Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

Author(s): Courtney Everts Mykytyn

Source: Anthropological Quarterly , Winter, 2006, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Winter, 2006), pp. 5-31
Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4150907

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 Anti-Aging Medicine:
Predictions, Moral Obligations,
and Biomedical Intervention
Courtney Everts Mykytyn
University of Southern California

Abstract
The emergence and proliferation of anti-aging medicine since the 1990s situates
the process of aging-rather than "age-associated" disease-as a target for bio-
medical intervention. Bypassing the notion of disease entirely, anti-aging propo-
nents argue that biological aging is the problem. The shift tendered by anti-aging
proponents proceeds largely upon predictions for the future. A compelling predic-
tion must have built into it a sense of feasibility and a sense of moral purpose.
Feasibility is principally predicated upon a particular history and a map for the
endeavors' imagined success. The notion that aging is painful and costly both for
the individual and for society links with the powerful ethic of scientific progress
to ground anti-aging predictions in the here and now of scientific funding,
research and practice. Imagining this kind of future demands, in this sense, its
pursuit. And its pursuit then refashions our relationship to our past by reifying
the particular history in which it is embedded. [Keywords: Future/Prediction,
Biomedicine, Nature/Disease]

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Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

E merging with gusto in the 1990s and with increasing relevance in popular
and scientific discussion in the past five years, anti-aging medicine situ-
ates the process of aging as a target for biomedical intervention and proceeds
upon predictions made for the technoscientific future. Predictions of a feasi-
ble anti-aging medicine vary as to how soon and how long science will extend
life-and health-spans and come packaged within a framework of the "good"
that can and should be done with anti-aging medicine.
A compelling prediction must have built into it a sense of feasibility (which
is grounded in a particularly drawn history and at least an opaque map of via-
bility) and a sense of moral purpose. For anti-aging, the tagged histories
include the dramatic longevity increases in the American 20th century and
the explosion of biotechnology-both of which provide historical trends
explicated out as trajectories. Coupled with the "promise" of various biotech-
nologies such as stem cell work, nanotechnology, and genetic medicine, these
histories and predicted means of discovering anti-aging medicine contribute
to the increasing belief that it is possible. Even together, however, these pil-
lars of feasibility are not enough for a strategic prediction. The notion that
aging is painful and costly both for the individual and for society links with
the powerful ethic of scientific overcoming (and resisting "victimhood") to
ground anti-aging predictions in the here and now of scientific funding,
research and practice. Imagining this kind of future demands, in this sense, its
pursuit. And its pursuit then refashions our relationship to our past by reify-
ing the particular history upon which it is embedded.
Predictions are powerful not only in what they might tell about our poten-
tial future but also in how resources are marshaled today, how our lives are
lived, what constrains and triggers our imagination and even how we relate to
our histories. And anti-aging medicine, with its challenge to "mainstream"
biomedicine in understanding the obligation toward treating the process of
aging rather than diseases associated with aging is largely absent from the
ethnographic record. This paper, drawing from research conducted since
1999, examines the forecasts of anti-aging activists and biogerontologists who
predict that aging may indeed be reversed and/or retarded. Thus, it con-
tributes to this literature by focusing specifically on the competing histories
and roadmaps for "success" that help draw predictions and the ethical argu-
ments posed for the pursuit of anti-aging predictions. It is particularly impor-
tant to lay out anthropological analysis of this emergence as anti-aging draws
increasing national attention, highlighted particularly in the inclusion of this
topic in the deliberations of the President's Council on Bioethics.1

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 COURTNEY EVERTS MYKYTYN

While the future makes its way into many discussions of science and bio-
medicine, limited work has been done theorizing such predictions explicitly. It
is clear that predictions rely upon histories2 and that predictions must come
packaged within the "good" they muster. The ways in which the role of bio-
medicine is envisioned and challenged with predictions is less clear. Brown's
work explicitly speaks of the "hype" of predictions and the unfortunate conse-
quences that are often experienced when the promises are (as they often are,
he argues) unrealized.4 Predictions necessarily affect what we do today-mobi-
lizing professional roles, marshaling resources, outlining duties. Predictions
provide a means for "facts and factoids [to] make their way into logics and
grammars" by laying out a future that comes to shape contemporary practice.5
I argue that not only do predictions shape contemporary practice, they also
redraw relevant history. In other words, as predictions come to matter, the his-
tory/histories upon which predictions perch come to matter in ways that other
histories do not. Kierkegaard poses that we live life forward but understand it
backward,6 and thus the past provides some foundation for the present.7
Predictions are a particularly ripe part of the ethnographic record8 as they tell
us as much about our future and present as they do our past.
Conceptualizing the work of biomedicine and science is contingent upon a
belief in its efficacy and purpose. A legitimate practice must address and have
impact on a "problem".9 This problem must be understood as solvable and
therefore depends upon predictions for its solution. The question then,
becomes, how a problem comes to be defined and how its fix takes shape,
especially in terms of the individuals, groups, institutions and rhetoric
involved.10 The contexts of these predictions affords a more nuanced under-
standing of the sometimes shifting and contradictory role of biomedicine and
science. While a great deal of literature deals with the construction of disease
categories, anti-aging medicine challenges this by circumventing the notion of
disease entirely. In anti-aging, biological aging-not the diseases associated
with aging-is the problem. The suffering that anti-aging proponents link
with old(er) age involves both personal pain and societal costs. Moreover, the
histories that come to matter most are those of biotechnological "progress"
and the oft-discussed exponential growth of such progress.

