There is a prevailing public disinterest in medical research to extend healthy life. The open access survey linked here is an attempt to understand which of the present widespread beliefs on medicine, aging, and longevity is a more important determinant of this public disinterest. Note that the paper is only available in PDF format at the moment. Also note that this is a project of the Health Extension folk in the Bay Area - so good for them for stepping up, doing the work, and getting it published.

The longevity science community has long known that the public appears indifferent or even hostile to the prospect of treating aging and extending healthy life spans. I and others believe this goes a long way towards explaining why the funding situation for aging research is particularly bad, even for a world in which near all useful medical research is poorly funded and given little attention by people outside the scientific community. There are a number of schools of thought as to why people don't appear to want to live longer, which include the mistaken belief that only wealthy people would benefit from longevity assurance therapies, the mistaken belief that overpopulation and dystopia would result, and the mistaken belief that greater longevity would mean more years of being ill, frail, and decrepit. There is also the role of conformity to the norm to consider, where the norm is what happened to your parents and grandparents, and the open question of why all of these widespread erroneous beliefs persist though year after year of numerous scientists telling the public that they are incorrect.

I'm sure many long-time readers here will not be surprised to find that the survey linked below identified the primary problem as being the fear of frailty, the unfounded assumption that being older as a result of new medical treatments must mean being having more of the characteristics of people who are presently old. Perhaps it is that many people see all medicine as equal, and make no practical distinction between (a) the present patching over of age-related illness without addressing its causes, an approach that allows survivors to struggle on, to age and decline some more and die later rather than die sooner, and (b) a future treatment that reverses and repairs some of the causes of aging and thus postpones or reverses all age-related disease and decline. This is one of the challenges of standing at the point at which the approach to aging and medicine is fundamentally changing: the old common wisdom is not longer correct, and the expectations among researchers for the near future are not yet widely appreciated.

Great desire for extended life and health amongst the American public