Will Saletan on Our Bionic Elders

Slate’s Will Saletan is an interesting (and sometimes maddening) writer who writes about the raging bioethics/biotech debates from a uniquely oblique angle that often exposes the surrealism of modern times. Case in point, an op/ed piece in yesterday’s Washington Post. He begins:

Twenty-four years ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in “The Terminator,” a movie about a cyborg—part man, part machine—sent back in time from the year 2029. He was young and buff, and the movie became his shtick…Today, Schwarzenegger is 61, and the joke’s on him. The cyborgs have arrived, and he’s one of them. He has had a hip and two heart valves replaced, plus a femur repaired with screws, cables and a metal plate. “This is what happens when you are the Terminator,” he quipped. “They switch body parts.”

In real life, cyborgs aren’t studs from the future. They’re old folks. As we age, our parts wear out. That used to mean immobility or death. Today, we can replace them.

There’s money in them thar hills from replacing body parts:

The [artificial body parts] industry is booming because it combines two things. One is the innovation of high-tech engineering. The other is the world’s most powerful desire: to live longer and more comfortably. The market for replacement body parts is like the market for car or computer parts, except that your body is paramount, and you can’t get a new one.

This raises new questions. How will it be paid for? What about when these devices wear out? Is turning off a life-saving appliance as unwanted medical treatment tantamount to killing?

Saletan concludes:

Twelve years after “The Terminator” came out, another actor, Al Franken, offered a modest proposal: “Why not shoot the elderly into space?” That way, we could explore without worry. “I’m not saying we don’t try to get them back,” he joked. “We just don’t make such a big deal about it.” Today, another 12 years later, Franken, like Schwarzenegger, is an aging politician. And here’s the punch line: We’re not shooting the elderly into space. We’re shooting them into time. We’re testing cyborg gadgetry on them because they’re the ones whose parts have worn out. If it works, they’re exploring the future. And if it doesn’t, no big deal.

Quoting the always nasty Al Franken is an iffy proposition, but I take Saletan’s point. This much is sure: How we work through these matters could not be more important to the maintenance of a moral and ethical society.