This week’s topic concerns topics concerning insulin and Alzheimer’s disease deals largely with aging. Alzheimer’s is not alone with a strong correlation between age and occurrence. The chances of developing cancer and other major neurodegenerative diseases also greatly increase with age. There is little doubt that curing these diseases would led to an average extended lifespan in humanity along with improved quality of life, after all no one wants to feel the pain from cancer or forget what their children look like. These diseases dealing with life expansion seem to be “hot topics” in medicine as of late and have received much media attention. They bring a few questions to mind that I think are worth acknowledging. How far should medicine and research go with life extension? I believe that life extension is to a certain extent a by-product of well-practiced medicine and successful research but is there a limit to how “how far we go”? Or do we go with the school of thought that pursues life extension and higher quality of life.
The second question is perhaps more immediately relevant. There is only a fixed amount of money allocated from our government and other sources towards scientific research. Two categories which disease could be broken down into are those ages related mentioned earlier and the diseases acquired earlier in life for example down-syndrome. I think that cancer and these neurodegenerative diseases receive the attention they do because of their prevalence; they are much more common than obvious genetically debilitating diseases. Should our government be giving as much attention or funding as they do towards these diseases? Or should we be concentrating more on disease which affect our younger population?
How Old do We Want to Be?
