The High Price of Long Life

If anti-aging drugs are possible, they will require dangerous—and ethically troubling—clinical trials.

Wanted: Healthy volunteers to participate in clinical trials of experimental therapies designed to radically extend the human life span. The therapies being tested may alter your brain and body at the cellular level.

How long before we see notices like this?  Recent media stories suggest that anti-aging medicine may soon change from fantasy into a scientifically realistic prospect. Here I address the dangerous consequences of a widespread belief that human aging could be halted or reversed. If anti-aging medicine is to become a reality, then the various theories about how to halt or reverse the aging process will require testing on human subjects. Carrying out such tests will place unprecedented pressure on the rules protecting human participants in clinical trials, which are already routinely ignored.

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