Anti-aging Technoscience & The Biologization Of Cumulative Inequality: Affinities in The Biopolitics Of Successful Aging Part 2

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Cumulative inequality

A major sociological implication of the recent colonization of age is that it reveals strong socioeconomic associations. Several biomarkers commonly used to denote biological age,e.g. telomere length and DNA methylation, are inversely associated with measures of socioeconomic status, e.g. education level, social class, and parental income (Hughes et al.,2018; Iparraguirre,2018). Such findings suggest that social disadvantage ages people, or rather lead people to senesce, faster than their more privileged counterparts. For example, the financial hardship faced by African American women can accelerate their biological aging, and the greater average biological age of African Americans accounts entirely for their comparatively high mortality rate(Levine & Crimmins, 2014b; Simons et al, 2016). cistanche tubulosa dosage reddit In this manner, biological age reveals health inequalities that chronological age does not, making possible new ana-lyses of the potential for disadvantage to worsen health outcomes (Ferraro & Shippee,2009; Levine & Crimmins, 2018).

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This linking of social and biological inequalities in aging contributes to, and extends, one of the most influential areas of social scientific aging research-cumulative(dis)advantage(CAD). CAD denotes the tendency for inequality to increase over the life course as intra-cohort trajectories diverge exponentially(Crystal & Shea, 1990; Dannefer,2003; Platt, 2019). CAD stems from Merton's(1968)research on the"Matthew effect" in institutional science practices of communication and reward, whereby individuals with initial small advantages accrue greater advantages over time (Bask& Bask,2015). In the late-20th century, sociologists of aging began to explore similar mechanisms in relation to life course inequality (Crystal & Shea, 1990; Dannefer,1987). These early applications have subsequently developed, theoretically and empirically, into a strong CAD tradition within social scientific work on aging (Dannefer, 2018).

Today, a sizeable body of scholarship explicates CAD in various contexts(Crystal, Shea,& Reyes,2016; Dannefer,2018). Studies have principally focused on the relationships between socioeconomic factors and later-life physiological and psychological outcomes. cistanche แอ ม เว ย์ For example, Damaske, and Frech(2016)have used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to reveal that the employment trajectories of women in the United States (US)are significantly constrained by their early life socioeconomic circumstances. Focusing on health outcomes, Ferraro, Schafer, and Wilkinson (2016)have used the US'Midlife Development dataset to show that socioeconomic disadvantage in childhood is associated with greater lifestyle risk factors in adulthood and subsequently increased morbidity. Similarly, Shrira and Litwin's (2014)analysis of data from the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe has revealed that increases in depressive symptoms and functional decline over time are larger for those exposed to greater adversity and hardship. In sum, a broad body of social research indicates that initial advantage generally begets greater advantage, and vice versa, though it should be noted that CAD is not without contestation (see Kim & Durden,2007).

CAD has been important in revealing "aged heterogeneity", the tendency for a range of inequalities to be greater among people of older ages than among people of different ages (Dannefer,1987). As with John and Kevin, the differences between two 70-year-olds may be far greater than the differences between a 70-year-old and a 45-year-old. Historically, the preponderance of chronological age within social scientific aging research, particularly in the functionalist social-gerontological and demographic veins, concealed this intra-age diversity, but since the late 20th century CAD has successfully drawn greater attention to aged heterogeneity (Stone, Lin, Dannefer,& Kelley-Moore, 2017). Moreover, contemporary research suggests that inequalities within chronological age groups are increasing, rendering CAD ever more pertinent to social scientific engagements with aging(Grenier et al., 2019). how much cistanche to take This growing recognition of intra-age diversity is intimately bound up with the aforementioned problems of using chronological age as a social variable, potentially concealing more than it reveals. CAD's problematization of chronological age, therefore, provides further justification for the use of biological age as a worthwhile analytic route into aging and later life.

