Geroscience and COVID-19

For over a decade most of my academic research has been devoted to establishing the case for the following two theses:

(1) the aspiration to promote health in late life for humans is one of the most pressing societal predicaments of the 21st century, and

(2) achieving (1) will require altering the aging process itself vs simply extending the number of years humans survive by managing multimorbidity, disability, frailty and postponing death.

I believe it is accurate to say that neither of the two theses I identify above is currently a prominent position in the humanities and social sciences. Undergraduate students coming out of University with a degree in the humanities and social sciences will have taken many courses exposing them to the importance of topics like patriarchy, economic inequality, racism, colonialism, multiculturalism, global poverty, and climate change. All important topics. But these same students will receive little, if any, exposure to the realities of population aging. Nor are they likely to have taken any courses which will help them perceive the empirical realities of today through the explanatory lens of evolutionary biology. Instead most will receive a steady dose of insights from paradigms like "ideal theory" or, conversely, identity politics. And finally what will be absent from the discussions of those research paradigms will be any engagement (outside of perhaps climate science) with the significant of science, and science policy, for addressing the future of humanity. Ideal theory and identity politics are not well equipped for addressing the societal predicaments raised by population aging, artificial intelligence, climate change, or infectious diseases like COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic ought to serve as a "slap in the face" wake-up call to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. We are ill equipped for addressing the societal predicaments this virus, and our response to this virus, has thrown us into because our theorizing about the world's problems is often detached from the complex realities like the fact that there are nearly 1500 different species of infectious organisms have been identified as causing disease in humans. Students in first and second year courses in philosophy, politics, sociology, and history (perhaps an exception will be a history of pandemics course) are unlikely to even learn about this reality of the human predicament. And by the time these students finish their degree they still might not, and thus they can be forgiven for forming the impression that human beings go through life disease-free till the day they die. For that is the impression of the world they receive from what they learn in University. They will learn about combating the threats of global capitalism, racism, patriarchy, colonialism, etc. but it is unlikely they learn much about the things that will actually cause the most disease and death in the world today. And I think this is deeply problematic for many reasons. We are failing the mission of higher education when this happens.

One consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is that this might change things, and hopefully for the better.
The pandemic ought to compel scholars in the in the humanities and social sciences to re-think their neglect of population aging and the importance of scientific innovation. The pandemic has compelled me to think very deeply about how we are responding to this virus (i.e. has it been proportionate and evidence-based?), and what the pandemic’s impact is likely to mean for aging research in the future. I believe these questions will fuel my research over the coming decade.

For those who haven’t followed this blog or my academic career, my list of publications on the importance of aging research includes the following (just to make it clear that I am not jumping on the "hey, disease and science is now important" bandwagon! It has been the primary focus of my research for 20 years):

Genetic Ethics: An Introduction
Biologically Modified Justice
“Aging, Geroscience and Freedom” Rejuvenation Research 22(2) 2019: 163-170.
“Justice and Life Extension” in End-of-Life Ethics (edited by John Davis) (New York, NY: Routledge Publishing, 2016).
“Empirical Ethics and the Duty to Extend the Biological Warranty Period” Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (2013): 480-503.
“Why the NIH Should Create an Institute of Positive Biology” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 105 (2012): 412-15.
“Biogerontology and the Intellectual Virtues” Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences 67(7) (2012): 734-46.
"Positive Biology” as a New Paradigm for the Medical Sciences” Nature’s EMBO Reports 13(2) (2012): 186-88.
“Global Aging, Well-Ordered Science and Prospection” Rejuvenation Research 13(5) (2010):607-12.
“Equality and the Duty to Retard Human Aging” Bioethics 24(8) (2010): 384-94.
“Why Aging Research?” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1197 (2010): 1–8.
“Mind the Gap: Senescence and Beneficence” Public Affairs Quarterly 24(2) (2010): 115- 30.
“Framing the Inborn Aging Process and Longevity Science” Biogerontology 11(3) (2010): 377-85.
“Has the Time Come to Take on Time Itself?” British Medical Journal 337 (2008):147-48.
“A Tale of Two Strategies: The Moral Imperative to Tackle Ageing” Nature’s EMBO Reports 9(7) (2008): 592-95.

