Canada's First Geroscience Summit

A few days ago I attended, and presented at, Canada’s first Geroscience summit in Toronto.  It was a great event, with participants from many different areas of research.

My 20 minute presentation addressed the ethical and social implications of the science of healthy aging, and I focused on some insights from two of my most recent papers- one on women’s health and the other on climate change.

During the first few minutes of my talk I stated that, if I had to grade bioethical/philosophical discussions of aging and geroscience, I would only give the field a “D+” grade.  I expanded with a few examples, including Callaghan’s argument for imposing age limits on healthcare to arguments dealing with immortality.  To experts in the fields of gerontology and geroscience hearing that established scholars seriously posit such arguments no doubt reinforces the reputation of philosophers as aloof or somewhat sophomoric, and this only further entrenches the divide between “two cultures” that CP Snow identified over half a century ago.

My background academic training is also in philosophy.  And philosophers are often characterized as functioning at a somewhat abstract level of analysis when addressing the social predicaments they concern themselves with.  Sometimes this abstraction can be a strength—helping to provide a “bird’s-eye view” of the moral landscape and/or epistemic challenges that lay ahead, etc. — but this same perspective can also be a liability.  For example, when it is so abstract it muddles, rather than enhances, the quality of our discussions and debates concerning a societal predicament that actually requires some nuanced understanding of relevant context (e.g. detailed empirical knowledge, etc.).  So I spent the bulk of my time in the presentation making the case that the philosopher's skillset can be an asset for geroscience communication/advocacy.

Perhaps my largest complaint about philosophy/bioethics is that, for the most part, it has simply ignored population aging and geroscience.  If I had to speculate as to why these issues have been neglected I would think that factors like the following have contributed to this predicament:

(1) the insularity of the discipline (e.g. few philosophers would consider the world’s changing demographics to be something relevant to what they theorize about, indeed they might not even be aware of this empirical fact!);

(2) a tendency to focus on what is currently considered a “hot top” at this particular moment in time within their own discipline (a symptom of (1));

(3) a heavy reliance on one’s “moral intuitions”, not only as a guide to the conclusions one argues for on contentious ethical issues (admittedly the moral imperative to slow human aging is not intuitive) but also as a guide for the issues they take to be morally significant and worthy of pondering in detail in the first place.   

The thrust of the thesis in my presentation was that geroscience advocacy and communication must find effective ways to frame the science within the existing ecology of ideas and advocacy for equality and social justice.  I have tried to do this in a variety of different ways already in my published work.  But the geroscience summit also sparked new ideas which I intend to write up in a serious of new papers over the coming year or two.

I finished my talk by playing the following video abstract from my recent Aging Cell paper on climate science and geroscience.

Cheers,

Colin

Good Arguments (Autumn Reading Group, session #3)

This is the final book summary of Seo’s Good Arguments (post #1 and post #2), covering chapters 7, 8, 9 and the conclusion, for the Philosophy Meetup book discussion this weekend. 

Chapter 7 Education

Seo offers the following debating formula:  

Information < skills, skills < motivation  

Skills include research, teamwork, logical thinking, etc. Debate activity gives students a reason to care about learning.  To be heard, and hold one’s own in an argument.  It is an equalizing activity.

Seo discusses James Farmer’s involvement in debating.  This short video describes Farmer’s involvement in the civil rights movement:

Seo notes that those who engage in repeated debates will experience more losses than wins.  Thus it is an activity that teaches us humility.  Debate can make us realize that while our adversaries might be defeated, they will never be vanquished.  They return with better arguments and new information. Debate teaches us these truths.  Struggle and conflict are not only part of debate, they are life. Seo contends that wisdom involves responding to this reality with grace.

Reflect on your experience in school.  Do you have good role models for debate?  Teachers that exemplified intellectual humility and “perspective taking” when considering contentious subjects?  Conversely, did you have teachers that exemplified the epistemic vices of being close minded, arrogant and blindly ideological in their outlook?  Did you have the opportunity to observe and participate in debate at school?