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CAD also highlights the dependence of biological age on chronological age, because it is in reference to chronological age that the bio-logic nature of cumulative inequality is revealed. For example, to be biologically 40 is rather meaningless by itself, but to be biologically 40 and chronologically 50 may be normatively appraised as a success (e.g. Levine & Crimmins,2018). There is, of course, an irony here in that biological age is intended to be a challenge to chronological age, and yet it relies on chronological age to generate meaning (Katz,2006; Moreira, 2015; Moreira et al.,2020). The neologization of age as an alternative to chronology has facilitated the application of CAD to the molecular and phenotypic characteristics that are employed as aging biomarkers. There is limited support for claims to the effect that being biologically 40 and chronologically 50 is more likely the more socioeconomically advantaged one is, but this is nonetheless an increasingly popular trope of biosocial research (Kelly-Irving & Vineis,2019; Robertson et al,2013; Stringhini& Vineis,2018; Thyagarajan &Levine, 2019).In this manner, parallel social scientific work on CAD and biological age over the past few decades has converged to reveal novel biologic entanglements of aging and (dis)advantageous exposure. To an extent, this work adopts social determinants of health approach to aging, wherein 'health is directly substituted with 'age', so that age is recast as a type of negative outcome. This would not be so problematic if, as will be discussed further, those social determinants were not similarly substituted with personal responsibilities. There are hence two simultaneous conceptual substitutions here.

Finally, biology has itself become a popular variable, or set of variables, within CAD research. Ferraro and Shippee(2009)have promoted a model of cumulative inequality, based on CAD, that aims to unpack life-course determinants of health in later life with particular reference to biological factors. Their proposals are based on the observation that sociological research on CAD is remarkably aligned with molecular research on senescence. Both delineate the long-term effects of the lifelong accumulation of various exposures. This alignment is ultimately echoed in cumulative inequality's focus on uniting sociological and biological aging research or perhaps translating the former into the latter. To this end, their foundational text states: We seek to develop meaningful links between [cumulative inequality] theory and selected findings and models of biological processes associated with aging.. we hope to illustrate how [cu-mulative inequality] leads to biological changes in humans that are commonly associated with the process of growing older. what is a cistanche In this sense, inequality may well lead to the accumulation of biological materials under the skin that are markers of aging and predictive of senescence (Ferraro & Shippee, 2009: 334). From this initial outline, cumulative inequality has gained popularity within social scientific aging research and has been used to frame various correlations between early life exposures and later-life health outcomes (e.g. Ferraro et al.,2016; Kemp, Ferraro, Morton,& Mustillo, 2018). Its pursuit of the intersections of biological age and CAD has generated imaginings of later life in terms of unequally accumulated senescence. This senescence-centric use of life course cumulation trans-forms the original CAD treatment of social (dis)advantage as an analytic focal point into a precondition of more important molecular mechanisms. Thus, the social inequalities that a biology-sensitive CAD can explicate are themselves biologized, so that ethnicity or income differences become DNA methylation or telomere differences. That said, cumulative inequality should not be read as a biological theory. It is principally indebted to sociology, and particularly demography (though as will be discussed shortly, biological/sociological boundaries are increasingly blurred), and the colonization of aging is not an explicit aim.

The reimagining of later life inequalities as molecular matters is part of a broader history of scholarship seeking to integrate CAD and biological phenomena. In his foundational paper on CAD, Dannefer(1987)suggested the potential for future research to study relationships between social conditions and later life heterogeneity across blood pres-sure, immune function, and testosterone levels. Though fleeting, this observation does reveal that notions of biology have always been at stake in gerontological scholarship on longitudinal inequality. This style of work has flourished into the substantial tradition of CAD research, discussed above, and has always been particularly conducive to extrinsic theories of senescence (Alkema & Alley, 2006). What is different in cumulative inequality is the move toward depictions of aging as a set of biomarkers, with the implication that inequality determines aging and agedness, rather than influencing issues associated with later life. For example, Simons et al.(2020)have recently used the aforementioned epigenetic clock to show that social adversity and discrimination faced by African Americans accelerate their aging. Aging is here defined as DNA methylation. They conclude: "social disadvantages commonly experienced by Black Americans exhibited both unique and combined effects on accelerated aging"(Simons et al.,2020:7). This builds on Levine and Crimmins'(2014b,30) earlier study, which concluded that: "racial differences in the pace of aging—as signified by biological age—may be a central mechanism for the earlier overall and disease-specific mortality of black individuals."Aging here is a composite of ten biomarkers.