Anti-aging Medicine Players and Field

Anti-aging has been partially fueled by the difficulties in defining aging.
Whether we think of aging as a disease or a natural part of the life course

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Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

impacts how aging research and medicine are practiced. Separating out the
elderly as a particular category for geriatrics has implied a difference between
the old them and the younger us though gerontology has gone to great lengths
to quantify a distinction between normal and pathologically-problematic
aging."1 This has given rise in gerontology to a vocabulary of age-associated dis-
eases which include late-life cancers, heart disease, osteoporosis, etc. However,
anti-aging proponents seek to nullify this rhetoric by speaking instead of aging
as the underlying factor such that osteoporosis and the like become a symptom
of aging itself. In its stead, the idea that aging is natural becomes less relevant
to biomedicine; whether aging is natural or not is inconsequential to any real-
ity of biomedical intervention. Whether aging can be considered a disease is
tenaciously debated though the anti-aging trend appears to be bypassing this
categorization entirely as talk of health optimization becomes more salient. It
is becoming irrelevant whether aging is a disease or/and natural if we can do
better than accepting the decline of aging, the logic goes.12
Anti-aging practitioners and proponents-and gerontologists as well-
hope to prolong a healthy life. These hopes curb questions of quality versus
quantity of life as anti-aging proponents shun the notion of a lengthened,
painful life. Predictions about how long and how soon technoscience may
indeed increase our longevity range from a few additional years to complete
immortality. Aside these conservative and liberal outliers, most discussions
invoke 120-150 years as the likely life span average that could be achieved
within the next fifty years.
The stakes of anti-aging are great: an estimated twenty billion dollars of
patient/consumer expenditure in the anti-aging marketplace (more than the
$15.2 billion US weight control products/services industry but less than the
$22.8 billion world power tool industry),13 funding monies, research reputa-
tions, pharma/nutraceutical development, insurance actuarial tables and pay-
outs, field leadership, and so on. Predictions reveal not only a hearty belief in
scientific promise but also a set of moral responsibilities;14 the two are inex-
tricable and as such have a powerful effect on organizing technoscientific
practice. The forecasts of the means to achieve an effective anti-aging medi-
cine coupled with a coherent and cohesive history and moral charges to mit-
igate the pain and costs of aging construct the way we think about, conduct,
fund, shape and are shaped with technoscience today. The creation of an anti-
aging field is a critical step toward professionalization and the spoils associat-
ed with such an identity: funding, publicity, entering scientists and practition-
ers, and a paying consumer base.

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 COURTNEY EVERTS MYKYTYN

The question of what an anti-aging future would look like has drawn sig-
nificant attention.15 While I concentrate on the predictions of anti-aging pro-
ponents, there are many who are anti-anti-aging. Great fear, disdain for, and
worry over an anti-aging future looms. The President's Council on Bioethics
asserts that humanity is inextricable from mortality, and therefore the med-
ical endeavor of anti-aging that undermines aging also undermines humani-
ty.16 Eminent gerontologist Leonard Hayflick speaks of the "population bomb"
that anti-aging would engender; he paints this future as "bizarre, even terri-
fying."17 Others harness fears of inequity in a world where anti-aging is only
for the wealthy. Concerns of many of the prominent opponents and skeptics
have as long a history as do optimists for varying anti-aging remedies;18 the
question of our humanity is most always at stake.
Many individuals and groups are linked to anti-aging: practitioners work-
ing in anti-aging practices, gerontologists, organizations devoted to the study
and well being of the aged, companies selling anti-aging products. Their iden-
tities are still nascent and the political distinctions are contentious, but the
idea that aging should become a target for biomedical intervention provides
the common thread. Some proponents seek a dramatically protracted life
span while others focus on the goal of increasing "health span" such that
frailty and decrepitude are mitigated. Some currently practice anti-aging for
their patients and themselves while others believe that no anti-aging current-
ly exists19 (though the future looks optimistic20). The battle over boundaries,
identity, and leadership is fierce.21
Currently hundreds, perhaps thousands, of health care practitioners in the
US practice anti-aging. They are medical doctors, chiropractors, doctors of
osteopathy, nutritionists and even psychotherapists; the vast majority do not
come from geriatrics but rather sports medicine, endocrinology, cardiology,
obstetrics/gynecology, rehabilitation, anesthesia and even AIDS/HIV specialty.
The anti-aging practice largely translates to helping patients improve their
nutrition and exercise habits, prescribing supplements as well as hormones (pri-
marily human growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone).
Practitioners focus their energies on increasing their patients' overall sense of
health-a flexible and nebulous notion that most resembles a sense of not
declining, of not suffering any "age-associated" weaknesses or impairments.
In the US, the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M) is a contro-
versial piloting force for anti-aging practitioners. The A4M has organized
numerous national and international conferences, credentials physicians and
other health care practitioners in anti-aging, publishes articles, and lobbies

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Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

against the conservative "gerontological bias." Much of the this work is con-
ducted on their voluminous website.22 According to this site, academy mem-
bership (practitioners, researchers, and general public) has grown to 11,500
since their establishment in 1993.23 Adopting mainstream biomedical forms of
professionalization (such as credentialing and conference hosting), the organ-
izations' activities attempt to legitimize anti-aging as a medical specialty and
to situate the A4M as the fields' repository of expertise.
Academic researchers of aging have begun, within the past five years, to
develop explicit interest in anti-aging. The launching of the Journal of Anti-
Aging Medicine in 1999 (/AAM renamed Rejuvenation Research in January of
2004) marked a purposeful claim to professionalization for anti-aging. JAAM's
explicit mission is to "provide both a multidisciplinary forum for anti-aging
science and ultimately to make a difference in the exploration of the anti-
aging frontier... to separate truth from fiction."24 This journal is admittedly at
the fringe of gerontology, taking a controversial stance while demanding to be
taken as serious science. Their marginality was clear to the editorial staff and
contributors. Then-Editor-in-Chief Michael Fossel writes:

JAAM has, since its inception, been in a curious gray zone between sci-
ence-with-little-clinical-application and applications-with-little-sup-
porting-science. Over time this has changed slightly and, we believe, will
change a great deal more-and quite soon.25

