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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Posted Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:03:33 This message was forwarded through MEDSOCNEWS. If you wish to make an announcement or publicise an event then please send the text to: [log in to unmask] +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Apologies for cross-posting. We are pleased to announce the third seminar in the ESRC funded Seminar Series: The 'New' Ageing Populations: Mapping identities, health, needs and responses across the lifecourse. 14th October 2010, 3 - 6pm, University College London Living longer: who wants to live forever?* Room G10, Chandler House University College London 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF *This seminar, led by the Institute of Gerontology, King’s College London, is co-hosted with BioCentre www.bioethics.ac.uk and UCL Grand Challenges of Human Wellbeing www.ucl.ac.uk/human-wellbeing Making Longevity in an Aging Society- linking technology, policy, ethics Sharon Kaufman, Professor, Medical Anthropology. Institute for Health & Aging, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. An explosion in the varieties of life-extending interventions for older persons is changing medical knowledge and societal expectations about longevity, 'normal' old age and the time for death. Cultural assumptions and expectations about growing older are partly shaped by a new form of ethics, constituted by the routines and institutions that comprise ordinary clinical care. To be distinguished from bioethics, with its emphasis on clinical decision-making in individual situations, this new form of ethics can be characterized as an ethical field because it is exceptionally diffuse. It is 'located' in and shaped by health care policies, standard technologies and clinical evidence. It emerges in what physicians understand as standard care and in what patients and families come to need and want. Renaissance treatises on ageing well Chris Gilleard, Honorary Research Fellow in the Division of Research Strategy at University College London Medical School. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, numerous books were written on the subject of ageing, longevity and living well. This paper briefly outlines the recipes for a good old age that they offer as well as the ‘modern’ sense and ‘medieval’ nonsense they contained. Looking back I suggest that they derive much of their content from Galen and his Muslim commentators, the idea of the natural and the non-natural aspects of ageing and the particularly contested status that ageing had in his writing and the implications that had for prolongevity doctrines. Looking forward, I will draw out some points of similarity as well as points of difference between these treatises and contemporary writing on ‘successful ageing’. The future of death & ageing Guy Brown, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge. Ageing is not natural: it was rare in humans and wild animals prior to the modern age. In last 200 years, human longevity doubled, while the rate of ageing remained largely unchanged. The result is: an ageing population, a degenerative end to life, and a switch from digital to analogue modes of death. Preventing the end-of-life from becoming a living hell depends on rebalancing our investments in life (preventing age-related disease, disability and dementia) relative to simply preventing death. Otherwise we are doomed to the Tithonus scenario. This seminar is open to all but participants are asked to book a place in advance by contacting [log in to unmask] There will be a reception in Room B04 following the seminar. ********************************************************************** 1. For general enquires or problems with the list or to CHANGE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS send a message to: [log in to unmask] 2. To suspend yourself from the list, whilst on leave, for example, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the following message: set medsocnews nomail 3. To resume email from the list, send the following message: set medsocnews mail 4. To leave MedSocNews, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the message (leave the subject line blank and do not include a signature): leave medsocnews 5. To join or subscribe to MedSocNews, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the message (leave the subject line blank and do not include a signature): SUBSCRIBE medsocnews firstname lastname 6. Further information about the medsocnews discussion list (including list archive and how to subscribe to or leave the list) can be found at the list web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medsocnews.html **********************************************************************