Is Growing Younger Good?

Late Night Health Radio

Just as big pharma has recently discovered a simple mechanism to reverse weight gain and obesity, it is highly likely that soon, we will discover something equally simple that triggers the onset of aging, postulates Joel Geiderman, a distinguished physician and professor at Cedars-Sinai and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA who is considered one of the pioneers of emergency medicine. It could be as simple as a protein we can block. And with AI speeding up research, Geiderman firmly believes the day we “cure” aging is not far off. This entirely plausible concept is the basis for his novel, The Plasma Cell Report. But then what? Geiderman cautions that so much could go wrong, and that society and our planet are simply not ready for nature’s course to change. He’d be happy to chat with you about this. Among the concerns he points to are:

• An ever-expanding population that will skew increasingly toward older people and could ostensibly double in number every twenty years.
• Uncertainty around whether Earth really has the natural resources - from energy to water and food - to support this ongoing population growth.
• Doubt about how to meet the increased need for infrastructure -- everything from transportation and housing to education and healthcare facilities.
• Questions over social issues such as entitlements such as social security and how to finance them as the number of retired people grows as a share of the population.
• Matters of equity: who would have access to the new treatments? What about those left behind?
• Moral issues such as: would we be interfering with a divine plan? Doesn’t nature know best?

And in times like these, we must also consider:

• The risk of older generations maintaining a grip on top leadership positions to the detriment of change and renewal; and
• The potential dangers of lifetime terms for people in public office (e.g., the Supreme Court).

As the father of the atomic bomb Robert Oppenheimer said, “The deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it is possible to find them.”
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