The neologization of CAD sits within a broader biosocial turn in the social sciences since the 1990s, with work on issues such as local bi-ologies, epigenetics, and the microbiome revitalizing social scientific relations with biology (Fitzgerald, Rose, & Singh, 2016; Landecker &Panofsky,2013; Meloni& Testa, 2014). At the same time, similar developments in biological science, such as epigenetics and distributed neurocognition, have rendered those sciences increasingly receptive to traditional social scientific concerns (Meloni,2014). Across these fields, the question of how the social gets under the skin has become a central concern (Manning,2019). Thus, the colonization of later life in-equalities must be read within a broader recent history of a blurring of boundaries between historically compartmentalized, if not hostile, social and biological sciences. A striking example of this biosocial turn was a special issue of the American Journal of Sociology dedicated to "exploring genetics and social structure", which deftly contested the designation of certain types of research as either biological or socio-logical (see Bearman, 2008). Celebrating this development, Rose (2013)has suggested that biology is the future of sociology, and vice versa. However, Fletcher and Birk(2019,2020)have cautioned against the neologization of social phenomena within this novel biosocial landscape, noting how complex psychosocial and socio-economic considerations are switched into epistemically convenient molecular characteristics. This creates the risk that those molecular characteristics are successfully ameliorated, but that such molecular amelioration has no impact on the problematic phenomenon that said molecules are purported to represent. Moreover, the biosocial turn is characterized by an emerging replicability problem and should be approached with caution (Das, 2019).

In biologically-inclined work on cumulative inequality, the potential of CAD is transformed in a similar fashion, from a means of uncovering underlying social causes of biological inequalities, into a means of delineating simplistic molecular solutions to the problems wrought by social phenomena that either preclude intervention or for which interventions are met with political impediments. This is a major transformation because there are evidently considerable differences between addressing the effects of racism by tackling racism and addressing the effects of racism by tackling DNA methylation. bioflavonoids An important corpus of critical scholarship in the CAD tradition engages with biology to emphasize the negative effects of social pathologies. For example, Leopold(2016) has shown how unequal education provision in early life put poorer Swedes at greater risk of unemployment during the 1990s leading to worse health outcomes in the 2000s.Crystal(2018) has charted the detrimental influence of growing economic inequality during the late 20th century on the later life health statuses of Americans born between 1956 and 1975. These studies point to the political economy as a progenitor of biological inequality, and thus as a site for potential intervention. However, there is always a risk that by attempting to engage with biology on its own terms, such work inadvertently facilitates the neologization of social inequalities. It is important to note that the critical tradition of CAD scholarship is not necessarily motivated by such neologization, and indeed largely rejects it, but that its insights are vulnerable to exploitation in the service of colonization. Ultimately, there is a fine line between, on the one hand, an approach to inequality that highlights its potential pathophysiological implications and explicates the ramifications of those pathophysiologies foraging and later life, and on the other hand, an approach to inequality and aging as pathophysiological phenomena. Scholars should be alert to this distinction.

The biopolitics of successful aging

The affinities between contemporary anti-aging technoscience and certain social scientific approaches to aging are remarkable, yet rarely remarked upon. Over recent decades, both have pursued increasingly sophisticated operationalizations of aging in terms of biology in response to problems with more traditional approaches. Anti-agers have challenged the clinical normalization of aging as being distinct from discrete diseases, proposing in its place a more pathological molecular account of aging. Social scientists have criticized chronological age as an empty variable that conceals aged heterogeneity and inequalities, advocating biological operationalizations of age that help to reveal the extent of those inequalities. Under the guise of cumulative inequality, biological aging has gained greater attention as a type of inequality problem in its own right. This colonization of aged heterogeneity indicates the potential for social scientific engagements with aging to evolve in accordance with biopolitical ends that simultaneously guide anti-aging technoscience. In this final section, I argue that the bio-legalization of age can be read within a broader history of social scientific insights on aging being reformulated to serve biopolitics of successful aging that constrains our relations with age, aging, and agedness (Lamb, 2014).

