I just read a shocking new piece in MIT Technology Review. In it, they detail what they view as the preferred outcome for each and every one of us.

It’s harrowing: Your bones thin. Your muscles waste. Your arteries harden and your heart begins to fail at the job. Your immune system, once a sophisticated defense network, starts confusing your own tissue for the enemy. Your brain loses volume. Memories dissolve. If cancer doesn't find you, dementia might. If neither does, your organs will simply wind down, one by one, until a cascade of failures puts you in a bed where you will be fed through a tube and cleaned by a stranger. Then your heart stops. Your cells, starved of oxygen, begin to rupture. Bacteria that lived in your gut start eating you from the inside out.

The alternative - that someone might try to engineer a way around it - is presented as ghoulish, ethically suspect, and creepy as hell. The people working on it are “extreme life-extension proponents.” The people funding it are operating “in secret.” The people organizing around the idea that maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't accept all of the above as inevitable are "hardcore adherents" of a movement the article describes with the warmth typically reserved for doomsday cults.

I'm being very facetious here. The first part above - what I just called MIT Technology Review’s “preferred outcome” - is, as you can probably imagine, never put into words. But the second part is very much the essence of the article.

Now, Antonio Regalado is a serious journalist whom I respect a great deal. As a reporter his job is not to keep secrets, but to expose them. And in all fairness, he includes more voices and nuances than he’s obligated to.

The funny thing is, I'd already started writing this essay before the MIT Technology Review piece came out. It was prompted by a Wired article about the same company - R3 Bio (don’t worry, you’ll get the context in a bit) - but framed in very different language.

And what I wanted to write about was never really about R3. It was - it is - just about that: language.

I'm tired of speaking in code. I'm tired of watching people in this field dog-whistle their actual ambitions because saying them plainly is too dangerous. I'm tired of a conversation where the people trying to solve the biggest source of human suffering on earth have to stay closeted for fear of exactly the kind of coverage R3 just got.

We can never just say the thing. We can never just say: aging is a catastrophe, it kills more people than anything else on earth, and we should be working as hard as possible to stop it. Instead, we must carefully manage every word. Soften every ambition. Wrap every honest statement in enough qualifications that it no longer sounds alarming, which also means it no longer sounds urgent.

And when someone does say the thing plainly, the response is exactly what you'd expect: they get called radical.

So: A few days before the MIT Technology Review piece, Wired ran a story about R3 Bio, based in the Bay Area. Wired described a startup building “organ sacks” to replace animal testing and ease the organ shortage. MIT Technology Review gave a very different framing: A company pursuing “brainless clones” and “backup human bodies” as a path to life extension.

R3 itself tells yet a third story. On its website, the company responded to the coverage by saying it is “not in fact working on any large scale ‘organ sacks’, ‘brainless animals’ or whatever these articles insinuate” and that its work involves “molecules, cell cultures and microscopic structures.”

Three different framings, one company. I don't know exactly what R3 is doing - but if even half of what's been reported is accurate, then their denial is itself the point. A company that may well be working on something that could one day help people not age and die can't afford to say so. That's the language trap in its purest form.

And it's not just R3. According to MIT Technology Review, the entire community around this work - including Vitalism, of which I'm a member, and the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, whose retreats I've been part of - is guilty by association.

Replacement biology is the idea, broadly, that you can extend life by growing new parts and swapping out the old ones. It's a real scientific concept with serious people behind it. But if you lead with that - if you say “we're developing technology so that people don't have to age and die” - you get the treatment R3 got. Sinister framing. Words like “extreme.” Comparisons to Dr. Strangelove. Your conferences portrayed as secret gatherings where unsettling things are whispered behind closed doors.

So you don't say that. You talk about “molecules, cell cultures and microscopic structures” which, you know, could be said about pretty much every biotech in the world.

Society has somehow decided that it’s acceptable to age and die, but not acceptable to discuss alternatives, especially if they make people a little uncomfortable.

I want to be clear: I'm not endorsing R3 Bio, I don’t know the people behind the company and have never spoken to them. I don't know enough about the specifics to do that, and some of what's been reported gives me pause. What I am endorsing is the project of solving aging. And what exhausts me is the fact that we cannot talk about it honestly without the conversation collapsing into exactly this kind of cycle.

