John Vincent 2007 1

The cultural construction and demolition of old age:

science and anti-ageing technologies.

John Vincent 2007 2

Why study anti-ageing science?

• Predominantly western culture seeks not to celebrate ageing but to avoid it.

• Why does western culture currently devalue old age so much when compared to many other cultures?

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Time orders Old Age to destroy Beauty

BATONI, Pompeo Girolamo (1708 – 1787)

Despite the success of parts of the re-evaluation/ emancipation agenda, the dominant contemporary cultural attitude to later life is that of ‘anti-aging’

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“looking ten years younger”

Should anti-ageing practices be considered as part the problem of ageism by prejudicially acting to segregate off old age and subject it to dissection, manipulation and control

Or, in contradistinction should they be considered as part of the resistance to ageism – acts to overcome the exclusion of the aged?

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Anti-ageing - definitions

• Firstly there is an approach in which ageing is the appearance of old age, a phenomena of the body’s surface. This ‘anti-ageing’ is thus cosmetic in intention.

• The second approach is to consider ageing to be a disease, a phenomenon of the body’s interior. Ageing is to be tackled by medical strategies with the intention of cure.

• The third view of ageing is that it is a fundamental biological process particularly located in intra cellular bio-chemistry. Biological anti-ageing strategies seek to modify these processes with the intention of extending the life span.

• Fourthly, ageing for some is death, and for them the objective of an anti-ageing strategy is to achieve immortality, or at least something close to it.

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Science and Culture

• 1. Science comes first – cultural follows:– 1.1 Naïve version – science is truth inevitably

revealed– 1.2 Knowledge as power – institutional control of

knowledge mediates which aspects of scientific knowledge becomes culturally dominant.

• 2. Culture comes first – science follows. – 2.1 Antipathy to ageing directs scientific endeavour. – 2.2 Cultural concepts loaded with ageist

preconceptions permeate into scientific thought.

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1.1. The ‘normal’ view• Science is seen as steadily and predictably

revealing the hidden truth of nature and is consequently an inevitable and predetermined progression.

• This attitude is an important part of the motivations and life world of those in the anti-ageing movement. They see their work as the necessary precursors of inevitable “progress”.

• This position can be clearly illustrated by the work of Aubrey de Grey:

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Aubrey de Gray

• “The cure of aging must now be taken seriously by responsible gerontologists, because it is no longer science fiction. It is patently not yet science fact either, but it has crossed the boundary into science foreseeable. Its elevation to science fact is a foregone conclusion,” (de Grey 2003: 934)

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Jurgen Habermas

1.2 The ‘critical’ view

Carroll Estes

• Science is the most powerful source of cultural knowledge and there is a diffusion effect from new science into popular understanding and practice. Biological and medical knowledge is of such power that dominates and makes self-evident the nature of old age.

• This power facilitates the role of the medical / corporate structure in the development and marketing of medical procedures, including anti-ageing ones and the role of consumerism in marketising the body.

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Science and Capital Marco Traub

• There is widespread criticism of “big pharma”, essentially a term of abuse identifying the major multi-national drug companies, within the anti-ageing movement.

• Despite the evidence of commercial sponsorship at the ‘anti-ageing’ conferences studied, the rhetoric used is essentially that of small capital threatened and excluded by big capital. It is a rhetoric which enables both those who work within established medical and scientific frameworks and the alternative “new age” practitioners to use a common language and identify an agreed target.

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Michel Foucault

2.1 Archaeology of discourse • Science reflects the cultural history of the society

within which it is practiced. There are many good histories of gerontology, and longevity which can provide background to how the contemporary intellectual apparatus of bio-gerontology arose (Katz 1996; Boia 2004; Haber 1984).

• Knowledge cannot be independent of the human knower and so science is one amongst many possible knowledge systems. The ‘archaeological’ approach unearths the history of ideas and meanings and how they have changed over time as a commentary on current ways of understand the phenomenon.

• The origins of the contemporary ‘commonsense’ understanding of ageing are related historically to (i) the Cartesian division of 'mind' and 'body', (ii) an extreme individualisation of society and (iii) the focus on the body and identity. Hence the modern deference to the science of the mechanics of the body in the characterisation of ageing and old age.

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“if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928: 572)

• It is people’s belief in the inevitable progress of science that makes them arrange for their bodies to be frozen with the intention of being restored to life when science has made sufficient progress.

• Further, their understanding of body and self, as derived from Enlightenment thought, leads them to think it is they, some personalized self-conscious identity, which will be resurrected.

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Franz Boaz 2.2. Language and thought

• Science is inside, not exterior, to culture. Scientific knowledge has to be formulated in ways which conform to the wider cultural practices such as language, which are pre-requisites for the communication of knowledge.

• Specialist and technical languages develop among social groups with particular communication needs – for example those who study the biology of ageing. However, meaning cannot be created without the pre-existing base of language with its embedded concepts and which shape the possibilities of development.

• The use of military metaphors in the anti-ageing movement (Vincent 2007) – illustrates various kinds of anti-ageing practitioners taking well know images from one area of life and using them as tool to think with and explain anew other phenomena, in this case ageing.

