The salience of language in probing public attitudes about life extension.
The salience of language in probing public attitudes about life extension.
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语言在探讨公众对延长寿命的态度方面的重要性。
DOI：
10.1080/15265160903320521
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发表时间：
2009
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Binstock,RobertH
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
SetterstenJr,RichardA;Fishman,JenniferR;Lambrix,MarcieA;Flatt,MichaelA;Binstock,RobertH
In a 2003 Science article, Eric Juengst and colleagues asserted,“NIH [National Institutes of Health] has a responsibility to help society respond to the implications of antiaging research for which it has been providing its cachet and public funds,” and went on to call for public deliberations on such implications (1323). Now, Partridge and his colleagues (2009) provide an exploratory study of public views of life extension in Australia, drawing on data from six focus groups as well as 57 individual interviews recruited from a registry of volunteers at the Australasian Center on Ageing in Queensland. To probe views of life extension, Partridge and his colleagues asked several interesting but general questions of their participants (eg,“What are your initial thoughts when you hear the term ‘life extension’?”“Would you be interested in using a life extension technology?”“Should we research antiaging and life extension technologies?”)(68). It is not surprising that these investigators find a diverse range of favorable and unfavorable opinions that echo the range of issues that previously have been raised by bioethicists and others (eg, Post and Binstock 2004). These opinions are undoubtedly affected by differences in how participants interpret the terms “life extension,”“life extension technology,” and “antiaging”—for example, in the number of years that might constitute an extension of life, when in the lifespan these extra years get added, the upper limits they might impose on such an extension if it were acceptable, or how radical the treatments are relative to common medical treatments that also (perhaps inadvertently) extend life.In our National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded study of efforts to control human aging, we have interviewed biogerontologists about their research on the biology of aging (eg, Settersten et al. 2008), providers of anti-aging medicine about their practices (eg, Fishman et al. 2010 [in press]), and consumers of anti-aging therapies about their treatments (an ongoing research effort). Throughout these projects, our findings repeatedly speak to this very issue—the power of language to condition, confuse, and clarify what is signaled, said, and understood. This is especially so in a field as contested as anti-aging science and medicine,