Several scholars have noted that anti-aging, social science, and international governance manifest biopolitics of successful aging (Lamb, 2014; Neilson,2006,2012; Otto,2013). This biopolitics (a Foucauldian term denoting the governance of human life)encourages individuals to achieve desired forms of aging through the right kinds of personal conduct. Intellectually, it is rooted in a longstanding"activity" tradition within social gerontology, positing that a good later life is dependent on maintaining certain kinds of activities,e.g. volunteering after retirement (Havighurst,1961). Today, this prescription of the right kinds of later life, heavily contingent on a rationally self-governed able body, inspires the policies of several international institutions, variably articulated as "active aging", "productive aging", "healthy aging",etc.(e.g.EC,n.d.; UN,2018; WHO,2018a). Most notable among these is"successful aging", which defines a successful later life as being characterized by:1)low probability of disease and disability;2) high cognitive and physical function; and 3)active engagement with life (Rowe & Kahn,1998). These measures of success are satisfied through appropriate individual action and their attainment is a personal responsibility. Critics have argued that this approach ignores social determinants and attributes deterioration in older age to personal failure(Katz& Calasanti,2015; Martin et al.,2015; Peterson & Martin,2015). Successful aging has also been criticized for universalizing experiences of aging based on exclusionary white, middle-class, ableist values that diminish all other varieties of aging and agedness as comparatively 'unsuccessful'(Baker, Buchanan, Mingo, Roker, & Brown, 2015; Holstein & Minkler, 2003; Minkler& Fadem,2002; Pace & Grenier,2017). Nevertheless, successful aging permeates global governance and social scientific engagement with aging (Pruchno,2015; Pruchno & Carr,2017).

The biopolitics of successful aging responds to and reflects what Moreira (2017) has termed the epistemic assemblage of the aging society as a meaningful political entity. Here, a confluence of specific uses of demographic and economic data and analysis has rendered population aging a stark political issue through measurement, depiction, and especially the dramatic elucidation of its potential economic ramifications. Measurement is an essential apparatus of this assemblage, particularly as it relates to populations through the epistemological assumption that large human collectives manifest regularities that are empirically knowable. Population aging can also imperil such assumptions by undermining the actuarial knowledge base upon which redistributive social security is predicated, in terms of the shifting proportionalities of age groups, as well as uncertainties regarding the relations between life expectancy, health expectancy, and morbidity, particularly given the possibility of longer lives lived with greater disability. What are states, organizations, and individuals to do when the numbers paying in are fewer, and the numbers taking out are greater, than has been predicted and accounted for in welfare calculations?

Concerns regarding the implications of population aging, and especially morbid population aging, echo Malthusian population dispositifs that have long inspired imaginings of aging as an economic problem. In this vein, population aging is commonly presented across various fora as leading to scarcity and associated ills, e.g.conflict. Indeed, demography has been instrumental in generating representations of aging as a societal issue by placing its measurements alongside appeals to undesirable economic consequences. Such dispositifs are bound up with wider eugenic propositions relating bad biologies to bad economies, for instance, via claims that medicine's artificial maintenance of the biologically inferior poor inadvertently undermines the economic prosperity of society at large(Moreira,2017). As a population trait, aging comes to pose a significant societal risk, at the intersections of economics and biology. Biopolitics of successful aging is thus a response to the aging society, cast as a means of ameliorating the promissory economic ruination of demographic forecasting.

Foucault's explication of biopolitics was famously short-lived, and biopolitical thought has since broadly split into two categories(Neilson, 2012)-that focused on macro-political developments, espoused by scholars such as Agamben(1998), and that focused on molecular technoscience, knowledge, and values, popularized in the works of scholars such as Rose(2007). This paper is principally embedded in the former tradition given its focus on a range of efforts to render age a molecular matter at an institutional level, amidst the familiar concerns of welfare, the state, and the market. Neilson (2012)has attempted to intersect the two categories, uniting macro-political concerns with the influence on molecular technoscience and associated values on contemporary manifestations of aging. His work is principally concerned with introducing the experience of aging into biopolitical scholarship. I draw on his work here where relevant, yet I am less concerned with the implications for the experience than I am with disciplinary epistemological machinations, specifically those at stake in certain social scientific developments. That said, such concerns are never entirely extricable (Neilson,2012).