The COVID-19 pandemic of the past 6 months has revealed a number of interesting things about the popular attitudes people, the media and policy advisors have towards disease, aging and death. In what we might call the “pre-pandemic” era, say the decade preceding the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, I would commonly encounter the following attitudes from students, scholars and the general public when discussing the prospect of extending the human lifespan via modifying biological aging:

Aging and death are natural.
There are too many people on the planet already so why would we want to extend the lifespan!?!
It is unfair to extend the lifespan when there are other pressing problems, like poverty, malaria, climate change, unemployment, etc.
Altering aging is science fiction.

Now contrast those sentiments with the following sentiments which have quickly become more mainstream among the public, media and policy experts and advisers in just the past 6 months:

COVID-19 is the worst public health threat in over a century!
Spend whatever needs to be spent on preventing the spread of the virus.
Spend whatever needs to be spent developing a COVID-19 vaccine and expediate the trials to get the vaccine within the next year.
Enforce prolonged lock down measures (limiting work, public transport, friendships and romantic intimacy; closing schools for children; banning travel, etc.) to prevent the spread of the virus and minimize the risk of dying from COVID-19.
Mandate compliance with the wearing of face masks if there is any chance doing so could help prevent the spread of the virus and reduce the risk of death from COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has really brought to the fore a number of inconsistencies and fallacies in the way people think about the aspiration to prevent disease and death. The complacency many have for the most common causes of death- the chronic diseases of late life like cancer, heart disease and stroke- stands in sharp contrast to the vigilant (even militant) attitude many take to preventing death from this new virus. I have found this both surprising and puzzling.

Just to be clear, I am among the most staunch defenders of promoting the health of the elderly, and yet I have been a critic of many of the strict (and unsubstantiated, in terms of the evidence for effectiveness) measures taken by developed countries in responding to the virus (the one exception being Sweden, the country I think has responded the most rationally and proportionately to the virus). My main opposition to most strict lock down measures is that little to no care was given to consider the adverse side effects of the lock down measures themselves- the harms to children, victims of domestic abuse, the newly unemployed, those at risk of addiction, suicide, and anxiety disorders, not to mention the delays in diagnosing and treating medical conditions unrelated to COVID-19 (which is the VAST majority of health problems plaguing the Canadian population). There are also substantial harms to the economy and liberty.
If the lock downs had been a drug, we never would have pursued them on grounds of both safety and efficacy. At a minimum we ought to have at least required "informed consent" before locking people up indefinitely. But fear, uncertainty and a rush to action won the day.

All of the risks and harms I just mentioned, risks and harms which have been incurred by the lock down measures themselves, were inflicted for the benefit of (mostly) reducing the mortality risks of older persons who already suffer multi-morbidity and would most likely pass within a few months, maybe years, in their nursing home. In other words, had we prevented most of the COVID-19 deaths doing so would still not have scored high in terms of what is called "QALYs"- quality-adjusted life years saved. An 87 year-old who is in the final stages of cancer progression and develops COVID-19 in their nursing home while undergoing chemotherapy would not survive many months even if a cure had been discovered for COVID-19. This is why aging researchers argue that tackling aging itself, and not simply the diseases of aging, is so important. Because of the reality of co-morbidity in late life. COVID-19 is not the only fatal disease among the elderly, nor is it the most fatal.

The data on COVID-19 deaths in Canada make vivid the role aging has played in our susceptibility to COVID-19.

To date Canadians over age 80 account for only 16.2% of our positive infection numbers, this is roughly equal to the percentage of Canadians who tested positive between the ages of 20-29 (14.9%), 30-39 (14.2%), 40-49 (15.1%) and 50-59 (15%).

