I really can't call it off. There's nothing I can say that is likely to stop it. Science is always on the verge of great breakthroughs. We're going to find ways to extend human life, but not inexpensively, so we're going to be backed up against the problem of having a lot of wonderful possibilities, but actually no way of paying for them, or at least no way of providing kind of equitable health care for people. Let's take cancer.
Lung cancer is the great killer of men.
We really know a lot less about how to change people's smoking behavior than we do about the genetics and physiology of lung cancer. Heart disease is a wonderful example. But it seems to me an awful lot of heart disease is caused by bad health behavior. It seems to me the trick is to figure out how to change that behavior, rather than trying to find expensive ways to maintain the life of people who have had bad health behavior and are now terribly sick, want to be saved, as we all would, but we don't know how to save them inexpensively and often we save them for rather poor lives in terms of the quality of life. I believe that it's a mistake just to sort of endlessly try to increase average longevity.