The ascendancy of successful aging biopolitics has been attributed to its concordance with neoliberal capitalism (Katz,2006,2013; Rubinstein & de Medeiros,2014). It portends that proactive individuals can defeat the evils of aging through correct styles of consumption, underpinning a rapidly growing "third-age" marketplace offering products that facilitate a successful old age, or even the abolition of old age(Gilleard & Higgs,2000,2005; Kampf & Botelho,2009; Katz &Marshall, 2018; Neilson, 2006). Depictions of successful aging in the manner highlighted above are particularly conducive to a style of biopolitics that relies on"technologies of the self, wherein "the capacities of rational autonomy and self-determination-the homo eco-nomic-are generated in entanglement with enactments of liberal, soft power"(Moreira, 2017:37). The conviction that biological aging is dependent on individual action, and by extension consumption, is part of the biopolitics of aging to which certain sociologies have contributed (Gilleard & Higgs,2000,2005).CAD's aforementioned recognition and explication of aged heterogeneity have diverted attention away from the social structuring of age, and age as a structuring social force, facilitating the individualization of biological aging as discrete exposures, encompassing products such as gym memberships and health foods(Hendricks & Hatch,2009). Recognizing these affinities, critics have cautioned that the neologization of aging facilitates a biopolitics wherein older people are made"tractable in the interests of the state, commerce and other powerful elites"(Vincent,2009:202).

Noting the biopolitical entanglements of government, capitalism, and gerontology, Neilson(2012,51)argues that we must pay greater critical attention to "the intersection of financially driven rejuvenation medicine and policy discourses of 'healthy or 'positive aging'". He notes that a dominant politics of individual responsibility simultaneously substantiates the erosion of welfare provision in later life and the flourishing of rejuvenation consumption possibilities and ethical imperatives, within which those consumers consider their practices to be agentic (Neilson,2012). The booming third-age market offers considerable growth potential for longevity products, while healthspan extension is conducive to state initiatives to"extend working lives"(Dumas &Turner,2007; Petersen & Seear,2009). The contemporary expansion of anti-aging technoscience is particularly reliant upon venture capital and consumer demand for promissory biotech and has hence become more amenable to the conditions of neoliberal capitalism (Neilson,2012). Thus, anti-aging both replicates and responds to broader biopolitics (Fishman et al, 2010). As an example, parabiosis was first developed in early-20th century Russia as a type of egalitarian blood-sharing or "physiological collectivism"(Bernstein,2019:69). Ambrosia's recent foray into young blood transfusion is hence a reimagining of an originally cosmic endeavor to befit the more liberal ideals of Silicon Valley. There is no obvious reason that these entanglements of government, capitalism, and gerontology will change in the immediate future, and therefore no reason that the neologization of aging will not be further bent to the biopolitics of successful aging.

Such bending is not novel and is echoed in social science. Various strands of social thought have been molded to the biopolitics of successful aging under the guise of social science research. Katz's(2013)account of "lifestyle" provides a good example, detailing the concept's adoption and adaption by the more functionalist sections of mainstream social gerontology. Sociological work on lifestyle stems from Simmel and Weber. Simmel(1978)claimed that new lifestyles of social individualization, differentiation, and alienation were created by modern financial economies. Lifestyle was not an agentic choice, but rather an attempt to solidify an identity amidst the tumult of social fragmentation. Weber (1978) considered lifestyle to be an overt manifestation of one's desired social status, albeit constrained by one's material circumstances. For each author, lifestyle was a compromise between choices and constraints, both of which were socially determined. Katz(2013)identifies the continuation of this approach to lifestyle through the more recent sociologies of Bourdieu(1984) and Giddens (1991, 1999), each centering on syntheses of agency and structure. However, the concept of lifestyle has been individualized within the sociology of aging and stripped of its ability to unpack structural social determinants (Hen-dricks&Hatch,2009). Far from the structural constraints articulated by Weber, lifestyle in social scientific aging research has become a composite of moralized personal decisions, typically centering on smoking, diet, and exercise (Katz, 2013).