And yet the percentage of Canadians who died from the virus between the ages of 20-29 was only 0.1% (9 people), for those ages 30-39 the deaths account for 0.2% (15 people), the 49 people between the ages of 40-49 who have died account for 0.6% of the total COVID deaths. And finally 2.3% of deaths have occurred among those age 50-59. These 4 younger age categories account for a total of 59.2% of the known positive COVID-19 cases and yet they only account for just over 3% of the total deaths.

By contrast, the 16.2% of known positive cases for those over age 80+ account for 71.5% of the total deaths from the virus. Canadians over age 70 account for roughly 90% of all our COVID-19 deaths.
Like cancer, COVID-19 is much more lethal for the elderly than it is for the young. But the death toll from cancer will be much more significant than that from COVID-19, and for Canadians at all stages of the lifespan. Cancer will kill an estimated 83,300 Canadians this year alone, nearly 10 times the current total deaths from COVID-19 to date. Every day cancer kills 228 Canadians. This number never makes the evening news. I suspect it rarely ever gets “tweeted” or mentioned on social media.

150 Canadian children under the age of 15 die every year from cancer. To date there are no reports of any COVID-19 deaths among children in Canada (under the age of 15). One person under the age of 19 does appear on the data for COVID-19 deaths in Canada. But there has not been any disclosure of the age, nor any more details on the cause of death for Canada’s youngest COVID-19 death (e.g. were there other contributing factors?).

It is also worth noting that the country now has 115,000 documented positive cases of the virus, which means there has probably been around 1,000,000 people infected in Canada if we assume the findings from this study in the US also apply to Canada.

If only a fraction of the popular support for prioritizing the effort to reduce COVID deaths among the elderly could also be harnessed towards support for aging research itself (which would help us prevent ALL the diseases of aging, including COVID-19 and any new future viruses) we would reap a much bigger health and economic dividend than simply slowing the spread of one virus. But of course aging is not a virus, nor did it originate in a foreign country, and its health and economic toll is not reported everyday in the news. Framing and exposure to information is everything when it comes to our collective priority setting.

But there is some reason for optimism that reason, evidence and a sense of proportionality will, in the end, prevail! Some of the leading aging researchers in the world have a forthcoming editorial in the journal Aging and Disease highlighting one of the biggest lessons the medical sciences can learn from the COVID-19 pandemic—we ought to target the aging process itself to help protect today’s aging populations from the multimorbidities of late life. A COVID-19 vaccine will not, by itself, be a panacea when the chronic diseases of aging are so prevalent among the elderly. A sample from the policy implications section of the editorial:

“The COVID-19 global emergency has emphasized to vast masses of people the vital need to prevent old-age multimorbidity, protect the elderly and improve their health span. Proponents of geroscience have argued for the importance of such preventive measures for many years. Now we see in front of our own eyes the disastrous consequences of the deficit in such preventive measures, and the portent this gap in our approach represents for the future. We are witnessing how this new infectious disease is wreaking havoc among individuals, the healthcare system and the entire social fabric around the world, while the rapid aging of the population represents the main risk factor and aggravating condition. Therefore, arguably, one of the most important lessons to be learned from this pandemic, is the need to therapeutically address degenerative aging processes to prevent aging-related ill health as a whole.

…. Conquering the current pandemic will require a multipronged approach, including primarily an ‘offensive’ approach represented by the development of vaccines and treatments, as well as a ‘defensive’ approach focused on strengthening the resilience of affected individuals. Importantly, the offensive part of our arsenal requires the urgent development of a new vaccine, curative and palliative treatments for each successive pandemic and epidemic confronting the world. This aspect of our approach is unfortunately both slow and specific to the currently relevant virus or pathogen. In contrast, the defensive arm proposed here is pathogen-blind insofar as the interventions are pathogen independent. Therefore, a geroscience-focused response to the COVID-19 pandemic can be deployed not only against the current emergency, but the same approach will certainly be relevant to future infections, be them pandemic, epidemic, endemic, or even those affecting any one individual."

