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