Are Longevity Assurance Therapies only for the Wealthy?

The Life Extension Advocacy Foundation is in the process of reworking their online presence and adding a lot more content. One of the new items is this discussion of the likely trajectory of cost for near future therapies that slow aging or produce rejuvenation, such as the panoply of SENS therapies presently under development. There is a tendency for people to assume, without giving it much thought, that rejuvenation therapies will always be enormously expensive and thus restricted to the wealthy, but this is basically nonsense. Once proven and packaged as a product, the projected types of therapy will be mass manufactured infusions and injections, the same for everyone. They will be administered by bored clinicians, needing little in the way of time from expensive medical staff, and only undertaken once every few years or so. If you look at comparable technologies today, even given the way in which a dysfunctional and highly regulated medical industry piles on unnecessary costs, this class of medicine is not expensive once it gets to the point of widespread availability and standardized manufacture in bulk. Further, consider that this is the case is when the number of patients, while large, is only a tiny fraction of the overall population. When the target market is instead everyone over the age of 40, enormous economies of scale will come into play. The concern that rejuvenation biotechnologies might cause social disparity and further widen the gap between rich an...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs