Eternal youth for all! Why I want to live forever and you should too.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Delayed aging - Cover story

AS THE GILGAMESH SAGA, Ponce de Leon's quest for the Fountain of Youth, and the alchemists' search for the philosopher's stone all attest, the yearning for eternal life and youth has been a preoccupation of humans for millennia. Yet quite a few people remain unconvinced that cheating death is a good idea.

"Living too long is ... a loss," the oncologist and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel wrote in a widely cited Atlantic article this October, provocatively tided "Why I Hope to Die at 75." "It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived." Emanuel added, "It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world."

"The longer lives that medical advances have given us have run exactly parallel to the increase in chronic illness and the explosion in costs," wrote Daniel Callahan, founder of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank, in a 2013 New York Times op-ed. "Can we possibly afford to live even longer--much less radically longer?"

"It's worse than you think," fretted the Harvard political scientist Gary King and the Dartmouth demographer Samir Soneji in a New York Times op-ed on the future of Social Security the same year. "If the amount of money coming in through payroll taxes does not increase and if the amount of money going out as benefits remains the same, the trust funds will become insolvent less than 20 years from now."

For every promising advance in cancer treatment or hip replacement, a chorus chimes in with a warning about being careful what we wish for: Sure, we're curing diseases and easing pain, but perhaps the cost--in health and in dollars--is too high.

This approach isn't just wrong; it's almost criminally obtuse. These objections conflate the physical process of aging with the mere passage of years. Our quest must be--as it has been for all of recorded history--not merely to live a long time, but to slow and stop the process of aging. Eternal youth, not just long life.

The current medical paradigm is to go after each individual disease as it emerges in a perpetual game of therapeutic whac-a-mole. The result is that individuals begin to accumulate infirmities. About 50 percent of Medicare beneficiaries are being treated for five different chronic conditions. This is ultimately a losing proposition, because aging bodies accrue more and more lethal and disabling conditions that compete to kill them. Patients routinely survive health crises that would have done them in even a generation earlier, but to what end? If an older patient doesn't die of a heart attack, prostate cancer could do him in. If a stroke doesn't get her, the Alzheimer's will. Ultimately, more than 25 percent of Medicare spending goes toward the 5 percent of beneficiaries who die each year.

There is a better way. We must look beyond individual pathologies to their root, aging itself. If anti-aging treatments can maintain people in the state of health of the aver age 30-year-old, the onset of chronic illnesses will be forestalled and health care and pension expenditures will be much lower. And it increasingly looks like we may actually be able to slow or even stop the aging process, to the tremendous benefit of humanity.

What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Older

Everyone knows that as people get older they become more vulnerable to all sorts of diseases and chronic disabilities. The annual incidence rate for heart attacks, for example, is just 0.3 per 10,000 people before age 35. This rises inexorably to 66 per 10,000 for people who are between 65 and 74 years of age, eventually reaching 190 per 10,000 people for those over age 85.

The good news is that the age-adjusted death rate from coronary artery disease has fallen enormously over the past six decades, dropping from its peak of 482 deaths per 100,000 Americans in 1968 to 114 per 100,000 in 2010. This trend means that 1,223,000 deaths from coronary artery disease were averted in 2010 alone. Nevertheless, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death and disability in the United States.

Similarly, the probability of developing cancer goes up with advancing age. According to the National Cancer Institute, Americans have a 5.4 percent chance of developing cancer and a 2.2 percent chance of dying from the disease before age 45. The probability of developing cancer climbs to 24 percent between ages 55...