Background reflections

  

For the past month I have been preparing for an upcoming presentation on the public communication of translational gerontology in a warming and aging world, drawing on the main insights of this article and a new forthcoming paper.

My career pathway to this topic, coming first from philosophy, then moving into political science for nearly 25 years, and then engaging with issues pertaining to geroscience, will appear to many as an oddity.  But when I now look back on my career path, it in many ways proved to be the ideal fit.     

Philosophy taught me it is much more important to ask the right questions than it is to try to answer the wrong questions.  And political science taught me that everything is political, including science communication and advocacy.

And 25 years ago I consciously oriented my research towards "empirical ethics" and the genetic revolution.  First motivated by my curiosity with the potential significance of sequencing the human genome and the early gene therapies of the 1990s, I undertook the writing for this book.  I initially assumed it would take 5 years to research and write it.  But then I encountered the field of biogeronotlogy (as it was known back in the early 2000s, today it is "geroscience)), which added a decade to my research on the book.  

The fields of political philosophy and bioethics had very little in the way of normative theoretical frameworks to address population aging, let alone anything informed by the biology of aging.  There were arguments about imposing age restrictions on access to healthcare, the "fair innings argument", medical assisted dying and some philosophical discussions of immortality and radical life extension.  But the normative theoretical terrain was pretty much barren in terms of empirically informed normative theorizing about how aging impacts our health, and what translation science might offer in terms of promoting health.  So that required me to undertake some more substantive theoretical work....  

20 years later and I am still working through these issues, and find it the most engaging topic!

Cheers, 

Colin