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"It's staggering to think about the fiscal effects of this," he said.

Inequality

The situation is equally troubling on a global scale. While science may be on the brink of unlocking the mysteries of the aging process, Tuljapurkar worried that the world is unprepared for the inequalities that this new knowledge may generate between the world's rich and poor.

"Are some people going to be left behind? Are we going to make society far more unequal than it is now?" he asked. Tuljapurkar predicted that the lifespan boom will be confined to wealthy countries, where citizens can afford anti-aging technology and governments can afford to sponsor scientific research. This disparity complicates the current debate over access to healthcare, as the rich become increasingly distanced from the poor, not only in quality but length of life.

Tuljapurkar warned that the distribution of anti-aging technologies is likely to be in the hands of companies that have a history of focusing solely on profit rather than the imperative to distribute medicines to those who need them most.

"Big pharmaceutical companies have a well-established track record of being very difficult when it comes to making things available to those who can't pay for them," he said.

If anti-aging technologies are distributed in the unchecked free market, "it's entirely likely to me that we'll wind up with permanent global underclasses, countries that will get locked into today's mortality conditions," Tuljapurkar said. As the gap widens and rich countries continue to invest in anti-aging technologies, the developed world may become increasingly less willing to disseminate the technology to other nations, he said: "If that happens, you get negative feedback, a vicious circle. Those countries that get locked out stay locked out."

Medical technologies around the globe

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Source:Stanford University