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Textbook Definitions

• “Although there may be advantages in using ageing in this general way, it is rather difficult to do so, because in common language ageing implies something more than simply getting older. For example, it would be unusual to talk of an ageing child. We would normally refer to a developing child, because in everyday English the word ageing carries within the idea of decline and deterioration. Most biologists have tended to accept these connotations, and think of ageing as occurring only after maturity has been reached. In fact, as can be seen from some of the definitions given below, the terms ageing and senescence are frequently used interchangeably.” (Lamb1977: 2)

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Textbook Definitions

• Using the points emphasized above as a working definition of aging or senescence has the advantage of allowing us to be precise in categorizing a particular process as a normal age-related change. For example, we can easily distinguish deleterious changes due to aging from changes due to infectious disease (the latter is the result of a parasite and is not intrinsic), or from changes that have no obvious deleterious effect (for example, gray hair). (Arking, 2006:11-13)

• “…we may define aging as the time-independent series of cumulative, progressive, intrinsic, and deleterious functional and structural changes that usually being to manifest themselves at reproductive maturity and eventually culminate in death. A simple mnemonic for this definition is CPID (cumulative, progressive, intrinsic, deleterious).”

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Faragher RG. (2000) “Cell senescence and human aging: where's the link?” Biochemical Society Transactions. 2000 Feb;28(2):221-6

• The term senescence entered science and biology from a long history and was present from the beginnings of the discipline. The concept was derived from wider culture and diffused into biology as scientists sort to make sense of what they observed.

• The term senescence has transformed its meaning over time. Variously in biology its meaning has shifted from senescence as the general decline of the organism or race, to the loss of efficient function in specific organs and functions, to special identification with cell function.

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Senescence imaged

• A new test developed by LBL researchers uses blue stain to detect the presence of senescent cells. The assay top left shows young tissue with no presence of blue; top right is young sunburned tissue, also negative. Older tissue cells, pictured in the bottom four assays, contain blue areas revealing evidence of the existence of senescent cells.

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Senescence

• However the metaphor of senescent cells, conjures many images and extensions.

“Normal human somatic cells have a finite life span in vivo as well as in vitro and retire into senescence after a limited number of cell divisions.” (Pandita 2007)

• Scientists can talk of ‘old molecules’, or ‘ageing proteins’ as well as senescent cells, almost as if they had grey beards and used a zimmer frame to go and collect their pension.

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Apoptosis

• The term apoptosis was consciously invented to describe a newly discovered cell process. The OED records a previous much older but now redundant meaning of the term but in modern English it is clearly and unambiguously a technical biological term.

• They cite a 1972 paper by Kerr et al in the British Journal of Cancer (1972 vol.26: 241) as the etymological source. By the nineteen nineties the term was well established in the Biological literature and its significance in a number of fields including cancer research and gerontology was understood.

• Further evidence of the generation of the term within the scientific discipline is the debate as to how to pronounce the word.

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‘The final stage of apoptosis; cleaning up after the death’

• The biology text books and popular science media have the apoptosis metaphor conventionally as suicide. Sometimes they call it murder (when the cell responds to external stimuli) but I have only found one case where it is referred to as euthanasia (see Raloff 2001 [i]). However, apoptosis is clearly good death

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Apoptosis

• “Apoptosis is programmed cell death and although we don’t realize it, each of us has been dying every day, right on schedule, in order to remain alive. …Death cannot be our enemy if we have depended upon it from the womb. Consider the following irony. As it turns out, the body is capable of taking a vacation from death by producing cells that decide to live forever. These cells don’t trigger p53 when they detect defects in their own DNA. And by refusing to issue their own death warrants, these cells divide relentlessly and invasively. Cancer, the most feared of diseases, is the body’s vacation from death, while programmed death is its ticket to life. This is the paradox of life and death confronted head on. The mystical notion of dying every day turns out to be the body’s most concrete fact.”

• Deepak Chopra - August 12, 2005

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Science is both ageist and is a potential agent of change

• Understanding ageism requires more sophisticated models of the relationships between science, knowledge and society. A theory of process, a method of understanding the intermediation social and scientific developments which plausibly explains the direction of change in needed.

• The evidence suggests a predominant, but not exclusive, direction of movement in the contemporary world. One in which science, particularly biological science, constructs new and ever more negative understandings of ageing based on bodily failure. As we have seen for biology ageing is by definition bad for you.

• There is a tight association between ageing and death which enables some “anti-ageing” activists to characterise their opponents as in favour of death. However, science is advancing rapidly and the pursuit of knowledge about the basic processes of life is producing a new biology. Concepts such as apoptosis undermine the conventional view of death and offer alternative models of the stage next to death with potential for cultural change.

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Conclusion

• The crucial issue is not whether anti-ageing is science based or not.• The issue for combating ageism is not the effectiveness or

otherwise of particular anti-ageing technologies but rather giving positive social meaning to the final part of life before death.

• While whole heartedly endorsing the need to expose money marking schemes based on ineffective pseudo science and how they play on the fear of ageing, I would also want to draw on the sociology of science to critique the consequences of the role of biogerontology, even in its ‘respectable’ forms. The cultural devaluation of old age and the lucrative opportunities this opens up for those who control anti-ageing technologies, are more vulnerable to genuine than bogus science.

• The power of science can be used both to reinforce and to challenge ageism. Old Age cannot be something which should be avoided. It is important to distinguish ‘liberation from old age’ – the anti-ageing strategy from ‘the liberation of old age’ – the cultural re-evaluation strategy.

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Thank you• This slide show and the paper on which it is based can

be viewed at• http://www.people.exeter.ac.uk/JVincent/