Coping with methuselah the impact of molecular biology on medicine and society

The prospect of extra-long life spawns a bloom of ethical issues, among them how to achieve intergenerational equity; how to balance health care entitlements with rising costs for the elderly; how to divide years of life between work and retirement; how to assign the responsibilities of young family members for care of the old; and how to answer philosophical questions about the meaning of life, the "naturalness" of the human life span, and the wisdom of "tampering" with nature. The chapters in this volume, especially Alex Capron's, touch on all these issues and in doing so share a common assumption: If extra-long life becomes possible, people will actually live it. Of all the authors in this volume, Capron comes closest to identifying this assumption explicitly.