The Biology of Senescence 



aggressive restatement from gerontologists, particularly at a 

 time when there are scientists who seek ethical reasons why 

 human life ought not to be prolonged, at least in communities 

 of which they are not themselves members. Although it has 

 much fundamental interest, we have seen that senescence is not 

 biologically speaking a very satisfactory entity. It appears in 

 most animals only under artificial conditions, and it would 

 probably seem to most of us pointless to devote great effort to 

 so arbitrary a part of development if it were not involved with 

 a primary human desire. As it is, medicine has always accepted 

 the prolongation of active and healthy human life in time as 

 one of its self-evident objects, and this object has only been 

 seriously challenged in the past two decades by the growth of 

 pathological forms of anti-liberalism. Gerontology differs from 

 other fields of medical biology only in the fact that while most 

 medical research is directed to making the curve of human sur- 

 vival as nearly as possible rectangular, gerontology is directed 

 to prolonging the rectangle, and shifting the point of decline 

 further in time from the origin. The applied character of such 

 work, and the object it has in mind, would not require emphasis 

 or defence at a period of culture when they ran no risk of pro- 

 voking a neo-Malthusian uproar. The beggarly opinions of such 

 writers as W. Vogt (1949) merit the rebuke of James Parkinson 

 (1755-1824), that 'if the population exceeded the means of sup- 

 port, the fault lay not in Nature, but in the ability of Politicians 

 to discover some latent defect in the laws respecting the division 

 and appropriation of property'. Postponement of old age, like 

 all the other advances in human control of environment, must 

 involve corresponding social adjustments: in the prevention of 

 presenile mortality, as the graphs in Fig. 3 abundantly indicate, 

 social, economic and political factors clearly predominate 

 already. But whatever problems might be raised by future 

 increases in the human specific age, in this and other fields 

 medicine can afford to treat protests based upon an interested 

 misreading of the biology of human societies with the contempt 

 they deserve, as a compound of illiberal opinions and bad 

 science. The emotional preoccupation of former workers with 

 magical rejuvenation did no good to the progress of science, 

 but it was at least a humane preoccupation. 



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