Enhancement Ethics and the Molecular Genetics of Aging

Advances in the molecular genetics of cellular aging raise the prospect of intervening in the human aging process to dramatically extend the human life span. The development of such interventions would confront society with the challenge of interpreting, using and regulating the ultimate genetic enhancement technology: a technology that could allow us to change a basic constant of human life at the cellular level. This project is designed to combine the work of two ongoing research programs to begin to address these challenges. The first is the research that Eric Juengst, Maxwell Mehlman and Thomas Murray have been conducting on the ethical and public policy challenges that are posed generically by genetic enhancement technologies. The framework for ethical analysis and public policy development generated by that research would be applied here to the case of anti-aging interventions, both as a test of the framework and to see what it yields in this case. The second resource is the work of the other co-investigators, Stephen Post, Peter Whitehouse and Robert Binstock, on the clinical and social meanings of the human aging process. That research will be used to identify the issues to analyze in this project, by providing the landscape of contemporary social practices, values and beliefs that radical life extensions could challenge. Collaboratively, the two groups will seek to anticipate the issues that anti-aging interventions could raise for three constituencies: the individuals and families that might use them, the health professionals that might provide them, and the public-policy makers that will shape the context in which they might become available. The project's methods will be analytic and discursive: the investigators will be critiquing, constructing and proposing arguments on the basis of existing information and previous work, through a regimen of regular research meetings and collaborative writing. This work will be overseen by an expert group of advisors; Carol Donley, Co-director, Center for Literature, Medicine and the Health Profession at Hiram College; Michael Fossel, Editor, Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine; Linda George, Associate Director, Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, Duke University; and Thomas Murray, President, The Hastings Center.