Half Empty

The President's Council on Bioethics recently issued its report on the prospect of using biotechnology to enhance the human body and mind. Some scientists and ethicists--including members of the council --say the group has taken too negative a stance on the pursuit of therapies that might someday retard aging and extend human life span.

Last month, the President's Council on Bioethics released Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. The report tackles weighty and controversial topics, including the ethical implications of ongoing research aimed at slowing the rate of human aging. But those hoping that science will help people live longer and healthier lives in the future might find the council's position disappointing. In a chapter entitled "Ageless Bodies," the 17-member group delivers a mostly disapproving analysis of age retardation, concluding that "the anti-aging medicine of the not-so-distant future ... presents us with a questionable notion both of full humanity and of the proper ends of medicine." The same summary statement appeared in a previous council working paper on human age retardation that some council members criticized for its negativity last March (see "Panel Politics"). Now, some outside gerontologists and ethicists are sounding similar concerns, and some scientists on the council are expressing in print their fears that the arguments laid out in "Ageless Bodies" will spark a debate that contains more heat than light and thus will not serve the public good.

The ideas presented in "Ageless Bodies" closely follow the views of council chair Leon Kass, who has written that "the finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual, whether he knows it or not." Medical ethicist Samuel Gorovitz, former dean of arts and sciences at Syracuse University in New York, calls the chapter "paradigmatically Kassian," both in its rhetorical elegance and in its conclusions.

A far-ranging moral rumination packed with quotations from the likes of Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift, "Ageless Bodies" advances the contentious argument that because it has "no inherent stopping point," the quest to slow human aging cannot be distinguished from a hubristic striving after immortality. The chapter then lays out the "serious consequences" that the council suggests might result should scientists succeed in retarding aging in humans. Longer-lived individuals might find themselves less driven to achieve, less able to derive meaning from the passage of time, and less willing to remain married "until death do us part." As for society, age retardation could trigger a "slowing of the cycles of innovation" in the business world and a devotion of resources to the old at the expense of the young.

The concerns are timely. Today bioethicists are calling for a broader discussion of the prospect of human life extension before science catches us unprepared. In recent articles, for example, ethicist Robert Binstock of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and colleagues have called for "sustained intellectual dialogue" to help society prepare for further advances in the science of aging.

But Binstock, like many ethicists, objects to the pessimistic tone of the council's report. "Instead of saying, 'Oh, wouldn't it be terrible,' " he says, the council ought to be considering "how to deal in a positive way with all the changes that [life extension] would effect." Gorovitz, meanwhile, says he's troubled that the council links the quest to slow aging with the pursuit of immortality, an association he calls "an extravagant non sequitur." Some council members concur. Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel says he is "not persuaded that age-retardation research aims at immortality, either explicitly or implicitly," but he supports the release of Beyond Therapy as a way to prompt public discussion of biotechnology.

The document represents some gerontologists' viewpoints well. "I think the committee has expressed genuine and accurate concerns about what the consequences are if we succeed" at extending human life, says S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois, Chicago, demographer and co-author (with Bruce A. Carnes) of The Quest for Immortality. Olshansky also agrees with the council's equation of life extension with a longing for immortality. "As long as death exists, we will always be unsatisfied," he says. "Death for many will remain the enemy, which in my opinion is a mistake."

But several leading researchers on aging note problems with "Ageless Bodies." "The prolongation of healthy life would seem to fall precisely under the heading of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," says Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, known for his studies of life extension in flies. David Harrison, a physiological geneticist at the Jackson Lab in Bar Harbor, Maine, says, "We need to publicly criticize the fear of change underlying the report, and its ignorance of the pace of change that already has occurred."

Unlike the council's previous report on the ethics of human cloning (see "Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry"), Beyond Therapy does not make explicit policy recommendations. Neither does it present majority and minority perspectives on the issues it discusses. When asked whether "Ageless Bodies" represents the consensus view of the council members, a spokesperson for the President's Council on Bioethics pointed to the preface to Beyond Therapy, which notes that the document "represents mainly a (partial) distillation of the Council's own thinking." "Not every Member shares every concern here expressed, or every scientific speculation or ethical assessment offered," the preface continues, noting that the council as a whole nevertheless offers the report "as a guide to further thinking" about the ethics of human enhancement through biotechnology.

In addition to Sandel, several other council members are going on record with their caveats. A repackaged version of Beyond Therapy will soon appear courtesy of the Dana Foundation, a philanthropic organization with an interest in science and education. In a preface to the Dana Foundation reprint, three scientists on the council express concern about the report, including its treatment of aging-related research. The mostly upbeat statement—signed by council members Elizabeth Blackburn, a cell biologist at the University of California, San Francisco; Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire; and Janet D. Rowley, a geneticist at the University of Chicago—notes that Beyond Therapy frequently relies on the "rhetorical device" of describing imaginative future scenarios that might result from various scientific advances. But these scenarios, the scientists observe, are probably just as unlikely as they are ethically troubling. "You can take away from this discussion the feeling that a bunch of things are about to happen, when I don't think they are," says Gazzaniga.

When it comes to age retardation, Gazzaniga and his two fellow council scientists say that researchers’ goal is "not eternal life but improved health while alive." "Ageless Bodies" strongly implies otherwise. The debate over these two views of research and its consequences might not last forever, but it seems likely to live for a long time.

Chris Mooney, a writer living in New Orleans, Louisiana, has aged considerably as a result of covering the President's Council on Bioethics.