寿命预测技术使老人重新规划人生_BEC初级作文

寿命预测技术使老人重新规划人生

We are becoming a nation of planners living quantified lives. But life accumulates competing risks. By preventing heart disease and cancer, we live longer and so increase our risk of suffering cognitive losses so disabling that our caregivers then have to decide not just how, but how long, we will live. The bioethicist Dena Davis has argued that emerging biomarkers that may someday predict whether one is developing the earliest pathology of Alzheimer’s disease (like brain amyloid, measured with a PET scan) are an opportunity for people to schedule their suicide. Or at least start smoking.

我们成了一个过着量化生活的计划者之国。但是生活会积累各种互相冲突的风险。通过心脏病和癌症预防，我们的寿命更长了，但这同时也增加了丧失认知能力的风险，患者会完全丧失生活能力，必须由照顾他们的人去决定他们该活多长、该怎样活。生物伦理学家蒂娜·戴维斯(Dena Davis)说，目前正在发展的生物标记技术或许有一天可以预测出一个人是否会出现阿兹海默症的早期症状（比如通过PET扫描脑淀粉样蛋白），这或许会使一些人去规划自杀——或者至少是开始吸烟。

Our culture of aging is one of extremes. You are either healthy and executing vigorous efforts to build your health account, or you are dying. And yet, as we start to “ache in the places where [we] used to play,” as one of Mr. Cohen’s songs puts it, we want to focus on the present. Many of my older patients and their caregivers complain that they spend their days going from one doctor visit to the next, and data from the National Health Interview Survey suggests one reason. Among older adults whose nine-year mortality risk is 75 percent or greater, from one-third to as many as one-half are still receiving cancer-screening tests that are no longer recommended.