Michael R. Rose is the evolutionary biologist who, in the 1970s, started the Methuselah movement by developing, through forced natural selection, long-lived fruit flies in just 12 generations.

Yesterday, The New York Times [no link] interviewed Dr. Rose about the implications of his fruit fly research on human longevity:

“…it showed that aging isn't some general breakdown process, like the way cars rust. Aging is an optional feature of life. And it can be slowed or postponed.

“This implies that controlling human aging does not require the violation of some absolute scientific law. Postponing human aging is not like building a perpetual motion machine or faster-than-light space travel. It is a scientifically reasonable thing to try.

“This doesn't mean it will be easy, or even that it is the best thing to do with our medical resources. But it's not a completely crazy idea.”

Dr. Rose went on to say that we are only five to 10 years from producing pharmaceutical therapies that will extend life beyond its current boundaries. In a decade after that, he says, implantation of cultured tissue will further increase life spans and then even more advances in biological technology will take life expectancy into new realms.

The spiritual ramifications are inconsequential; no religion I know of objected to the 30-year average increase in human longevity during the 20th century. But – assuming Dr. Rose’s rosy longevity future does not go the way of Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth - ethical, social and geo-political considerations are significant. Just a few of the innumerable questions – off the top of my head:

• Which of our human years will be expanded? Babyhood? Middle age? Will the additional life be tacked on at the current outer reaches of age consigning people to an extra hundred years or so of senile decrepitude?
• How will the drugs and surgeries be paid for? Will insurance cover it or will it fall into the category of elective procedures as cosmetic surgery is now? If the latter, how can an ethical society consign everyone but the rich to foreshortened lives?
• How will people use the added years of a lifespan than is doubled or more? Can enough jobs be generated?
• Will people continue to have children throughout a 200-year-plus lifespan? What are the implications of raising five or six or more families in a lifetime?
• Can anyone rationally imagine a 200-year marriage to one person?
• How will be pay for chronic illness? None of the Methuselah-mavens have considered the problem of 200 years of therapy for increased numbers of people with AIDS, high-blood pressure, diabetes, etc.
• What about the garbage all these people will generate? Where are we going to put it?
• What would we do about the undoubted increase of crime? A life sentence takes on a whole new meaning when people are expected to live for more than 200 years.
• How will we feed all these Methuselahs? Currently, 12 million people a year die of starvation worldwide. 860 million eat less than they need to be healthy. Clean drinking water is already a shrinking commodity in the world.
• And just where are we going to put all these people? They need houses, transportation, medical facilities, schools, added government bureaucracies.

These questions barely begin to address the issues a sudden doubling of life expectancy would create. I can think of much better ways to spend our science research dollars.