Derek Lowe, over at the Lagniappe blog, has a nice little summary of the current state of medical science.

In the long run, I fully expect gene therapy and antisense to fix what can be fixed at the genomic level. Downstream, I think we'll eventually get control of protein expression, which should take care of another huge swath of trouble. Small- molecule folks like me (or the next generation after me) will take care of the rest. And as we go after diseases, we'll also be figuring out how to deal with the normal damage of aging. I don't know how long the human life span can be extended, but I'm certain that we don't have to live it in poor health. We may not know the exact mechanism of Alzheimer's, for example, but we know that it's the result of something going wrong, something that can be fixed. Damn it, show me something that can't be fixed!

Me, too. People who believe that aging is inevitable, and that there's some physical law that prevents us from preventing it, are living in some non-materialist otherworld. Our bodies have been designed to age by nature. We can redesign them, as long as we don't deify "nature."

I agree with you and Derek on the sentiment, but I think stopping "aging" is a devilishly hard problem, and it may be worth considering the potential consequences. For example, are you willing to consider mass sterilization of people in order to contain the population EXPLOSION that would occur for every, say ten years added to our lifespans? Think Malthus squared! Human lifespan has held pretty steady for the last century or so, give or take. Just to be clear, I am all for research and development of techniques to improve quantity AND quality of life, but we will face some tough, somewhat unforseen challenges. Derek's pretty bright, though, I am sure he can handle it!

Population explosion is a bad thing if we are limited to earth (there is some physical limit to how many people can live on this globe, even if it is something like 100 B or whatever). But if we get some decen space stuff going... well we have a whole big empty universe out there... we would want a population explosion so that we could colonize the galaxy and universe... People are our best resource.. lets make more of them, make better use of the ones we have (develop the rest of the world) and not throw them away (keep them alive and functional as long as possible)