Via the Longevity Meme I found this heartening and amusing discussion between George Khushf and Christine Peterson. Here are a few lines from Ms. Peterson's part of the presentation. I particularly admire the concreteness and simplicity of her examples.

Let's look, for a moment, at a longer-term issue, which is this question of extending the human life span. Actually, this is—here at UCSF the idea of making people healthy may not seem too controversial, but it turns out in Washington , D.C. , it is controversial.

I have brought three props with me to help explain this issue. I doubt that our UCSF folks need this, but I have found tremendous confusion in the public and I want to use these props to make a point.

I brought three longevity pills with me. OK? Here is the first one: what this one does is take the last day of your life, which I would argue may very well be the worst day of your life—there's a good chance you are in pain and pretty miserable—and gives you one more day of those. OK? You get two of those days instead of one.

Now, I don't think anybody is interested in this pill, OK? But when you say longevity, this is what people think they are going to get, and they say, “No, thank you.” Very understandable, right? They don't want that!

That's sort of what they get now from some medical research I read. It will say, “Well, we tested this new drug for cancer and it gave the cancer patients two more weeks.” Oh, great.

Maybe those are two good weeks. I hope they are. But a lot of folks think they are going to be pretty bad. So this is a pill people do not want.

I brought a second pill. This pill gives you immortality and lets you live forever. This pill is physically impossible. I think these words “immortality” and “forever” are not helpful. Talk to any physicist, I think they'll tell you your atoms are not immortal and will not exist forever. So it's unlikely your body will last forever.

I brought the third one, which, of course, is the one that I want. Here's the way to think about it. Let's say you're healthy. I'm pretty healthy. What it does is it gives you—it inserts another day, but it inserts it tomorrow. In other words, it takes your current state and says, “No, no, we're not tacking it on the end when you are really ill and pretty miserable. No. You just get another day just like today. You are as healthy as you are today. It's inserted tomorrow. Every time you take a pill, you just get one. OK. So that would be health extension, not miserable life extension, but health extension. This, I would argue, is what people would prefer.

But there are folks who are against this pill. Francis Fukuyama, prominent writer; Leon Kass, who runs the president's Bioethics Council, is opposed to health extension, morally opposed. I heard a talk by him. One of his points was—and I think he has some good points; I'm not saying he doesn't have any good points. But this is the kind of point he makes: he says, “Wouldn't it be sad if the sons could never exceed their fathers in physical ability?” OK.

How sad is that? Well, I brought my mom. Mom, wave to the audience. I want you all to know that my mom has better upper body strength than I do, and you know what? I've been working on it! The fact is it's just going to be this way—she's just good at this. I have grown used to this concept, and I think it's OK.

So I disagree with Dr. Kass. I don't think this is a big deal. I think we can live with this.

So do I. And I think bringing her Mom may be dirty pool, but I still love it. It's a debating point that anyone can relate to.

Somewhat later in the program, Dr. Khushf voices a modest demurral regarding the timetable for eradicating cancer, and the need for a deeper consideration of the bigger picture. Here is Ms. Peterson's response.

...one thing that helps me think about this is to go back in time and replace the word cancer with polio, and we could have said, we could have had a little panel and talked about, “Well, you know, is it really just about curing polio and don't we need to have these ethical debates about curing polio?”

Well, maybe we didn't, you know. Maybe we should just cure polio and the heck with it. It's gone! So now, we could probably make a case cancer is different in some fundamental way. But oftentimes, when you hear, let's not speak of George here, but perhaps of some of the actual opponents to this, such as Francis Fukuyama and Leon Kass, some of their arguments you could—you again replace the—you know, extending human life span with getting rid of pain in childbirth. I mean, this was a big issue. It was a very controversial thing and was seen as a morally bad thing.

Another thing that was seen as ethically bad was anesthesia during operations because what if you died during the operation. Then you would have not have been in the right spiritual state, etc., etc.

These were real issues at the time, and now we look back and go, “What was that about?” So sometimes there are real ethical issues and we want to engage, and I want to engage with George on those, and sometimes maybe it's just OK if polio goes away.

I don't want to paint Dr. Khushf as the bad guy here. He's actually a pretty nice guy, as you'll find if you read the whole thing. He certainly isn't claiming that suffering is good for us. He thinks living longer is problematic but worthwhile.

Some readers might consider the notion of adding healthy years to our lives to be an utterly fanciful folly, bereft of common sense. Am I as gullible as all that? All I can say in my defense is that if they weren't already doing it with lab animals, well, I might be sceptical too. Luckily for my self-esteem the mice are alright.

The transgenic mice Rabinovitch’s team created produce higher-than-normal levels of the antioxidant enzyme catalase. Cells use catalase to convert damaging hydrogen peroxide to harmless water and molecular oxygen, but the enzyme is usually found only in the cytoplasm of cells.

His team made mice that produce high levels of catalase in their mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells. They found that cellular damage, as well as age-related damage in the heart, decreased in comparison to control mice that produced catalase in just cytoplasm or in cell nuclei. The lifespan of the mitochondria-catalase mice was extended by more than five months - an increase of around 20%.

And they didn't even have to diet! More on this at Betterhumans. Take good care of your mitochondria and they'll take care of you.

So what will He Who Must Not be Named make of all this? Something equivocal and platitudinous, I'll wager. Oh, to be a fly on that wall. Which, now that I think of it, is actually an option. But only retroactively.

See, Michael Gazzaniga has written a book. As you may recall, Dr. Gazzaniga was one of the good guys on the President's Bioethics Council. While it may not approach the level of a tell-all tabloid, it's sure to provide a fascinating insider's view. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "The Ethical Brain"...

I can't wait to dive in.