This "curious gray zone" has also been inhabited by a multitude of aca-
demic publications in mainstream journals26 and books.27 A focus group was
established in 2003 at the annual Gerontological Society of America confer-
ence focusing on the challenges and dilemmas anti-aging poses. Additionally,
Science Magazine established the internet site SAGE-KE (The Science of Aging
Knowledge Environment) in 2001 and in 2003 began monthly webcasts of
debates on aging topics.28 2003 also saw the invention of the Methuselah
Mouse Prize which awards researchers who successfully pursue certain anti-
aging goals.29 A number of scientific conferences focusing specifically on anti-
aging have been convened; the UCLA Roundtable, held in 199930 led to the
SENS I conference in 200031 and SENS II in 2001.32 SENS- or Strategies for
Engineered Negligible Senescence-explicitly champions the plausibility of
the indefinite postponement and even reversal of aging by discussing tactics
for its achievement. Other conferences such as the International Association

of Biomedical Gerontology series, the Integrative Medical Therapeutics for

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 COURTNEY EVERTS MYKYTYN

Anti-Aging Conference, and perhaps even the somewhat more peripheral

Immortality Institute's Life Extension Conference 2005 continue to vie for a
serious scientific look at anti-aging possibilities. These places of academic dis-
cussion seek a scientific basis for understanding and most promote a form of
anti-aging optimism. They generally do not seek solidarity with the A4M and
often work to destabilize the organization.
Great contention surrounds the existence of a currently efficacious anti-
aging as separate from any anti-aging intervention that may be developed in
the future. In 2002, Scientific American released a position paper signed by
fifty one gerontologists claiming the "Truth about Human Aging;" this paper
aimed to warn the public about the hucksterism of those who currently claim
to practice anti-aging medicine.33 While the article does not discount future
anti-aging developments, the overriding assertion distanced the "real" science
from the charlatans preying on the hopes of the gullible. The authors of the
Scientific American position statement have been actively lobbying against
current anti-aging practice in other forums as well. Olshansky founded the
Silver Fleece Awards in 2002 "honoring" the A4M with the inaugural Silver
Fleece Award-a bottle of vegetable oil labeled "Snake Oil." By tagging the
A4M as snake oilers this award aims to protect "real" science from the taint of
the swindle.

While drawing data from "legitimate" scientific journals, the A4M harbors
its own disdain for their outspoken gerontological opponents. Not present to
receive the Silver Fleece Award, the A4M responded in kind with a paper on
their website "The Fleecing of Academic Integrity by the Gerontological
Establishment."34 Noting the accomplishments of the A4M, the article asserts
that "to deny these facts offered by the new clinical medical specialty of anti-
aging medicine defies basic logic." This claim to truth rests on a notion that
while anti-aging is not " science as usual" it is cutting-edge and revolutionary
and not bound by entrenched ideologies.35
The "boundary wars" between gerontology and anti-aging practitioners
expose issues of funding and legitimacy36 and are consequential to leadership
in the emerging anti-aging field. The anti-aging approach to framing aging
counters much of the gerontolgical work by explicitly marking the aging
process as a site of intervention rather than the "age-associated diseases." The
stakes of anti-aging are enormous and as a result, great efforts are made to
assert each groups own ideas of anti-aging as the only real or scientific stance.
The predictions mobilized by these groups often coincide but also often dis-
count claims made by competing groups.

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Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

Historical Groundings: Longevity Trends and Scientific Majesty

Histories are crucial to forecasting; they lend stability to an imagined future by
allowing the creation of trajectories and dispatching a time-grounded confi-
dence. The history claimed by any given prediction is, however, contentious and
strategic. Many gerontologists place anti-aging (specifically the A4M) within a his-
tory of quackery and entrepreneurial snake oil peddling-a predation on fear
and misuse of science for sales.37 This representative group of doubting gerontol-
ogists argue that the desire to not-age is an historically plumbable one.
The "snake oilers" in contrast, situate their history as an extension of the
persecuted revolutionary:

Look at the history of medicine. Look at the history of science. When a

new paradigm comes which doesn't make sense initially and it's poo-
pooed, the people are persecuted who follow it, and suddenly it's main-
stream. Who's the guy... the paradigm shift?38

Invoking Kuhn's theories of paradigm shifts, anti-aging physician Dr. N

locates anti-aging practitioners as revolutionaries rather than quacks. The pio-
neering image bequeaths a martyrdom of morality and wisdom. Ronald Klatz,
A4M president and co-founder agrees:

Hell, Galileo never even got acknowledged. Why should I?... It's enough
for me to see if just the research gets funded. If the research gets funded I
get my reward and I'll get an extra lifetime or two. I've got to keep realis-
tic in this world... All the great scientists have dipped in anti-aging to one
extent or another. Brown-Sequard, he's the father of endocrinology. He
was giving people goat testicles. The establishment laughed at him, how
ridiculous, how unscientific. Well, guess what's in testicles? Testosterone.39

Testosterone, a male hormone, now commands significant attention in sci-

entific and clinical circles within talk of andropause (male menopause). Here,
yesteryear's quackery is tomorrow's innovation. The quacks are revolutionar-
ies and the naysayers antiquated sheep.40
A viable anti-aging perches, in part, atop the phenomenal longevity increase
boasted by industrialized nations. Many popular and academic publications lead
with statistics stating that people in the US can expect to live longer now. Life
expectancy is currently noted to be 73 and 79 years for males and females
respectively41 with projections that it will jump to 79.7/84.3 years by 2050.42 The

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 COURTNEY EVERTS MYKYTYN

A4M employs such historical trends as sturdy trajectories asserting that "there's
no reason to imagine that we won't do at least as much in the next century."43
While this particular read on the applicability of history to the future pre-
supposes progress, a counter-perspective asserts that such increases have lit-
tle to do with the trends continuance. According to the National Institutes on
Aging (NIA), the increase in average life span is directly attributable to
"improvements in sanitation, the discovery of antibiotics, and medical care."44
Therefore, critics argue that using historical longevity trends is ill-advised for
grounding future longevity trends since most of the work has already been
done. The quantity of circulating statistics is stunning and has supported and
undermined predictions and the feasibility of continuing research.
While the refutation of historical trends as applicable is compelling, the A4M
charges that they problematically ignore the biotech factor.45 That sanitation and
antibiotics were so critical in longevity increase does not mean, however, that all
the longevity work is done. Instead, these innovations only further support the
creation of future innovations that will, they argue, increase longevity. The A4M
posits a compelling forecasting mechanism (or, as they term it, technodemogra-
phy-the study of the future) in their "future equation." This asserts that just as
we have no reason to assume that longevity trends might abate, neither should
we assume that scientific discovery will slow. The "future equation" relates
human longevity to 5 K=1 T " where TK represents technological knowledge
and T represents the year after 2000 AD over the doubling time of medical and
technological information every 3.5 years46 Drawing from a history of technosci-
entific success, the A4M confidently quantifies a future in which these triumphs
will continue at the same astounding rate. Moreover, the A4M counters pes-
simism by asserting that many of the models of mortality and longevity "ignore
the enormous potential for technology to function as the quantum leap acceler-
ating the extent and achievement of scientific discovery leading to practical
human immortality."47 Thus, they expect the rise of biotechnological knowledge
to not only continue but to continue geometrically.
In kind, Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist with whom a luncheon was auctioned
off on ebay for $4,050 (proceeds to benefit the Methuselah Foundation),48
developed the paradigm-shift rate. Kurzweil asserts that the tempo of techni-
cal progress is "doubling every decade, and the capability (price, performance,
capacity, and speed) of specific information technologies is doubling every
year."49 For this reason, he and co-author Terry Grossman predict that with
"aggressive application" of our scientific knowledge, life extension therapies
will emerge over the next couple of decades. They outline the "bridges" or

