Imagination and demand.

To understand the communication challenges ahead, one must first understand how completely absent biomedical rejuvenation is from the wildest dreams of the general population. Looking back over the short history of Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) advocacy, I find it ironic that some very early critics dismissed this journal’s long-term predictions as ‘‘science fiction.’’ Unlike this journal, modern science fiction has a rather bleak view on the future of biomedicine. Reviewing the history of 20 century sci-fi movies and novels, one would identify remarkably few imaginary futures that have a scientific fix for senescence. This is odd, considering that rejuvenation, like teleportation, is an idea quite accessible to the creative imagination. At about the time of the launch of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a recurring discussion among fans was why a bald Patrick Stewart had been cast in the role of Captain Picard. Surely, in the 24th century—an age of interstellar travel, real artificial intelligence (AI), teleportation, alien technology, and super-advanced medicine—male pattern baldness would have been overcome? This matter was put to the show’s producers at a press conference. It turned out the writers had already thought of this. ‘‘In the 24th century, nobody will care’’ was the reply. Conspicuously absent from this discussion was the suggestion that a grey-haired Patrick Stewart might have looked just as anachronistic as a bald one. Why would baldness be reversed, but not other aspects of aging? Why draw the line at baldness? Why was the possibility of rejuvenation so invisible that its absence didn’t even require an excuse? Is this what Hollywood thought of biomedicine? Hundreds of years from now, the other sciences are cloning dinosaurs and teleporting Vulcans, while all biomedicine has done is grow a little hair? For some reason, the notion of overall human rejuvenation failed to present itself, even in a context where it ought to be unavoidable. That was the early 1990s. Has science fiction moved on? Hardly. Rejuvenation didn’t even get the usual cautionary tale from the late Michael Crichton, which even killer nanoswarms got. In this year’s reboot of Star Trek, aging seems to be the only problem left unconquered by science. To find the concept of rejuvenation explored extensively in mainstream fiction, one needs to look beyond science fiction and into the realm of fantasy (Benjamin Button, The Fountain, Stardust, 17 Again, and some elements of vampire fiction). This only goes to show that, to the general population, senescence is a mere ghost of an idea: Something to be exorcised rather than addressed scientifically. The interesting thing about this neglect of rejuvenation in science fiction is that it is not explicable in terms of what Aubrey de Grey calls the ‘‘pro-aging trance,’’ the cycle of psychological resistance to the serious prospect of real antiaging medicine that he summarized as the simultaneous holding of the following views: