Regulation Will Kill Millions

A good point from the Fight Aging blog:

I have said in the past that, from a pure research timeline perspective, by 2040 we’ll plausibly have all the technologies needed to repair and reverse aging. Unfortunately when we look beyond the laboratory, the field is strewn with roadblocks of legislation, slowing everything down. Even the time taken for new businesses to raise capital, try, fail, and try again is less than the delays imposed by the ball and chain of regulation.

Apparently, around 100,000 people worldwide die per day from age-related diseases. If regulation postpones the achievement of acturial escape velocity by even a year, it will have killed 36.5 million people. Not quite the biggest act of democide in history, but it will be if the delay is much more than two years. In opportunity cost terms, slowing anti-aging technology is in fact much worse than was killing someone born too early to have the prospect of a radically extended lifespan. If you kill a 30 year old destined to die by the age of 90, you’re robbing him of 60 years of life. If you deny a 60 year old anti-aging technology, you could be robbing them of a thousand years of life.

This is why I get so angry at the bioconservatives wringing their hands over the intrinsic value of human nature: they are killing more people than Hitler  ever dreamed of. Of course, regulators have been mass murderers for some time.