Surgeon General’s Warning: Gupta Is At It Again

In a previous installment of Biopolitical Times, I noted how CNN correspondent and almost-Surgeon General Sanjay Gupta casually endorsed the discredited idea of craniometry and used his cable television pulpit to spread it among an unsuspecting public.  Gupta’s on-air speculation that Asians might be smarter because they have larger heads is similar to Oprah’s uncritical acceptance of the slavery hypothesis on her show, where she and Dr. Oz matter-of-factly linked Blacks’ high rates of hypertension to a mythical genetic predisposition. In both cases, biological understandings of racial difference filter how influential TV personalities introduce debunked theories of race, genetics, and difference to their viewing audiences.

But now Gupta is taking this uncritical approach to biology and social outcomes to the realm of radical life extension. In a recent edition of Vital Signs, Gupta gave noted transhumanist Aubrey DeGray the imprimatur of mainstream legitimacy through an extended segment on CNN:

DeGray is a proponent of what he calls “rejuvenative” medicine, or using regenerative medicine – stem cell research, gene therapy, etc. – to halt if not reverse aging. And he’s not talking about extending life expectancy by five or ten years, but decades if not centuries.

Such radical interventions can have tremendous social effects, both in terms of how we develop such applications and who benefits from them. DeGray acknowledges these concerns during the interview, but dismisses them as “incidental.”

But perhaps the most troubling aspect of Gupta’s foray into radical life extension is that he interviews DeGray alongside Dan Buettner, an author interested in distilling and promoting behaviors that can modestly improve life expectancy, such as exercising more and eating healthy diets. Gupta’s casual back-and-forth between DeGray and Buettner (who admire each other’s work) nevertheless represents a journalistic slight of hand that is ultimately a disservice to viewers. By conflating behavioral improvements with biomedical engineering, Gupta holds out life extension by any means as an unqualified good without critically assessing key differences between promoting healthy lifestyles on one hand and human genetic enhancement on the other.