 

Chapter 8 Relationships

Seo starts this chapter by noting the frequency in which arguments amongst intimates occur (e.g. 18 arguments/month about dishwashing).  The most persistent disputes are often with our closest inmates and over trivial matters.  He notes the the typical advice to resolve disputes- like finding commonality or breaking the disagreement down into smaller parts- seems harder to apply in intimate relationships.

With personal disagreements misunderstandings are very common, perhaps arising from the certainty that comes with greater knowledge of other person.  Unimportant issues often take on exaggerated importance.  We often expect loved ones to agree with us.  And we read a lot into these disputes, about our importance to the other person.  As soon as we expand the scope of these disagreements we risk making it more intractable.  Sometimes in these disputes a person is testing if the other person still cares about us (an example of misaligned motivations in disputes).

Dirty dish disputes are Seo’s archetype example of personal disputes.  And pride plays a significant role in disputes with our intimates. 

The following “side switch” exercises are addressed, as a way to resolve such disputes:

Stress test:  review your arguments from the perspective of your opponent. Think of the  strongest objections to your claims.

Lost ballot:  imagine you have won the debate from the opposing side, write out the reasons why you won and the mistakes of the opposition.

When we try to see things from another point of view, we see the “subjective reasonableness” of other beliefs, and this may help us realize that some of our beliefs are erroneous.   

Seo quotes A. Craig Baird (1955) “Sound conviction arose from mature reflection.  And it was the role of debate to facilitate the maturing of such reflection and conviction”.

Think of the debates and disputes you have in your own intimate relationships.  Do you have any advice on what to do, or what not to do, in such circumstances?  Has pride taken a toll on your personal life?    

Chapter 9 Technology:  How to Debate in the Future

This chapter has an interesting discussion of IBM’s Project Debater.  This video shows the debate in question.

We can discuss how we think AI might impact the future of debate.  But even with technological advances like social media (Twitter, FB, etc.) we can reflect on how information and debate has been shaped by these technological advances.  For example, fuelling group polarization and echo chambers, sound bites, misinformation, etc.

Conclusion

Seo notes a friend’s suggestion as was finishing a draft of the book: to consider the question “How does debate scale?”

Seo contends that public institutions should make more space for debate- such as the   rules for Parliamentary procedures, or create new institutions (e.g. Citizen’s Assemblies).  The state should provide education to enable citizens to participate in such forums.  Debate requires a level playing field.  But in the real world this is not the case.  So we need to work on creating more equitable institutions and ensure they have integrity.

How does debate scale?  Seo’s eventual answer to this question is “It doesn’t”.  He argues that what power debate has resides in the magic of an encounter, one-on-one, on its own terms.  One good conversation at a time.  Good arguments create new ideas and strengthen relationships.  It is a basic commitment is to dialogue not monologue. 

He concludes by noting the lessons debate taught him.  It gave him a voice when he had none.  Debate taught him to argue for his interests, respond to opponents, use words, lose with grace and pick his battles. 

I really enjoyed reading this book and look forward to our final discussion of it on Sunday. 

Cheers,

Colin

Human Challenge Trail for Zika

Nature news has this interesting story on the human challenge trail for Zika, illustrating the challenges science face in testing vaccines when the the prevalence of disease is low in the population.  A sample:

For the first time, scientists have deliberately infected people with Zika virus to learn whether such a strategy could help to test vaccines against the pathogen.

The virus can cause severe birth abnormalities in babies born to parents infected during pregnancy. It also has been associated with neurological problems in adults, although those cases are rare. But infected study participants had only mild symptoms, and none became pregnant during or immediately after the trial. The results raise hopes that ‘human challenge’ programmes — in which volunteers are exposed to a pathogen in a controlled setting — could make it feasible to test vaccines at a time when Zika incidence is low.

