Controlling Human Aging: Alternative Rationales and Implications

描述（由申请人提供）：控制人类衰老过程的努力可以用几种不同的方式来解释，这些解释具有重要的实际意义。我们对“抗衰老药物”的研究表明，无论是一个给定的研究项目，临床干预，或商业产品被解释为一种医疗，一种预防形式，或一种选择性的“增强”直接影响其评价对一些尺度，包括其科学合法性和公众监督的水平，其潜在的社会成本和效益，以及其作为一个生物医学企业的道德地位。为了使科学界和公共决策者能够负责任地监督这一领域的发展，需要对这些影响及其影响进行明确的计算。我们建议解决这一需求相结合的方式，在生物医学的努力，以控制人类衰老的解释和理解与认真的道德和法律的分析，他们是合理的，并促进公众的不同方式的实证调查。我们的实证研究将调查帮助制定抗衰老药物的推广者和临床医生，使用其产品和服务的消费者和患者，以及参与NIA进行的热量限制临床试验的科学家和参与者。我们的伦理和法律的分析将推断这些替代解释对抗衰老干预措施和其他生物医学进步的影响，这些进步提出了类似的解释问题。我们将特别关注将抗衰老干预措施作为预防晚年疾病的框架的影响，因为这种解释在活跃的生物学家中占主导地位，似乎具有独特的伦理和政策影响，并说明了“个性化基因组医学”将不得不更广泛地面对的问题，因为它强调风险检测和预防。 术语描述：我们建议研究科学家、研究对象、临床医生和消费者解释他们在控制人类衰老过程中的利益的方式，以帮助评估将抗衰老干预措施解释为预防晚年疾病的政策含义。这一点很重要，因为预防性解释具有道德意义，但可能掩盖了其他社会价值观，这些价值观受到控制人类衰老的努力的挑战。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Efforts to control the human aging process can be explained in several different ways, and these interpretations have important practical consequences. Our research on "anti-aging medicine" suggests that whether a given research project, clinical intervention, or commercial product is interpreted as a medical treatment, a form of prevention, or an elective "enhancement" directly influences its evaluation against a number of scales, including its level of scientific legitimacy and public oversight, its potential social costs and benefits, and its moral status as a biomedical enterprise. In order for the scientific community and public policy makers to oversee developments in this area responsibly, a clear calculus of these influences and their implications is needed. We propose to address this need by combining empirical investigations of the ways in which biomedical efforts to control human aging are explained and understood with careful ethical and legal analyses of the different ways they are justified and promoted to the public. Our empirical studies will examine the promoters and clinicians who help frame anti-aging medicine, the consumers and patients who use their products and services, and the scientists and participants involved with the clinical trials of caloric restriction being undertaken by NIA. Our ethical and legal analyses will extrapolate the implications of these alternative interpretations for the regulation of anti-aging interventions and other biomedical advances that raise similar interpretive issues. We will pay special attention to the effects of framing anti-aging interventions as prevention against late-life disease, since this interpretation is dominant amongst active biogerontologists, appears to have unique ethical and policy implications, and illustrates issues that "personalized genomic medicine" will have to face more broadly, given its emphasis on risk detection and prevention. Lay Descripton: We propose to study the ways in which scientists, research subjects, clinicians and consumers explain their interests in controlling the human aging process, in order to help assess the policy implications of interpreting anti-aging interventions as prevention against late-life disease. This is important because a preventive interpretation carries moral weight, but may mask other social values that are challenged by efforts to control human aging.