Extending Lifespan and its ethical, scientific and societal perspective

Part 1 : How far humanity has delved into genetics, regenerative medicine, and pharmaceuticals to
raise longevity

Part 2 : Ethical dilemmas associated with extending human lifespan, including issues related to
resource allocation, overpopulation, and access to life-extending technologies. It could touch on how
extending lifespan would not necessarily improve quality of life and some parts of economics may be
involved as well. Moreover, how longer lifespans can impact society, including healthcare systems,
retirement planning, and the workforce.

Part 3 : Speculating on the potential future scenarios and developments in the field of life extension
and their broader implications for humanity.

Questions:
- Why grow old? – 19th century alchemists had tried to make the “elixir of life”
- Is extension of lifespan really important?
- If so, in what ways does society benefit from this, and how bad are the consequences?
- Telomeres discovered in 1978 was found to be shorter every division of a cell so how do we
reverse this in our bodies. Cancer cells are able to do this with an enzyme called telomerase
and the battle between our cells and cancer cells will be forever. (So why not try get rid of
cancer cells?)
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Ideas to include in the essay:

- How to read numbers – Tom Chivers (how to show data in my EPQ essay)

How animals live longer:

- “The vast majority of research focuses on fruit flies, nematode worms and laboratory mice,
because they’re easy to work with and lots of genetic tools are available. And yet, a major
reason that geneticists chose these species in the first place is because they have short
lifespans. In effect, we’ve been learning about longevity from organisms that are the least
successful at the game.” – Genetic tricks of the longest-lived organisms
- Websites: knowable Magazine, nature communications
- Research on biogerontology
- To what extent does happiness lengthen health span (since animals who escape danger more
often/has less predators tend to live longer
- The idea of longer-lived species getting hold of more accurate ribosomes that makes copies
with less error than short-lived bastards
- Proteasomes – dispositor of defective proteins
- Methylation – life expectancy estimator or the “epigenetic clock”
- The use of mRNA sequencing in finding out which genes in a genome is active

Human stuff in general:

How countries with people with longer life expectancy live their life
- Live to 100 – Netflix documentary

How the immune response weakens with increasing age

- website