I hope the COVID-19 pandemic will put aging and aging research on the “global radar” as an important priority for global health. Many of the ageist and irrational objections to promoting health in late life I have encountered for over a decade in my research and teaching will be much harder for people to raise as a result of the outbreak of this pandemic and people seeing (a small reality of) of the impact global aging has on our health prospects.

Cheers,
Colin

Human Arrival in North America

Naturenews has the scoop on new findings which suggest that humans arrived in North America more than 15 000 years earlier than previously thought. A sample from the news item:

The first humans in the Americas came from East Asia, but when they began to arrive is hotly debated. Some researchers think that it could have been as early as 130,000 years ago, although most of the archaeological evidence supporting this theory is disputed. For instance, some of the stone artefacts are so simple that sceptics say they were probably produced by natural geological processes rather than by people. The mainstream view is that the peopling of the Americas began about 15,000 or 16,000 years ago — based on genetic evidence and artefacts found at sites including the 14,000-year-old Monte Verde II in Chile.

The latest discoveries, published on 22 July in Nature1, question that consensus. Since 2012, a team led by Ciprian Ardelean at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico has been excavating Chiquihuite Cave, which is 2,740 metres above sea level in the country’s Astillero Mountains. The researchers found almost 2,000 stone tools, 239 of which were embedded in layers of gravel that have been carbon dated to between 25,000 and 32,000 years old.

Cheers,
Colin

What is Political Theory? (updated for 2020)

Over 14 years I wrote this brief post on what I thought political theory is. This remains one of the most read posts on my blog. Today's post is an extended, and long overdue, update on that theme.

This summer I am undertaking a major revamp of the full year history of political theory course I have taught here at Queen's for the past 11 years to approximately 275 students. In the past this course was a standard Plato to Marx course. It will still cover major thinkers from the canon, but with a new mix of theorists and the themes will be juxtaposed with more contemporary issues and concerns. This is the new course outline for this coming year:

This course will survey and examine historical thinkers, and socio-political events, that have helped shape Western political thought. Ideas can be powerful catalysts for progressive change, but they can also be utilized to maintain and perpetuate oppression and exclusion. The study of the ideas and ideals of Western political thought reveal a diversity of assumptions (e.g. what is human nature?) and societal aspirations which invoke values like stability, individualism, community, equality, freedom and justice. Students will exam the writings of a diverse range of thinkers, ranging from Plato, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, to Emma Goldman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, JS Mill, Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon. These thinkers wrote about, and lived during, significant historical events in the development of Western democracies. From Athenian democracy and slavery, to the English Civil War, the French Revolution, colonialism, and industrialization and patriarchy, the history of political thought is ripe with examples of theorists diagnosing pressing societal predicaments, as well as exercising the intellectual skill of imagining collective solutions to these problems. Students will be expected to demonstrate both a comprehension of the material covered in the course and the ability to critically evaluate that material.

The impetus for these substantive changes to the course are three-fold:

(1) for my own interest and intellectual growth and development I had planned on revamping the course, and already started making substantive changes last year.

(2) Because of the COVID-19 pandemic the plan is, for at least the first term of the course, for the lecture material will be delivered online. This entailed a re-think of how the course is delivered, and it's aims and objectives. So I decided to do the complete overhaul at the same time.

(3) The recent events of the BLM movement and global protests against racism and police violence have helped give me the further push needed to update and invigorate my course with new content, to address ( more substantively) diversity concerns and better equip my students with an understanding of the political ideas and ideals needed to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

In order for a political theory course to be part of the solution to the problems of today (vs being part of the problem), it must be something an instructor constantly attends to and modifies vs simply hitting the "cruise control" button and teaching the same content in the same manner indefinitely.

