Aging & Social Change: Twelfth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Today, some two thirds of all human funerals owe to the processes of aging. Only 3.7 per cent of cancer patients are under thirty-four, and if a cure for all types of cancers were miraculously found, it would add no more than two years to the average human lifespan. But while the term “pandemic” — from the Greek pán (“all”) and dēmos (“people”) — does not imply infectious disease, our ethics prevent us from applying it to the nearly 100,000 daily deaths caused by aging. In 2021, we all agree that the effects of aging must be treated. The United States alone spends over $300 billion taxpayer dollars each year on the treatment of patients with Alzheimer’s, and the trillions of dollars spent on COVID-19 by this single country, in this single year, make for a painful calculation. But to preventively fund aging research itself goes beyond the reactive purview of both politics and medical systems.