“This is a great scientific gain in terms of the development of a vaccine,” said Rafael Franca, an immunologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. The results are scheduled to be presented today at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Chicago, Illinois.

Cheers, 

Colin 

Changing My Mind: Reflections on a Quarter of a Century of Research

At the end of this academic year I will have been a University Professor for 25 years.  A quarter of a century of time seems like a sizeable amount of time to reflect on how, with respect to substantive research topics and issues, I have actually changed my mind.  I spent the morning walk reflecting on this issue, and decided I would limit myself to the 5 most noteworthy things that I have changed my mind on.  Below is what I came up with.

Change #1:  Methodological Presuppositions

25 years ago I was a committed Rawlsian, in the final year of completing this doctoral thesis at the University of Bristol.  At that time if you had asked me what the primary objective of an aspiring political philosopher ought to be, my answer- following the example of the icons in the field at the time- would be to formulate and defend a theory of justice.  And the key elements of developing/defending one's fav theory of justice would involve:  

(1) priming the moral intuitions and convictions of prominent contemporary philosophers in my field in the 1990s (the fanciful terminology/justification employed at the time was "reflective equilibrium") 

AND 

(2) canvassing the extensive literature written by Anglo-American political philosophers since the 1970s on the topic, taking care to delineate the increments of changes, objections, counter-arguments, etc. of the various interlocutors.

Reflecting back on this time of my early career, and the discipline at the time, I now see that epistemic project as armchair naval gazing.  It did not require the political philosopher to actually learn or know anything about the real world-- what causes advantage/disadvantage (outside of these things being influenced by "the basic structure" of a closed society)-- or to draw an any interdisciplinary knowledge (the one exception being "pareto optimality" and incentives).  

Over the course of the early to late 2000s I shifted from being an ideal theorist to being a non-ideal theorist.  This represented a significant change in my mind.  It represented a change in the way I conceived of myself as a philosopher.  Constructing a grandiose theory of justice, predicated upon one's uncritically accepted moral intuitions, and formulating it via appeals to abstract and idealized assumptions no longer held any appeal to me.  It struck me as a very uncreative process intellectually, as well as very naive and lacking substance in terms of what it actually contributed to emancipatory knowledge.  This "The Emperor has no clothes" moment in my career created something of a perceived career crisis for me.  It was much easier to get published working within the accepted, mainstream research paradigms of the discipline.  Publishing my work on non-ideal theory was significantly harder, especially in the late 2000s before non-ideal theory had become more fashionable.  Reviewers committed to the orthodoxy of Rawlsian ideal theory did not appreciate the criticism that the whole ideal theory project was flawed.  Whole careers and areas of research were build on the abstraction and idealization of ideal theory.  It would take a long time for the discipline to pivot and redefine itself.  In the meantime, I still had to find venues to publish my research.  I was fortunate that I was able to pivot and adapt and find a way to do the research I was passionate to do, and have faith that that research would, eventually, find a publication venue.  So this first major belief change involved changing how I saw myself as a philosopher, and who I was trying to write my research for (e.g. other specialized political philosophers or a more broad audience).      

Change #2:  The Substantive Conviction  

In the early 2000s I started doing research on genetic diseases and advances in the biomedical sciences (e.g. gene therapy).  At the time I initially approached this research in a "top down" fashion.  This means that I started out with strong egalitarian and prioritarian convictions, and I let those convictions determine the kind of arguments I would make with respect to the duty to alleviate the harms of the genetic lottery of life.  So my papers from this early stage of research (this, this and this) reflect this "top down" approach.

