{"id":1043169,"date":"2011-02-14T14:08:10","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T14:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.longevitymedicine.tv\/apologism-for-aging-is-alive-and-well\/"},"modified":"2024-08-17T17:02:35","modified_gmt":"2024-08-17T21:02:35","slug":"apologism-for-aging-is-alive-and-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/longevity-medicine\/apologism-for-aging-is-alive-and-well.php","title":{"rendered":"Apologism for Aging is Alive and Well"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is no shortage of people trying to convince us<\/a> that degenerating into frailty, suffering, and death is a wonderful thing: \"Mr Agronin is an optimist. He does not deny - how could he? - the sufferings and indignities of old age. Scanning slices of old brain, 'stained and prepped for the microscope', his eye is unsparing: 'the aged folds' like 'the withered meat of a walnut', the blood vessels like 'hardened tendrils', the 'small plaques of toxic amyloid protein<\/a> surrounded by a debris field of dead neurons<\/a>'. But alongside the science, he sees something else: the people themselves. Old age, he says, has become our blind spot, neglected by the medical profession, lumped together with dementia<\/a> and disease, something to be endured, dreaded, mercifully pre-empted, or even - as one researcher in the field, Aubrey de Grey<\/a>, argues - reversed. Mr Agronin, by contrast, embraces it. He sees it as intrinsic to life, with its own 'ways and meanings', its particular wisdom. Even at its most tenuous and hollowed out, he finds some shape, a sense of cyclic pattern. In an almost mystical passage, inspired by his professor, Erik Erikson, a psychologist, Mr Agronin likens life to a stream which eventually seeps down unseen into the bedrock, and opens 'like a flower into the aquifer below'.\" From where I stand, there needs to be more of a healthy dread of aging - perhaps that would motivate more people to help develop the rejuvenation biotechnologies that can do something about it.<\/a> To try to pretend that aging to death, suffering terribly along the way<\/a>, is just peachy keen has an air of desperate madness to it.<\/p>\n

Link: http:\/\/www.economist.com\/node\/18111554<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is no shortage of people trying to convince us that degenerating into frailty, suffering, and death is a wonderful thing: \"Mr Agronin is an optimist. He does not deny - how could he? - the sufferings and indignities of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1246678],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1043169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-longevity-medicine"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043169"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1043169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1043169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1043169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1043169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}