Symposium: Creating very old people

Creating very old people: Individual blessing or societal disaster

"That is the title of a symposium to be held at the Marriott Glenpointe Hotel in Teaneck, New Jersey on April 30, 2004. It is an extremely important issue. We now are moving to the capacity to increase life expectancy at birth from the current 77 years to 90 to 95 years. That will happen relatively quickly. That is just the beginning. Many scientists now consider aging as a disease and they are now working very hard to understand the aging process and then literally change the boundaries of aging allowing people to have life expectancies on average of 110 to 120 or more years. Some highly regarded experts now say that, once we learn how to change the boundaries of aging, there is actually no upper limit."

People age 100 or older - will grow to 400,000 by 2030, a 500 percent increase.

"There are now about 36 million Americans over age 65, a population expected to double by 2030.

There's some qualified good news: The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the number of centenarians - people age 100 or older - will grow to 400,000 by 2030, a 500 percent increase. Granted, they won't all be in great shape. "


See article

Wisdom Accretion

It is true that we often do not listen to the wisdom of others. Most often we need to learn from our own mistakes rather than avoid those mistakes all together by listening to our elders. As the world goes this means that the collective wisdom-in-action, not the wisdom that actually resides in the heads of the older generation, is always at a lower level than it could be if we indeed listened and took to heart the wisdom of those who have gone before. One could make the argument then that we are not really building up the collective reservoir of wisdom. That the body of wisdom is not evolving so fast. The reason is that the older generation die off and with them goes there wisdom. And a fresh generation starts, ignoring the old stuff. What if either the old folks didn't die out so soon or the young folks really listened to the old ones? Would our wisdom pool grow? Advance? What would that wiser world be like?

The Future of Aging in a Biotech Era

Ageless Bodies and Happy Souls: The Future of Aging in a Biotech Era

An Interview with Leon Kass, MD,
Chairman, President's Council on Bioethics