Scott Wainner poses an interesting challenge to bloggers to blog their position on longevity research.

Here’s a quick backgrounder on longevity research.

Aubrey DeGray is the most familiar face of the longevity research movement, Longevity research seems to be an extremely fruitful and possible line of research and one of the best ways to improve the human condition, but many people are reluctant to support it.

I think there is great resistance to goofing around with the natural order of things - people get sensitive about the edge cases of birth and death especially. I also think that older people do not look forward to the decrepitude part of getting old and can’t imagine extending that out forever. Eternal life is such a myth, and since, we are  self-absorbed as a species, so our own death would tend to fascinate us, it stays that way.

But, we are really just talking about cell death

It’s a process, and researchers are working it, but will it end up in the same kind of pigeonhole that cloning finds itself in, where it interferes with the natural order of things. Think about it, because if you are like me you hadn’t up until now and you realize that this research has a strong, inherent appeal of its own. It sounds like a fantasy because it was a fantasy as long as we have been thinking animals. But those elemental expressions of hopes and fears also predate cell theory and cell pathology and now we can look at conditions that cause the complex we refer to as “aging” and possibly suppress those conditions. How could you not want that? Honestly, it points to a paradox that people reach a certain level of sophistication where they can possibly enact these amazing feats but at the same time reach an obnoxious distance from their own instincts that they suppress their instinct for self-preservation.