However, as I started to learn more about the actual science (e.g. evolutionary biology, the complex interplay between genes and environment, the costs and risks of gene therapies, etc.) I realized that this "top down" approach was very limited.  Gene therapy, for example, was still an experimental intervention.  It was risky and costly with yet unknown efficacy in humans.  For a philosopher to proclaim substantive conclusions - that gene therapies for rare, early onset disorders is a stringent requirement of justice- seemed naive and aloof.  Of course it would have been easy for me to invoke the "ideal theory" proxy and just say I am functioning at the level of ideal theory where messy empirical constraints like costs, risks and efficacy do not arise.  But if one can assume that medical innovations are costless, risk-free and 100% efficacious then one is no longer working within the confines of the world as we know it (but rather some fanciful utopia).  And if that is the case, why not just assume away all genetic diseases and health disadvantages? Oh wait, Rawlsian ideal theory does that as well!  I hope you appreciate my dilemma. Indeed, the Emperor has no clothes!  

By the mid-2000s I also encountered the field of science that was then known as "biogerontology".  Scientists were calling for more research on the biology of aging, in the hopes that the rate of aging could be slowed and humans could enjoy more (healthy) life.  At first my intuitions about altering the rate of aging were something like the following:

Calling for the development of medical interventions that extend the human lifespan by slowing aging is analogous to calling for tax breaks for millionaires.

In other words, as long as the world continued to have the problem of persistent early life mortality, any suggestion that we should alter aging to confer more longevity on those fortunate enough to survive into late life seemed, at best, a distraction and, at worst, morally insensitive if not offensive.

My view on this substantive judgement has changed significantly.  Public health problems should not be tackled sequentially, let alone conceptualized that way.  We need not eliminate all childhood mortality in the world before we get serious about tackling cancer or Alzheimer's disease.  Furthermore, childhood mortality has been diminishing for decades, while the chronic diseases of late life now account for most deaths in the world and are a growing challenge for developing countries.  

Most children born in the world today will survive into late life and suffer the chronic diseases of aging.  So over the course of about a decade of research I ended up becoming a strong advocate of rate (of aging) control.  This change in conviction resulted from shifting from a distributive justice framework that treated health like wealth, to a public health framework that champions cost-effective measures of preventative medicine that transcend the "War Against Disease" mentality of early public health pioneers.  This transformation in conviction only occurred because I was open to insights from demography, biogerontology and public health.  I never would have changed my mind if had to doubled down on my initial intuitions or searched for guidance in the contemporary theories of justice that are oblivious to population aging and science innovation.

Change #3:  Focus:  Well-Ordered Science

In the early 2000s if you had asked me what governmental decisions would have the most significant impact on the life prospects of a population I would have said it was really the political economy and the decisions around taxes that influence the distribution of wealth and income.  While I still view that as important policy decisions, I now see that perspective as very narrow.  Of course if the fiscal policies implemented by a government are so disastrous as to undermine the economic viability of a country then everything else is vulnerable as there will be little capacity to invest in healthcare, education, science, etc.  But of course in ideal theory no country has any national debt! And in ideal theory there also wouldn't be popular disdain for income taxation, or mismanaged public funds, or risks of capital flight (society is closed after all) etc. But I digress! 

For the past 20 years I have been telling my students that no other area of government decision making will impact their life prospects as profoundly as science policy.  How much research funding is invested in basic scientific research, which questions and aspirations different areas of science prioritize trying to answer, etc.  These are the questions to tackle.  So one of the biggest changes in my mind over the past 25 years has been a shift in what needs to be studied.  And the determinates of "well-ordered science" remain a much neglected field of enquiry.  And the impact of this will be felt on issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic, to future infectious disease outbreaks, how we combat chronic disease risks, climate change, AI, etc.

Change #4:  Focus II:  Virtue Epistemology 

In the early 2000s the most important question I thought ethics and political philosophy should tackle is:  How should we act?  Today I think it is much more important to ask a prior, epistemic question, "What should we believe?".  My interests in virtue epistemology have emerged in various projects of mine of the past twenty years.  It is a topic I wish I had more time to explore and devote serious time to writing about.  I am in the final stages of a major research project that applies this framework to the study and engagement with the canon of political philosophy.  So I will save elaborating on this in greater detail once that project is out.  