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Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

steps to longevity lingering mostly over the first bridge-the "present-day

therapies and guidance that will enable you to remain healthy long enough
to take full advantage of the construction of the second bridge." The second
bridge-the "biotechnology revolution"-involves the scientific ability to
"turn off disease and aging" will lead to the third bridge of nanotechnology-
artificial intelligence.50 Thus, biotechnological progress should not only be
included in thinking about any historical trajectory, it must be thought of
within the context of its own staggering growth.
Prediction making is not confined to small circles of debate. In 2001, Jay
Olshansky, a demographer of aging, and zoologist Steven Austad publicized
their wager involving the possibilities of life-length with intact cognition. By
2150, Olshansky bet that the upper limit of human longevity would be 130
years whereas Austad more optimistically wagered 150 years.51 This kind of
public predicting and congenial scientific wagering popularizes anti-aging
research while buttressing its feasibility.
Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge researcher, also offers a set of assertions
regarding the boom of contemporary scientific advance. He told me that my
young son would not be the first person to see 150 years of age.52 Thus, the
feasibility of anti-aging is not so far off as to allow for seemingly more imme-
diate research needs to take priority; it is not so distant as to be personally
unrewarding. He differentiates between the goal of the postponement of
aging and its more revolutionary counterpart of aging's reversal.

What I am talking about here is rejuvenation. Not slowing down aging

but actually fixing people up who have already aged somewhat. So sup-
posing we are at a point where we can take let's say a fifty year old and
make them live fifty years longer than normal. Now, fifty years is an
eternity in science, so that person is going to be around for the next gen-
eration of anti-aging treatments that are cleverer and can fix up some-
one who is even older, right? So really, we will have reached easily
escape velocity by that point, you might think of it that way, whereby it
gets progressively easier to keep people going, even though they are
older, because we are finding out and fixing the things that go wrong
with us faster than we are encountering them.53

De Grey's "escape velocity" refers to science's ability to predict, cope with,

and solve impending problems. In this depiction, the inertia of the scientific
machine escalates and overruns what it visualizes as obstacles. Marking not

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 COURTNEY EVERTS MYKYTYN

only science's obligation to forecast problems, the escape velocity idea under-
scores a sense of science's progress and glory. With this principle, de Grey
expands his predictions such that people alive today might live to a thousand
years and those born in 2100 even longer.54
Anti-aging proponents embrace different statistics and different histories
in different ways; a history of quackery and failure in seeking the fountain
of youth is mobilized against a history of scientific progress and glory. And
while it is taken that scientific progress begets progress, many anti-aging
supporters assert that the "rate of change is itself accelerating... mean[ing]
that the past is not a reliable guide to the future."55 This poses a question
about the use of history in making future-claims but ultimately, it is the
progress of science that is underscored as the most relevant in our under-
standing of the future. Longevity trends set beside what-we-don't-know and
what-we-think-we-might-know-later tell stories of promise as much as they
tell of fraud. The claim that most of the significant longevity work has
already been done (with improved sanitation, etc.) is rebuffed by many anti-
aging proponents who contextualize their predictions within a history of
continuing scientific progress.

Means to No End-Roadmaps to Realizing Predictions

A critical issue in establishing feasibility is its funding; calls for increased fund-
ing of anti-aging research are ubiquitous. Creating a scientific base from
which to make predictions is crucial to the viability of such visions-and is
expensive. Gavrilov laments that while aging research often makes its way into
mainstream reporting, only "10-20% of research projects are funded."56
Funding issues also create a fulcrum upon which the A4M balances much of
their repudiation both of gerontology and anti-aging critics. Responding to
the much-reported upon anti-anti-aging Scientific American statement,57 the
A4M employs statistics stating that less than 1% of the NIH is dedicated to the
study of aging;58 therefore, the notion that no anti-aging currently exists is
linked to the lack of investment rather than the lack of feasibility. During a
session regarding funding at the Integrative Medical Therapeutics for Anti-
Aging MedicineTM conference, the associate director of the NIA responded to
such critiques. Warner defended the NIA and situated all biology of aging
research as, in effect, anti-aging research.59 While citing the inconclusive work
on caloric restriction and the failure to identify aging biomarkers (despite the
substantial investment), Warner places the onus on scientists by asserting that

