Beyond Human by Eve Herold

Author:Eve Herold
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466842946
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

7

The Ageless Society

The fight against aging is big business in today’s youth-obsessed society. Americans spend about $80 billion a year on products and treatments that promise them smoother skin, thicker hair, slender, muscular bodies, and agile minds. These products include dietary supplements, hormone replacement therapies, expensive skin care products, and cosmetic surgery, to name just a few. The baby boomers, who immortalized the slogan “Never trust anyone over thirty,” are now entering their sixties, and by all indications, they don’t intend to go down the road of old age without a fight. We’re already seeing one effect of a graying population. In the past decade, there has been a 77 percent increase in the number of cosmetic surgeries performed. In 2014, there were 15.6 million of them, and the figure continues to climb.1

Americans would do well to be skeptical of over-the-counter therapies that claim to reverse aging. Most antiaging therapies, such as special diets, nutritional supplements, and cosmeceuticals (special creams and serums that claim to slow or reverse skin aging), are completely unregulated and don’t have to be proven effective in order to go on the market. Few have been tested with scientific rigor, and it’s anyone’s guess whether they make any difference. That, however, hasn’t stopped millions of people from pursuing them avidly.

In a field traditionally rife with exaggerated claims and even outright quackery, the administering of human growth hormone shots is one of the most expensive and controversial antiaging treatments. The cost can exceed fifteen thousand dollars per year, and among the possible side effects is a higher risk of cancer. The dietary supplement DHEA, claimed to be a precursor to the hormones estrogen and testosterone, is sold online for about thirteen dollars per capsule. People are willing to pay high prices and take all kinds of risks with their health with hormones, even though the National Institute on Aging recently told the Associated Press, “The truth is that, to date, no research has shown that hormone replacement drugs add years to life or prevent age-related frailty.”2

Despite the dubiousness of antiaging products throughout history, we are about to enter a new era, one based on decades of research. There is a legitimate, and growing, field in science that is testing a number of potential interventions in the aging process itself that have already shown significant success in animals. A new culture is taking hold in the scientific community that clearly approaches aging as a disease and, rather than just chipping away at age-related diseases, some scientists are searching for a “cure” for aging itself.

Many gerontologists still maintain, as does S. Jay Olshansky, that “aging is not a disease any more than puberty or menopause are.”3 But legitimate scientists have started to attack the aging process based on the premise that aging is a disease that is amenable to treatment, if not to an outright cure. How we define aging will probably continue to be debated for some time, especially among bioethicists, but real antiaging science is already illuminating the debate with an infusion of carefully studied scientific evidence.

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