Chapter #5:  Focus III:  Interdisciplinarity

The writing an academic undertakes exists within a complex ecology of ideas and professional norms/expectations.  There are professional incentives (e.g. getting published, tenured, etc.) and norms and conventions (e.g. conference themes, potential collaborators, etc.) that can shape, temper or constrain one's intellectual curiosity.  25 years ago my intellectual outlook was much more insular.  I looked only within political philosophy for both the questions I would ask, and the answers to those questions.  While the discipline still informs my teaching, writing and research, it is simply one toolkit among many others I rely upon when working through my ideas.  

One thing I have learned by substantively engaging with research from medicine and science is that philosophy and political theory can be both a liberating and constraining force on one's mind.  There is so much to read and stay abreast of in academia, and the more specialized one becomes in a niche intellectual endeavor the harder it can be to shift back to an "all-things-considered" perspective.  Engaging with other disciplines has, at least for me, been extremely pivotal in my intellectual development.  What I believe, the topics I address and where I publish my research all reflect this.  If I had to boil this down to one change in my mind from 25 years ago it would be this-- I have much more intellectual humility now than I did in the past.  Well, at least I think I do!  This humility stems largely from the realization that, at best, one can only shed some light on a small part of a much more complex and intricate normative issue.  This humility can influence both the methodology one employs in the argumentation one develops, as well as the force and content of the conclusions one arrives at.

I have been very fortunate to have enjoyed 25 years of writing and thinking about fascinating topics, while working in different departments (Philosophy, Political Science and Public Policy) and universities and countries (England, Scotland, US, Türkiye, as well as Canada).  I am just as passionate about the next 25 years of research as I was about the past 25 years.  I hope I can write an updated post in 25 years about how I have changed my mind with respect to the beliefs and convictions I hold today.

Cheers, 

Colin 

Fertility Enhancement Study

Nature news reports on this new study  about an anti-aging molecule that has improved the fertility of aging mice.  This is a very significant scientific achievement, though not likely to appear on the radar of most academics working in bioethics and science.  I plan to write a new paper, expanding the arguments from this piece, that amplifies the moral significance of a fertility enhancement in today's aging world. 

A sample from the news piece:

The chances of falling pregnant — naturally or with assistive technology such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) — become slimmer with age. This can be traced to reproductive cells in the ovaries called oocytes, which deteriorate and decrease in number throughout life.

A molecule called spermidine — first isolated from sperm but now known to have functions in many types of cell — has been shown to lengthen lifespan in yeast, flies, worms and human immune cells. Increased dietary intake of spermidine has also been linked with reduction of age-related problems in laboratory animals, including cardiovascular disease in mice and cognitive decline in fruit flies. But its effects on ageing oocytes were unclear.

The latest study uncovers the molecule’s potential to address major hurdles in reproductive medicine, says Alex Polyakov, a fertility specialist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “This research is undeniably groundbreaking.”

Cheers, 

Colin

Rocky (2010-2023)

Our beloved Boston Terrier "Rocky" has passed. 

Rocky was an excellent campanion, right down to his last days.  For the first decade of his life he had the youth and vitality of a puppy, always a ball of energy chasing rabbits and squirrels in the backyard.  It was only around age 10, during the COVID lockdown, that he began to slow.  But he always had a friendly temperament with family and friends, an excellent family dog.

Rocky lived a full life, and provided my family with many fond memories over the years.  He will be missed dearly.  And while the loss of his physical presence is already tangible in the house after just a few hours, the memory of his presence will fill our hearts and minds forever.  

Above is the last photo I took of Rocky, the day before he passed.

And here is one from around age 6:

Miss and love you buddy!  xo

Cheers, 

Colin  

Thoreau Quote

 

International Day of Older Persons (2023)

Cheers, 

Colin