Over the last two years I had removed Hume and Hegel from the course to provide space for addressing MLK and the civil rights movement. And this year I will also remove Aristotle and Kant to create space for a more extensive discussion of the BLM movement, Emma Goldman and anarchism, Charles Mills on the racial contract, WEB Du Bois and some Frantz Fanon in the final section of the course on Marx and Marxism.

I am working on the introduction lecture to the course and I would like to detail my thoughts for that introduction here.

Let us start with two important questions:

(1) What is political theory?
AND
(2) Why should we study and teach the history of Western political thought?

Both questions are hotly debated and contentious topics in the field. If you had 5 political theorists together in a room to answer these 2 questions you might actually get 10 different answers in total!

As the professor for the course I will give my answers to these questions, but students and readers of the blog should take my answers with a grain of salt. Having taught and published on these topics for over 20 years now I think my answers are plausible and defensible answers, but they are not the only answers. Nor do they have to become YOUR answers.

You might discover, as you engage with the course readings and topics for yourself, that you come to your own conclusions and answers to these questions. And that is a good thing. Higher education should facilitate insight and debate rather work towards a predetermined consensus on complex and important questions.

Whatever one says about the field of political theory, it certainly is a unique area of study in politics. Its main focus is on the realm of ideas and ideals vs specific institutions or the election outcomes of a particular country. Rather than focusing on empirical questions like “Why do voters vote for the candidates they vote for?” or “What causes war?”, political theory addresses moral, evaluative concerns. “What is justice?” “Are freedom and equality compatible political ideals?” “Why, and how, should we redress the inequalities persistent in today’s societies?” These are just a few of the concerns theorists address.

At it’s most general level, I like to think of political theory as the exercise of two distinct, but related, intellectual skills. In my earlier post from 14 years ago I referred to the 3 skills John Dunn notes, but for brevity I am reducing these 3 down to just 2 skills (merging his second two skills into one).

And to explain these skills I would like to make an analogy with the medical sciences. In oncology, which is the study of the pathology of cancer, there are two important aspects of cancer research- the diagnostic dimension AND the treatment dimension.

The first thing an oncologist must do is confirm if a patient actually has a cancer tumour vs a (harmless) benign growth. Cancerous tumours are not typically visible to the naked eye, which is why it is so important to catch cancer early on versus waiting for more serious symptoms to be manifest after the cancer has metastasized (that is, spread to other parts of the body). Thus some imaging scans like a CT scan, coupled with a biopsy of the suspicious mass, takes place to confirm if the tissue is cancerous or noncancerous.

If a cancer diagnosis is confirmed, then a treatment plan for this specific type (and stage) of cancer will need to be developed. This might involve chemotherapy and/or radiation and surgery, or a combination of different types of treatment. Even when a cancer turmour has been removed, there must be periodic followup exams to make sure it doesn’t return or grow.

Political theorists are kind of like oncologists for the cancers of politics and our collective lives. And like oncology, political theory has both a diagnostic and prescriptive function:

1. The diagnostic dimension: identifying pressing societal problems by developing the conceptual tools to identify, and quantify, societal problems. Political theory helps put on our “radar” things that we might not realize are significant problems. These problems can range from economic inequality and patriarchy, to climate change, racism, intolerance and unjustified government interference in our liberty.

2. The prescriptive dimension: showing us how best to confront these societal problems. Like a skilled cancer surgeon, a skilled political theorist will help us develop the insights needed to determine "what needs to be done” to improve our collective future. The prescription might be democratic reform, imposing clear limits on governmental power and authority, tackling inequality within the family or engaging in civil disobedience to raise awareness to persistent injustice. This second skill engages our capacity for political imagination (going beyond what is currently feasible), but is tempered by a pragmatic disposition to keep prescribed political actions and ambitions within the realm of "potential" vs "the impossible".