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Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

the NIA only responds to the grants submitted and therefore can not nor
should not be held exclusively accountable for any perceived lack of funding.
During this conference session, three of the five presenters offered a set of
means to achieve effective anti-aging therapies as the backbone for acquiring
funding. These scientific road maps temper the science-fictiony nature of anti-
aging claims because they not only offer a scientific tiller but they obscure any
notion of a "leap of faith" or "suspension of believability." Unlike a religious
conviction that bears no obligation for empirical "evidence" or a Star Trek future
that successfully circumvents the means by which this future emerges, these
anti-aging futures explicitly mark out a plan.
The roadmaps which deal in the biological feasibility embrace a few main
threads of hope and scientific practice; they primarily include work in nan-
otechnology, stem cell therapy, and gene therapy. Similarly, the A4M's doubling-
every-3.5-years-"technological knowledge" refers to key areas the organization
believes to be the most likely to succeed in anti-aging endeavors: genetic engi-
neering and stem cell research, cloning, nanotechnology, artificial organs, and
digital cerebral interfacing (wherein even memories can be digitally stored).
Targeting increased longevity via gene expression has been of intense
interest. For example, Cynthia Kenyon, a researcher at UC Berkeley and co-
founder of Elixir Pharmaceuticals has shown that tweaking the daf-2 gene
extends the life expectancy of worms. For Kenyon, the "best thing was that the
long-lived worms remained active and healthy long after normal worms were
decrepit or dead. They were like 90-year-old people who looked like 45-year-
olds."60 Leonard Guarante of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-
founder of Elixir has worked with the gene SIR2, which was found to slow
aging in yeast.61 And as this article is written, Science reportes that the overex-
pression of the Klotho gene extends mouse life span.62
Despite the political wranglings regarding its morality,63 stem cell research
holds great promise for anti-aging proponents. The Gerontology Research
Group, "dedicate[d] ... to removing the constraint of a sharply limited human
lifespan"'4 often hosts discussions regarding stem cells and how its exciting
promise has been undermined by Federal Governmental restrictions. Michael
West, CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, too has spent most of his career as a
biotechnologist seeking ways to make mammalian cells live forever and he
has been a vocal (and often lambasted) supporter of stem cell research.65
Nanotechnology is the creation of minuscule robots that may, with great
accuracy, fix molecular problems inside the body. Frietas writes that in the
next two decades we can expect the "the technological ability to perform spe-

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 COURTNEY EVERTS MYKYTYN

cific internal repairs on individual cells in real time, thus largely eliminating
all major causes of natural biological death."66 Marvin Minsky is not alone in
suggesting that at some future time we will be able to (and desire to) replace
our entire brains with nanotechnology such that we can become more able to
assimilate and store information than our biological brain currently allows.67
While this may present a cyber-frightening future for some, for others in the
anti-aging community, this may effectively combat the unfortunate and
painful wearing out of our bodies.
In a series of scientific roadmaps emanating from the SENS conference in
2000, de Grey and like-minded colleagues outline the seven major "molecu-
lar and cellular changes associated with aging" with "feasible methods for
their reversal." While some of these strategies are noted to be "already feasi-
ble in humans," others can only be shown in mice but "will become applica-
ble to humans as and when comprehensive somatic gene therapy is avail-
able."68 The publication of these strategies for reversing aging is an attempt to
legitimize the goal by clarifying the scientific milestones and inspiring
research and funding.
As de Grey enthusiastically addresses both lay and scientific audiences, he
is a sort of lightning rod for anti-aging. Two MIT Technology Review articles69
profiling de Grey were greatly condemned for the negative light in which he
and anti-aging were portrayed. Unable to engage researchers in debunking de
Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, author/journal editor
Jason Pontin has upped the ante: a $20,000 prize is offered to any molecular
biogerontologist who submits an intellectually serious, convincing argument
against SENS.70 In large measure, the challenge has been welcomed by de Grey
who accuses gerontologists of "catatonia," rooted in "ignorance of the rele-
vant science" and the difficulty in "embrac[ing] a new paradigm."71 This kind
of colleague challenge is interesting in that it highlights the silences around
anti-aging and provokes a kind of money-backed guarantee to the discussion.
The roadmaps offered for a successful anti-aging intervention may be up for
debate but the cartographical discussions are critical in paving the way for the
feasibility of the predictions.
Packaging the glory of scientific research with exciting longevity trends
yields a powerful foundation for amassing anti-aging belief. Making anti-aging
a feasible prospect was a particularly tough job in light of so many discussions
of hucksterism and having to combat a deep-seated sense that not only is
anti-aging an impossibility, aging had hitherto been so sheltered by the
notion of a "natural life course." Nonetheless, as anti-aging began in the early

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Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

1990s, by the late 1990s aging became increasingly thought of as malleable.72

Positing very specific means to ameliorate deleterious biological impacts of
aging-from nanotechnology to immune-stimulated phagocytosis73-pro-
vides a road-map for research, a congregation of scientific deliberation, and
an organization of scientific practice.

Aging's Pain, Pain's Costs: Scientific Obligations

As the notion of aging became more insistently coupled with fixability, ensuring
this future of intervention became a much talked about moral charge. The
image of aging as individually painful, as societally costly and as globally threat-
ening underpin the arguments for increased scientific attention. This imagined
future brings to a head the cultural discourse on aging, on scientific obligation
and potential. The images of aging as undesirable have deep American roots74
and certainly the history of science is inextricable with the notion of progress;71
now for anti-aging, their coupling is potent and morally charged.
During the nascent moments of the anti-aging, national discussions of the
"graying of America" became urgent as the baby-boomers (the large cohort of
people born in the US between 1946 and 1964) approach later life. As people
(most specifically here, Americans) can not only expect to live longer on aver-
age now, the sheer population size of the baby-boom generation compounds
the aging demographics. More people are living much longer and requiring
much more and much more expensive medical care. Social implications of
expected longer lifespans spurred a flurry of worried debate over retirement,
social security, medicare, and rising medical care costs both academically and
publicly.76 Seizing upon this image of impending doom, anti-aging activists
posit their work as a scientific salve. Because anti-aging presents a "new par-
adigm" or a "new health care model," it offers a new vision of the future. Anti-
aging aims to undercut the problem by keeping people younger and healthi-
er thereby saving billions of health care dollars, lessening the burden on
social security, mitigating or at least forestalling individual pain, as well as
contributing more work productivity hours.
The A4M promotes their mission as one desperately needed. The group
harnesses statistics of the growing segment of the population over age 65 to
show that not only are aging populations mounting but, globally, policies
are not in place to cope with this eventuality.77 The A4M cites that the US
Federal Government spends $350 billion on health care for the elderly and
quotes experts who anxiously project the "expenditure to double and stand

