36
The War on Aging
are biologically extremely similar to us; They dont talk, so if
the biomedical imperative is sufficient society feels entitled to
do more or less anything to them; They all age at least twice
as fast as us.
Because of this, a large colony of primates maintained under
conditions very similar to those under which we maintain
ourselves the same range of diets, the same lack of exercise,
and of course the same medical care, including all life-exten-
sion treatments in use at the time will be virtually certain to
display any health-threatening characteristic of aging that we
ourselves exhibit, at an age at most half that at which it appears
in us. These primates will be the experimental recipients of
succeeding generations of rejuvenation therapies. Some such
therapies will have unforeseen side-effects that will kill some
of the colony, which is why we will need such a large colony
so as to maintain a sufficient number of them of an age suffi-
ciently exceeding half the age of any human yet alive to ensure
that our primate experiments succeed before their results are
needed. Splendidly, this becomes progressively easier as time
passes: we may only just have 80-year-old primates before
we have 160-year-old humans, but we will certainly have
100-year-old primates some years before we have 200-year-
old humans, and the lead-time improves forever thereafter.
This strategy will be our most powerful defense against the
unforeseeable biomedical challenges that our attainment of
unprecedented ages will create.