The MIT Technology Review piece also describes Vitalists as “self-described ‘hardcore’ longevity adherents”. That's technically accurate. Here's another way to look at it:

Life and health are good. Aging causes immense suffering. Solving it is scientifically plausible. Humanity should apply the necessary resources to get there.

And I hate the word “radical.” It gets thrown at us constantly, and every time it does, it reframes the most basic human desire - not wanting to suffer, not wanting to die - as something deviant. Something that requires justification. Something that puts you outside the bounds of polite discourse.

You know what I find radical? The fact that over 100,000 people die of aging every single day and the global response is essentially a shrug. The fact that governments are staring down a tidal wave of age-related chronic disease that threatens to bankrupt their healthcare systems, and yet “solving aging” doesn't appear on a single serious policy agenda. The fact that when someone organizes to change this - raises money, funds research, builds a community - they get profiled like a cult.

That's radical. Our position is the sane one.

This language problem didn't start with R3 Bio or MIT Technology Review. It's been compounding for years. Say “lifespan” and people hear: decades of frailty in a nursing home. So the field retreated to “healthspan,” which polls better and sounds more responsible.

Lurking behind healthspan is the truly awful phrase “healthy aging,” which, if you think about it for more than three seconds, means deteriorating “gracefully” until you die. But “healthy aging” is perfectly okay to say out in the open. No one will demonize you for sugar coating the thing that takes your life away from you and everyone else.

Say “aging is a disease” and you've just disqualified yourself from the regulatory frameworks that determine what gets funded, trialled, and covered by insurance.

Yes, the language constrains the science. Not in some abstract, theoretical way. In the way that matters: the science that can't be named doesn't get funded. The science that doesn't get funded doesn't become medicine. The medicine that doesn't exist doesn't save lives. And so the vocabulary we're permitted to use quietly shapes who lives and who dies - while we argue about optics. It’s fucked up.

Go back to the MIT Technology Review piece and notice something. It spends thousands of words on the ethics of creating organisms that cannot think, feel, or suffer. Scientists worry about the moral status of these entities. Ethicists weigh in. The yuck factor is discussed at length. Fair enough, these are legitimate questions.

But notice what gets almost no emotional weight: the fact that actual, conscious, feeling human beings - people with families, memories, fears, plans for next Tuesday - are aging, suffering, and dying. Right now. Today. A hundred thousand of them since yesterday. The moral urgency flows toward protecting the theoretical interests of an organism designed to have no awareness. It does not flow toward the people this research could help.

I don't have a tidy resolution, I’m just tired of the whole thing. I understand the case for strategic framing. “We're solving the organ shortage.” “We're targeting age-related disease.” “We're extending healthy years." All true, all useful, and sometimes the only way to get through a door - whether at the FDA, with investors, or with an audience that isn’t ready to face what aging does to the people they love.

But the next time someone calls you “radical” for wanting to solve aging, don't explain yourself. Don't soften your position. Don't retreat to “healthspan” because it's safer. Ask them, instead, what exactly is moderate about accepting a hundred thousand deaths a day. Ask them what's “mainstream” about watching the people you love deteriorate and calling it natural. Ask them to defend their position for once - because we've been defending ours for long enough.

Maybe replacement biology isn't the path that gets us there. Maybe cryonics won't work. Maybe the first generation of epigenetic reprogramming will disappoint. I don't know. Nobody knows yet. But we have to try all of it - every path, all at once, as fast as we can - because the people dying today don't have the luxury of waiting for whichever approach offends the fewest people.

And we should be proud to say so. Not cautious. Not apologetic. Not hedging behind euphemisms designed to make the mission sound small enough to be acceptable. Proud. Proud that we looked at the biggest source of human suffering on earth and decided it wasn't good enough. Proud that we're building a community, funding science, and demanding that the world pay attention. Proud that we refuse to call the slow destruction of every person we love “healthy aging” and leave it at that.

Life is good. Death is bad. I'm done apologizing.