Engineering Substantially Prolonged Human Lifespans: Biotechnological Enhancement and Ethics

Abstract

Substantial extension of the human lifespan has recently become a subject of lively debate. One reason for this is the completion in 2001 of the Human Genome Project and the experimental avenues for biogerontological research it has opened. Another is recent theoretical progress in biogerontology. We had better investigate the ethical aspects of considerable human lifespan extension now, before this extension has become genuinely practicable, or before large sums of money have been spent on it. We shall see, first, that these apparently technical, biomedical questions cannot be discussed without considering ethics and values, and, second, that this investigation inevitably demands that we try to conceptualise something of what ageing itself and being human is about.