This last point is of course subject to much debate and disagreement. What seemed impossible only yesterday is often taken as "a given" today (e.g. universal suffrage, industrialization, peace, economic prosperity, etc.). But on the flip side, appealing to overly idealized "pie-in-the-sky" aspirations is one sure way to ensure no change ever comes. Incremental meaningful progress is still progress. Admittedly determining what the optimal point is between prioritizing "the feasible" and the "truly transformative" will be rife with disagreements over the magnitude of the shortcomings of the status quo vs the magnitude of the potential benefits (and possible harms) of more radical change. Such debates are the essence of what politics is about.

Now let us turn to question #2: (2) Why should we study and teach the history of Western political thought?

There are a variety of different perspectives to take on answering this question, sometimes these perspectives are driven by disagreement over which thinkers and themes to cover, sometimes the disagreement tracks different ideological convictions concerning the pros and cons of the ideas developed in Western political theory (and Western civilization more generally).

Perhaps the most contentious and divisive topic in academia today (at least in North America) are the pros and cons of Western civilization. Countries like Canada, England, Scotland, the United States, Australia, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, etc. are among the most free, equal and democratic countries in the world. The citizens of such societies enjoy legal and political rights that would have been unimaginable just a few centuries ago, and remain the envy of people living in authoritarian regimes in the world today. Citizens in such countries also enjoy high levels of economic development and prosperity, as well as democratic governance, freedom of the press and religion, and access to quality education and healthcare. These countries have the highest life expectancy for human populations in the world.

These positive features of Western liberal democracies are the envy of persons living in societies where they have no substantive voice in their political futures, and little or no access to the benefits of gender equality, freedom of religion or the press, or access to quality education and healthcare. And yet, ironically, many people living in developed democracies take for granted the benefits they enjoy (benefits they have access to merely as a consequence of their being born when, and where, they were born). It is easy to watch social media and the news about the political dysfunction of one's society and mistakenly equate those shortcomings with a condemnation of the system as a whole. The "twitterverse" amplifies this ahistorical, non-comparative understanding of the virtues and vices of the status quo within today's most affluent, free and tolerant societies.

But having said all of the above, concerning the successes of Western civilizations, this does not negative the reality that there still are significant injustices and problems facing all such societies. A history of colonialism and slavery, coupled with the persistence of institutional racism, intolerance, climate change and socio-economic inequality all pose formidable challenges for even the most successful societies of today. It can be true that a society like Canada fares (comparatively) very well on many indexes of justice (e.g. freedom, equality between the sexes, tolerance, affluence, treatment of minorities, etc.) and yet it can also be true to argue that Canada comes up well short on other important dimensions of justice (e.g. treatment of Indigenous persons and addressing concerns of transitional justice, the health and inclusion of its democratic practices and institutions, etc.)

Western civilization has had a dramatic impact (both positive and negative) on the life prospects of humanity. Rather than reduce these impacts to the simplistic narratives of "all good" or "all bad", an engagement with the history of political theory encourages us to do an extensive inventory of the mistakes we have made in the past, and continue to make today, as well as acknowledge the successes we have made in overcoming many of the exclusionary, intolerant, authoritarian, and shortsighted ways the collective fate of human societies have been decided in the past (and still are in many parts of the world).

I believe the study of the history of political thought in the 21st century is as important today as it ever has been. Sadly I fear my perspective is becoming more and more of a minority position within the discipline of political science. This is why I continue to passionately teach the large service course in the history of political thought. Each new generation must make its own reckoning with our past, for today's present will be tomorrow's past. And yesterday's past was once a potential future humans could have altered and changed. By learning how the ideas of past, and those of today, help shape our collective futures students can gain an awareness of the importance of attending to their own political beliefs, assumptions and aspirations. By doing so we will be better positioned for redressing the injustices that persist today, and improve the odds that the societies of the future will flourish vs flounder/perish.

Cheers,
Colin