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Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Fatasses and Leon Kass
The Times this morning has an article detailing some of the recent work in studying the link between caloric restriction and aging. Briefly, studies in organisms all up and down the evolutionary tree have shown that a reduction in daily caloric intake leads to an increase in lifespan, as well as an apparent increase in quality of life. In some of the lower organisms, they've even worked out a mechanism, and (of course) higher organisms (i.e. us) have varieties of all of the genes involved in the system.
Now they're seeing that monkeys on a reduced diet (less overall calories, but still nutritionally complete) have lower incidence of arthritis, cancer, etc, and they look and act far younger than their counterparts that eat more. Of course, getting people to eat less won't be an easy sell, but with the mechanism known it should be fairly straightforward to develop an artificial means to stimulate the system. Take this pill once a day and live an extra twenty years! I think we'd all agree this is a good thing - who wouldn't want to feel healthy for longer? Well, Leon Kass for one: As appointments with death are postponed, says Dr. Leon R. Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, human lives may become less engaging, less meaningful, even less beautiful. "Mortality makes life matter," Dr. Kass recently wrote. "Immortality is a kind of oblivion - like death itself." How about an idea: those who don't want to live longer don't have to take the drug. I nominate Dr. Kass to leave this planet a little sooner. I'd like to stay healthy longer, thank you very much. |
3 Comments:
Leon Kass is so conservative he believes marriages should be arranged again. I'm not kidding. He wrote a position paper saying kids should at the least have to ask their parents' permission to marry the person they want.
What a creep. He also writes for "First Things" which is about 1-2 degrees of separation away from the discovery institute.
12:12 PM, October 31, 2006
Kass also believes the practice of eating ice cream in public is shameful and animalistic. You could fill entire volumes with that doof's neuroses.
I believe that recent "Thirteen Worst People" article making the rounds put it best: his entire philosophy of bioethics revolves around whether he finds something personally icky. I suppose it's a good thing he isn't as queasy as I am about using animals in the lab.
1:03 PM, October 31, 2006
But he's right! Just think -- ever since we whupped typhus, and cholera, and all of those lovely disfiguring death-dealers, life's been a little less beautiful, hasn't it? The leaves don't turn as rich a color in the fall, the spring isn't as delightful in its perfume. The discovery of penicillin, the development of sterile medical practices -- all these will one day be known as black marks in the annals of beauty. I for one know that my inability to be scarred by the tragic loss of infant siblings to polio or my mother to childbirth has immeasurably impoverished my existence.
Upshot? This Kass guy is a royal idiot.
1:59 PM, October 31, 2006
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