The Salience of Language in Probing Public Attitudes about Life Extension

摘要

In a 2003 Science article, Eric Juengst and colleagues asserted, “NIH [National Institutes of Health] has a responsibility to help society respond to the implications of antiaging research for which it has been providing its cachet and public funds,” and went on to call for public deliberations on such implications (1323). Now, Partridge and his colleagues (2009) provide an exploratory study of public views of life extension in Australia, drawing on data from six focus groups as well as 57 individual interviews recruited from a registry of volunteers at the Australasian Center on Ageing in Queensland. To probe views of life extension, Partridge and his colleagues asked several interesting but general questions of their participants (e.g., “What are your initial thoughts when you hear the term ‘life extension’?” “Would you be interested in using a life extension technology?” “Should we research antiaging and life extension technologies?”) (68).