The Committee to Nuke Elysium

The establishment of Geroscience can be compared to the formation of Neuroscience nearly four decades ago, which combined knowledge from brain anatomy, neurochemistry, neurophysiology, behavioral sciences and other areas to create a new interdisciplinary field. Geroscience at the Buck Institute initially will include molecular genetics, biochemistry, cell biology, chemical biology, cancer biology, Alzheimer’s disease research, endocrinology, invertebrate aging, nutrition, bioenergetics, Parkinson’s disease research, molecular epidemiology, Huntington’s disease research, ischemia (stroke), proteomics, human embryonic stem cells, genomic stability and statistics, among others. Over the coming years the Buck Institute hopes to attract researchers from fields as disparate as physics, anthropology, engineering and mathematics, many of whom may have no background in Geroscience and may not initially think of themselves as researchers in this new field.

This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat, currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world’s urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years (90 percent of them in poor cities), and no one – absolutely no one – has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.

The Soviet Union successfully returned rocks to Earth from the Moon during robotic missions in the 1970s. But since then, such complex sample-return missions have been regarded as prohibitively complicated and expensive.

But Parker says the cost of returning Martian rocks, roughly estimated to be “at least $3 billion”, is now viable if many nations team up to foot the bill.