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 COURTNEY EVERTS MYKYTYN

at 14.5% of GDP" by 2075.78 These statistics, assembled in this way, reflect a

future of doom should we continue our historical trajectory of under-fund-
ing anti-aging research.
The A4M asserts that this doom need not be so. Not by reducing the num-
bers of older folks through some gruesome slaughter, but rather by reducing
how "biologically old" they are. By embracing anti-aging, the biomedical
world will, as the prediction goes, reorganize their interventions such that
individuals are kept "younger" longer. Moreover, by predicting the mitigation
of such a dire future, the demand for financed research attention is mandat-
ed now that a solution is imagined and arguably feasible. It becomes the duty,
the moral obligation of science to thwart the doom.
David Kekich of the Maximum Life Foundation asserts that the elderly are
not only a tremendous asset but that because American society treats them
as throwaways, America suffers 20% of the Gross National Product each
year.79 His figures are based on the valuation of lives from plane crash settle-
ments at one million dollars per life. Thus, we shoulder a 1.7 trillion dollar
loss per year. This financial assessment affords a vivid numerical assessment
of wisdom and life experience in an attempt to clarify and quantify the anti-
aging mandate.
The current biomedical system, focused as it is on disease, is in the words of
an anti-aging practitioner, "wasteful... I mean look at the billions of dollars that
are wasted on cardiovascular disease that we can intervene in before it
occurs.""80 Such improvidence is depraved. The current system, by concentrat-
ing its efforts on cancer, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, etc, acts as an
expensive band-aid on an open fracture. Such malpractice breeds disdain in
these anti-aging practitioners and serves as a major motivation for their migra-
tion to anti-aging medicine. Anti-aging becomes a way to practice a more pre-
ventative, honorable, fiscally prudent and pain-palliating medicine.
Drawing upon science's moral obligation, de Grey articulates the impor-
tance of adopting a different approach to aging. His take on science's moral
mandate is unambiguous: "we risk being responsible for the deaths of over
100,000 people every day that [Engineered Negligible Senescence] is not devel-
oped."81 Responsibility is placed on practitioners of science once a remedy is
imagined; once we can envision something we are obligated to pursue it and
must be accountable for any ramifications of a lack of the remedy. So, de Grey
asserts, the imagination of an anti-aging future demands a discussion of its
feasibility and a positive prediction of its feasibility demands its pursuit. The
death of so many is a heavy burden indeed.

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Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

Not only are the economic costs frightening for the country and the world,
the cost of aging for individuals also figure prominently. The cover of the A4M's
winter 2000/2001 Anti-Aging Medical News contrasts a "Successful Aging"/AARP
model of aging with a "Healthy Aging"/Gerontological model of aging with
"The Ageless Society"/A4M model of aging.82 The latter image reveals a couple
aged 74 and 80 flexing their tanned muscles while standing in small bathing
suits in front a sparkling swimming pool. The gerontological model shows a
man in a wheelchair, backlit from a convalescent home window. The AARP
model reveals a 50 year old woman, smiling and dancing and cute-ly chubby.
A caption reads "JUST SAY NO to a Fat, Frumpy, Sagging, Senile, Sedentary
Existence."'8 This critique of competing images of aging unambiguously posits
the anti-aging model as the most personally rewarding both in terms of pain
mitigation and beauty (defined in this specific way) preservation.
The personal costs-the ways one feels about getting older-is, as anoth-
er practitioner complained, a "victim mentality." In this model "you just
accept [that] you have joint pain and all the other symptoms [because] that's
just part of aging."84 With all of the scientific advancements, biomedicine is
poised for the good fight but because of its insistence on an fatalistic under-
standing of aging, laments Dr. N., it never takes a swing. And, as a result, peo-
ple learn to accept suffering. The personal costs identified by anti-aging prac-
titioners not only serve to narrate migration-to-anti-aging-medicine stories
but they also reflect a belief in a the moral failure on the part of the current
system and a hope for redemption with anti-aging.85
Frustration with the current biomedical system fuels a relationship with
anti-aging, an imagined tomorrow and a moral relationship to the future.
Many practitioners bemoaned a strained relationship with biomedicine.86
Theirs was largely an intense frustration with a system that allowed too much
pain. A cardiologist told me that he switched to anti-aging because he "didn't
become a doctor just to watch people deteriorate and then they end up in the
ICU and ... and the surgeons get their pieces and then they die and I sign their
death certificates."8 While these practitioners put great stock in scientific prin-
ciples and the glory of science, they also are skeptical about its politicization
and conservatism. They see anti-aging as a salvation for their patients-an
attempt at ameliorating rather than accepting pain.
Believing in this thinking about aging and the promises science offers has
led practitioners to practice anti-aging not only on their patients but also on
themselves. As one practitioner told me: "we do not have time to wait for the
results in this big experiment in aging."88 Like a majority of the practitioners

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interviewed, he practices anti-aging medicine on himself because he believes
in its principles and its results. This significant assertion of the morality of
time is fairly pervasive among practitioners and the A4M.
These moral components of predicting and advocating a certain future
draw upon a tomorrow of soaring medical costs to treat a monstrously dod-
dering and aching elderly population and a fear of personal pain, decrepi-
tude, and undesirability. These global and individual concerns lay bare a
moral mandate for their solution.

Conclusion: The Business of Making Predictions

Studying predictions offers a particular lens through which to understand the
construction of biomedical goals. Public predictions can marshal resources to
their respective agendas when the predictions "make sense." They must be
drawn on acceptable histories, have outlines for their feasibility and be based
in a moral mandate. In this sense, predictions can be powerful and, in turn,
can have unfortunate consequences.89 When the "hype" of predictions frames
a goal that is ultimately pursued yet unrealized, potential patients suffer from
dashed expectations and others who may have benefited had other research
agendas been pursued may "lose" as well. Examining the "actual contexts and
conditions in which expectations, hype and future imaginings are embed-
ded"90 affords a perspective not only anticipatorily but also of the present and
its relation to our history.
The anti-aging predictions made by its proponents have been outlined
through the histories they claim, the roadmaps for success they offer and the
moral mandates they serve. This anthropological look at these predictions
offers an understanding of the emergence of anti-aging and enters into the
growing debates regarding anti-aging and the role of biomedical obligation in
the face of proliferating biotechnologies.
In speaking of changes in descriptions of nature, Merchant writes that we
can perceive changes in cultural values-that the "is" of science and the
"ought" of society are not opposed but contained within each other.xci Here,
the same is evident. Technoscientific practice is charged with moral responsi-
bilities inextricable from innovation and forecasted knowledge. Because anti-
aging can be predicted-though debated-and because a future without it
can be drawn as foreboding and because technoscientific progress is summar-
ily expectable, the should of aging science is fused with the practice of today,
and, too, the understanding of yesterday.

