New Paper Forthcoming on Women's Heath and Wellbeing

My latest article titled "Longevity Science and Women’s Health and Wellbeing" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Population Ageing.  

Researching and writing this piece was a true labour of love.  Without realizing it at the time, my interest in this topic was shaped over decades as I first witnessed the demanding caring responsibilities my mother took on to care for her own mother during the last 10+ years of her mother's life.  And then this same dynamic of a period of prolonged management of chronic conditions, coupled with an unequal distribution of the burdens of care, played out for my mother in her final years.  And this predicament is occurring in millions of families around the world as populations survive into late life.  Geroscience can help redress some of these predicaments, because it aspires to improve the quality of life for older persons (vs simply increasing the lifespan by treating single diseases).   

The abstract:

In most areas of the world women comprise the majority of older persons (especially at the most advanced ages), but the additional longevity (globally it is 4.8 years) women have often comes with poorer health status compared to age-matched men.  This article draws attention to four distinct ways an applied gerontological intervention designed to increase the human healthspan via “rate (of ageing) control” could positively impact the health and wellbeing of women in today’s ageing world.  The four benefits examined are: (1) improving women’s health in late life; (2) increasing reproductive longevity and improving maternal health, (3) reducing the financial vulnerability many women experience at advanced ages (especially in the developing world); and (4) reducing the caring burdens which typically fall, at least disproportionately, on daughters to care for their ageing parents.  Highlighting these factors is important as is helps focus geroscience advocacy not only on the potential health dividend age retardation could confer on those in late life, but also the distributional effects on health throughout the lifespan (e.g. improving maternal health) and on helping to ameliorate other important inequalities (e.g. reducing the financial vulnerabilities of late life and easing the burdens on the care givers for ageing parents). By making vivid the benefits “rate (of ageing) control” could confer on women, especially in the developing world, the goal of retarding biological ageing can be rightly construed as a pressing public health priority for the 21^st century.  

Cheers, 

Colin 

Toleration for Today

 

An excerpt from the conclusion of my chapter contribution to Palgrave's Handbook of Toleration:

Virtue epistemology shifts the traditional focus of ethics away from the question
“how should I act?” towards the question “what should I believe?”. Virtue epistemology makes our cognitive lives (e.g., beliefs, motivations, attitudes, thought processes, etc.) a subject of moral inquiry and scrutiny. As such virtue epistemology provides the foundations for an original and compelling account of toleration as a virtue, one which makes the psychology of toleration a central focus of normative analysis. The so-called paradox of toleration arises when an agent or polity holds the following two, apparently contradictory, beliefs: (1) the belief that some belief or practice is objectionable and (2) the belief that, despite its being objectionable, the belief or practice in question should not be suppressed.
 
The virtue epistemological account of toleration advanced in this chapter attempts
to resolve this alleged tension by utilizing the “epistemic virtues” that help explain
how the introspective and flexible mind can consistently hold these two, apparently contradictory, beliefs. Such a mind possesses a cluster of intellectual virtues that Siegel describes as “mindsight” – the ability to “be aware of our mental processes without being swept away by them, . . . to get ourselves off the autopilot of ingrained behaviors and habituated responses, and moves us beyond the reactive emotional loops we all have a tendency to get trapped in” (Siegal 2010).

Mindsight requires having the ability to recognize the salient facts, intellectual
humility, insight into problems, fairness in evaluating the arguments of others, etc.
Unlike an autonomy-based account of toleration which makes respect for autonomy the central justification for exercising toleration, the virtue epistemological account advanced here emphasizes a number of distinct epistemic virtues. And the central cases of toleration examined in this chapter – the teen-parent relationship, tolerant employers and neighbors, and the censorship of hate speech – were utilized to reveal the importance, and provide some specific details, of how “mindsight” can help illuminate toleration as a virtue. Virtue epistemology can offer us an original and helpful normative lens for exploring the appeal and limits of toleration.

Cheers, 

Colin

Study on Genetics of Brain Growth and Complexity

 

Science reports on an interesting study into the genetics of brain growth and complexity:  

Now, a study identifies mutations that transform seemingly useless DNA sequences into potential genes by endowing their encoded RNA with the skill to escape the cell nucleus—a critical step toward becoming translated into a protein. The study’s authors highlight 74 human protein genes that appear to have arisen in this de novo way—more than half of which emerged after the human lineage branched off from chimpanzees. Some of these newcomer genes may have played a role in the evolution of our relatively large and complex brains. When added to mice, one made the rodent brains grow bigger and more humanlike, the authors report this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

....When Hu introduced one of these genes into mice, their brains also grew larger than normal and developed a bigger cortex, the wrinkly outer layer of the mammalian brain that in humans is responsible for high-level functions such as reasoning and language. The second gene did likewise in mice, and also caused the animals’ brains to develop more humanlike ridges and grooves. Those mice performed better on tests of cognitive function and memory than mice lacking this gene, the team says it will report soon in Advanced Science.

Overall, the findings suggest these de novo human genes “may have a role in brain development and may have been a driver of cognition during the evolution of humans,” says Erich Bornberg-Bauer, an evolutionary biophysicist at the University of Münster.  

Cheers, 

Colin

The Decline of Disruptive Science

Nature News has this interesting story (the source of the image) on this Nature study on the decline of disruptive science. 

A sample from the news piece:

It is important to understand the reasons for the drastic changes, Walsh says. The trend might stem in part from changes in the scientific enterprise. For example, there are now many more researchers than in the 1940s, which has created a more competitive environment and raised the stakes to publish research and seek patents. That, in turn, has changed the incentives for how researchers go about their work. Large research teams, for example, have become more common, and Wang and his colleagues have found3 that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.

Finding an explanation for the decline won’t be easy, Walsh says. Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same. The rate of decline is also puzzling: CD indices fell steeply from 1945 to 1970, then more gradually from the late 1990s to 2010. “Whatever explanation you have for disruptiveness dropping off, you need to also make sense of it levelling off” in the 2000s, he says.

And the abstract from the study:

Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes1,2, wherein previous accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’3,4,5,6,7. Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances8,9. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields10,11. Here, we analyse these claims at scale across six decades, using data on 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six large-scale datasets, together with a new quantitative metric—the CD index12—that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. This pattern holds universally across fields and is robust across multiple different citation- and text-based metrics1,13,14,15,16,17. Subsequently, we link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the ‘shoulders of giants’ view. We find that the observed declines are unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.

Cheers, 

Colin

Media coverage of Aging Research

Some recent media stories on aging and longevity science worth noting.

The FT has this piece, and National Geographic has this piece.

Cheers, 

Colin