Biotech and the Redefinition of Old Age: Successful Ageing As a New Challenge for Social Justice

The institutionalisation of a redefined molecular ageing process was central to the progression of anti-ageing bio-technoscience, both symbolically and pragmatically. As a result, anti-ageing knowledge claims became ambivalent about whether old age was a disease, while reframing it by the opposition of what was called successful ageing to senescence. This rhetorical manoeuvre led to the reconstruction of ageing as a process, amenable to intervention and change. A reconstituted and now institutionalized technoscientific field shared both the medicalisation of old age and the search for solutions to old age decrement in the body. The once refused anti-ageing medicine conceptualisations were brought into the reconfigured medicine of ageing. The result has been a transformation of gerontology principles and geriatric medicine and the re-framing of the bio-technoscientific field of anti-ageing. A substantial field of anti-ageing medical practice has also emerged, while a dominant culture and policies stressing individual responsibilitu for health encourage rejuvenation consumption and practices as ethical imperatives. On the other hand, the extension of health duration favours state initiatives to extend working life and the erosion of welfare provision in old age. In this context, the recent expansion of anti-ageing bio-technoscience is closely related to a specific bio-politics of ageing, based on technologies of the self, in which «rational autonomy and self-determination are generated in connection with the acts of liberal power» (Moreira 2017, 37). It also opens growing opportunities to venture capital and to consumer demand for promissory biotech, thus becoming more susceptible to the conditions of neoliberal capitalism, while generating new dimensions of social inequality in access to the biotech antiaging market.