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Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

Predicting is a crucial fulcrum not only for scientific endeavoring but also
for everyday living. As JAAM past-editor Michael Fossel writes in his popular
science book:

"[W]e are all affected. Often unknowingly, we are affected in day-to-day

ways by accurate predictions... Yet our health care costs, our insurance
costs...our pensions, our investments, and our taxes all depend upon
accurate predictions about illness and death.... Beyond actuarial pre-
dictions, we all make predictions about our own life spans and the com-
plications and events we expect to encounter. All of these predictions
have been based on the biological assumptions that we will age and die
in roughly the same way as our ancestors have for generations."92

The predictability of life and of life span in the West (and the United States
specifically) has been monumentally influential in the experience of the life
course.93 This predictiblity of which Fossel and others speak emanates from a
particular interpretation of history-of longevity trends, of demographic sta-
bilities, of expectations for biomedical interventions and inadequate research
funding. It bespeaks a foundational interrelationship with technoscience. The
technoscientific belief in the stability of fact, the reduction of complexity to
understandable bites, the mechanistic construction of the universe lay out the
opportunity for predicting.94 Because we believe that the world is how it is and
because we believe we know what we know the future is foreseeable-to
varying degrees and with an ever-increasing, ever-complicating set of facts.
This amassed history of biotechnological triumph alongside a sense that
aging is personally painful and societally costly beckons a feasible anti-aging
medicine. The imagination of a future without such suffering still resides in the
future but such a destination is the subject of many scientific roadmaps. These
sometimes oblique and sometimes quite explicit maps to tomorrow lend scien-
tific credibility to the predictions and buttress its goals and mandates.
Attitudes within biogerontology and anti-aging medicine vary regarding
the job of predicting: whose responsibility is it to predict, what responsibili-
ties are assumed by predicting (or avoiding predictions), what expertise is use-
ful for predicting, what should be laid out for predicting and what cannot be
foreseen. Nonetheless, some gerontologists argue that predicting equates to
scientists "sometimes unfortunate bent toward hubris."95 Conversely,
researchers such as de Grey argue that predicting is a duty of the informed sci-
entist. De Grey writes:

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 COURTNEY EVERTS MYKYTYN

"I feel that those with the best information have a duty to state their
best-guess timeframe, because that information determines peoples life
choices, whether or not the public's assessment of the reliability of what
experts tell them is accurate."96

Thus, not only are predictions moored to a moral cause, but they are moral
in and of themselves. The duty to predict, here, is linked to the position of
imagining what the future may bring. The role of the researcher in predicting
is far from institutionalized, but as research monies are competed for and as
research findings are publicized predictions circulate.
In explicating the predictions for an anti-aging future, an impassioned,
morally charged sense of promise is outlined. This promise has traversed
many "identity" lines such that the "anti-aging marketplace" and the "death
cult of gerontology" both have within its membership a group of dedicated
hopefuls. The "new immortality that has come into view only in the last
decade or so""' is challenging science and the "public" to think more critical-
ly about our assumptions regarding aging and humanity. Perhaps, as the
grounding histories become less public than the roadmaps to the future, our
triumphing of biotechnology will become an embedded "fact" of life. Now
that the U.S. federal government has taken an active interest in anti-aging
medicine"9 and the public has been enchanted (as evidenced both by the
swelling financial expenditures on anti-aging products/services and by the
attention to anti-aging in popular and scientific press), the imagined future is
beginning to take a shadowy but very real shape today and orients our rela-
tionship to our collective history.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research has been generously supported through a grant by the Wenn
Foundation and through a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study of
Technology, and Society in Graz, Austria. I am indebted to Cheryl Mattingly, Lanita
Huey, Sadie Moore, Jay Hasbrouck, and Roman Mykytyn for their time and insight
versations regarding this article and anti-aging medicine. I would also like to th
anonymous reviewers for their help in directing and focusing this paper,

ENDNOTES

1President's Council on Bioethics Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursui

Happiness--A Report of the President's Council on Bioethics (New York: Dana Press, 2003).

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Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

2Fortun and Fortun, 2005; Brown, N. 2003; Marcus, 1995: 3.

3Rabinow, 1996; Franklin, 2003.
4Brown, 2003.
1 Fischer, 2005: 60.
6Soren Kierkegaard, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard's Writings. VII
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985): 80.
7Bruner, 1999: 9.
8Fortun and Fortun.

9Rabinow, 2000.
10Brown; Marcus.

"Hayflick, 1994; Jean-Nesmy, "1991; Arthur Kaplan and Harry Moody "Is Aging a Disease?,"
SAGE Webcast, 22 January 2004 www.sagecrossroads.com (27 February 2004); Hayflick, 2004:
B547-B550; Holliday, 2004: B543-B546.
12Mykytyn, 2004.

13Freedonia Group, Inc. <Freedonia.exnext.com> 15 June 2005 (15 August 2005).

'4Marcus.

15Post and Binstock, 2004; Stock and Callahan, 2004: B554-B559.

16President's Council on Bioethics.

"1Hayflick, 6.

"1Gruman, 1966 [2003]; Haber, 2004: B515-B522.

g1Austad, 1997; de Grey, 2003: 249-270; Fossel, 1996; Hayflick, 2001: 20-26; Johnson, 2004:
19-23; Kirkwood, "2000: 77-81; Olshansky, and Carnes, 2001; Olshansky, Hayflick and Carnes,
2002: 92-95.

20Austad; de Grey, 2003: 927-934; Fossel, 2002: 1; Johnson.

21Binstock, 2003: 4-14.
22www.worldhealth.net-surveyed from 2000 through 2004.
23A4M, http://www.worldhealth.net/p/89.html (20 August 2004).
24Wolf, 1998.

25Fossel, "Aging".

26Butler, et al., 2000; Cole and Thompson 2001;de Grey, "Foreseeability;" de Grey et al.,
2002: 959-9621; Fossel "Aging: Science and Clinical Medicine;" Le Bourg, 2000a; 2000b
Olshansky, Hayflick and Carnes; Wick, 2002: 1137-1140.
27Austad; Fossel, Reversing; Hayflick, How and Why; Kirkwood; Olshansky and Carnes; Post
and Binstock.

28SAGE Crossroads, <www.sagecrossroads.net> (12 February 2003).

29Aubrey de Grey, Personal communication, 30 March 2001.
30UCLA Roundtable "Critical Future Milestones in Aging Research," <http://
research.arc2.ucla.edu/pmts/agemain.htm (25 June 2003); see also Kolata, "Pushing Limits
of the Human Life Span," New York Times, 9 March 1999.

3de Grey et al. "Time to talk SENS".

32de Grey, et al., 2002: 667-676.

330lshansky, Hayflick, and Carnes.

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 COURTNEY EVERTS MYKYTYN

34A4M, "The Fleecing of Academic Integrity by the Gerontological Establishment," 22

February 2002.
"Mykytyn, "Anti-Aging Medicine: A Patient/Practitioner Movement to Redefine Aging,"
Social Science and Medicine, in press.
36Binstock.

37Butler, 2001: 63-65; Haber, 2001: 9-14; Hayflick, How and Why; Olshansky and Carnes;
Olshansky, Hayflick, and Carnes.
38Dr. N., Personal communication, 16 October 2001.
39Dr. Klatz, Personal communication, 27 February 2004.
40Mykytyn, "Patient/Practitioner Movement".

41National Institute of Aging, Aging Under the Microscope: A Biological Quest. NIA publica-
tion, 2002.
42A4M "World Health Organization's Ageing and Health," MCARE, 2002: 1.
43A4M, "World Health".

44National Institute of Aging, "In Search of the Secrets of Aging," <http://www.niapublica-

tions.org/pubs/secrets-of-aging/index.htm#content> 1996 (May 2003).
45A4M, "Making the Quantum Leap to Human Immortality in the Year 2029," Anti-Aging
Medical News 1 (2000).
46A4M, "Validating the Facts and Science of Anti-Aging Medicine," Anti-Aging Medical News
Fall 2000.

47A4M, "Quantum Leap," 8.

48The Methuselah Mouse Prize "Charity auction in support of the Mprize for longevity
research a success," The Methuselah Mouse Prize, 18 July 2005 <http://www.mprize.org/>
(29 July 2005).
49Kurzweil and Grossman, 2004: 3.
"sKurzweil and Grossman, 15.
51McCaan, 2001.
52Aubrey de Grey, Personal Communication, 3 June 2003.
53Aubrey de Grey and Richard Sprott "How Soon Until We Control Aging," SAGE webcast, 5
November 2003 <www.sagecrossroads.com> (20 December 2003).
54De Grey and Sprott.
"Kurzweil and Grossman, 5.
56Leonid Gavrilov, "Pieces of the Puzzle: Aging Research Today and Tomorrow," Longevity
Meme <www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?page=1&article_id=12> (9
August 2004).
57Olshansky, Hayflick and Carnes.

51Mitka, 2002, cited in A4M, "Official Position Statement on the Truth About Human Aging
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S"Warner, 2004.
6oNew Scientist, 2003. "I Want to Life Forever," New Scientist <www.newscientist.com/opin-
ion/ opinterview.jsp?id=ns24171, October.
61Guarante, 2002.

62Kurosu et al, 2005.<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract1112766v1> (26

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Anti-Aging Medicine: Predictions, Moral Obligations, and Biomedical Intervention

63Hall, 2003.
64Gerontology Research Group, "Mission Statement" 1991 <www.grg.org> (March 17, 2004).
65West, 2003.

66 Frietas, 2004: 78.

67Minsky, 2004.

68de Grey et al., "Time to talk SENS".

69Nuland, 2005. www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/feature aging.asp, (2 March);
Pontin, 2005. <www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/editor.asp> (22 June 2005).
70Pontin, 2005, <http://pontin.trblogs.com/archives/2005/07/thesens_challe.html> (August).
71de Grey, 2004, <www.longevitymeme.org/articles/viewarticle.cfm?page=2&article_id=19>
(25 August 2005)
72 Mykytyn "Executing Aging: A History of the Anti-Aging Medicine Movement in the US,
1990-2003," unpublished ms.
73Referring to the digestion of extracellular debris promoted by the immune system.
74Achenbaum, 1995:19-28; Cole, 1992; Friedan, 1993; Gullette, 1997. Minois 1987[1989].

75 Adams, 2003: 38-71; Achenbaum, 1995; Franklin, 2003: 97-128; Rabinow, 1996; Smith,
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76Butler and Jasmin, 2000; Friedland and Summer, 1999; National Institute of Aging, 2002;
Roszak, 1998; Wallace, 2001.
77A4M, "World Health".

78A4M, "World Health".

79Kekich, 2004.
80Dr. M., Personal Communication, 1 July 2002.
81de Grey, 2003, <www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/adgbio> (30 May 2003).
82A4M, Anti-Aging Medical News, (Winter 2000-2001): 1.
83A4M, Anti-Aging Medical News, (Winter 2000-2001): 1.
84Dr. N., Personal Communication, 16 October 2001.
85Mykytyn, "Patient/Practitioner Movement".

86Mykytyn, "Patient/Practitioner Movement".

37Dr. X., Personal Communication, 21 January 2002.
38Dr. R., Personal Communication, 12 April 2002.
39Brown.

90Brown: 10.

91Merchant, 1983[1990]: 4.
92Fossel, Reversing.
93Achenbaum, 1998: 15-18; Becker, 1997; Cole, 23-38; Fossel, Reversing; Thane, 2000: 3-24.
94Modis, 1992.
95Austad, 181.

96De Grey, "Timeframe for Progress," <http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/time.htm> (12 May

2004).
97Rose, 2004.
98President's Council on Bioethics.

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 COURTNEY EVERTS MYKYTYN

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