Intuitively, a concept of aging as cumulative biological inequality might appear well-aligned with critical social scientific perspectives on structural inequalities, providing molecular justifications for equality-enhancing social interventions. However, as with lifestyle, notions of biological aging have generally been individualized in social scientific work in the more functionalist and demographic sections of social gerontology, presenting biological age as a personal responsibility, of which lifestyle is an important component (Kampf& Botelho,2009; Katz & Marshall,2018). This is echoed in individualized anti-aging, under the guise of superior personalized medicine (Fishman et al。,2010). Industries, researchers, and governments attempt to map out the behaviors of optimal later life and devise strategies for encouraging their uptake by aging citizens. Such interventions are often well-intentioned efforts to reduce human suffering, albeit articulated as individual problems of dependency and societal problems of welfare expenditure (Katz,2006, 2013). Moreira (2015) has identified the turn to biological age as a core infrastructural process supporting this individualization of the life course. Such biological individualization reflects earlier functionalist sociologies of aging, wherein aging is envisaged as an intrinsic and impervious molecular universal, upon which secondary social phenomena play out.

This biological individualization of age generates new justifications for risk and intervention that are conducive to anti-aging (Katz,2006). Contemporary anti-aging technoscience centers on notions of aging as individualized cumulative biological deterioration and associated imaginings of our aging molecular selves as projects to be improved. Through individualizing biological age, it promises personalized solutions to unsuccessful aging that avoid the kinds of largescale social interventions of which neoliberal governments are wary (Neilson,2006). Social scientific engagements with biological aging perpetuate this individualization of inequality. As an example, Levine and Crimmins'(2018, 400)analysis of racial and socioeconomic inequalities in bio-logical aging "used race/ethnicity and education as covariates.. due to their known associations with health behaviors."Here we find social scientists explicitly repurposing complex social variables as proxies for undesirable activities. The aging subject is transformed, from a member of a minority ethnic group to a smoker, to an unsuccessful ager.

Such operationalizations of biological age lay the fertile ontological ground for anti-aging technoscience. First, age becomes a familiar type of technical challenge that is surmountable with sufficient technoscientific advancement. Second, the ascription of badness to biological aging, in reference to associated inequalities, furnishes moral justifications for technoscientific intervention, righteously providing those poorly educated ethnic minority agers (recast as unsuccessful agers) with the means to save themselves. Given that the recent development of contemporary anti-aging technoscience has relied on accruing conceptual legitimacy(Mykytyn,2010), the social conceptualization of aging as unfair molecular deterioration is a powerful justification. Aging becomes a problem that is not only amenable to, but that also morally compels technoscientific action.

These syntheses of technical and moral imaginings of biological aging are disconnected from real-world observations. Though infrequently articulated as such, recent human history resembles an anti-aging intervention, characterized by dramatic successes in the moderation of biological aging(Vaiserman & Lushchak,2017). During the 19th and 20th centuries, global human life expectancy increased from below 30 to almost 67 years (Riley,2001), and Levine and Crimmins (2018) have shown steady decreases in biological age, relative to chronological age, in recent decades. This real-world anti-aging enter-prise is marked by substantial inequality. For example, international life expectancy ranges from 52.9 in Lesotho to 84.2 in Japan (WHO,2018b). The means already exist to dramatically increase the lifespan and health span of Lesotho's population, and yet Ambrosia and A4M are not championing such initiatives. This highlights a core anti-aging paradox: "On the one hand, there is a wish to prolong life and on the other, and indifference to the means to prevent premature death"(Dumas &Turner,2007:12). This example reveals that contemporary anti-aging technoscience, repeatedly presented as a straightforward problem of technoscientific progress, is not solely limited by value-neutral technical feasibility. It is also constrained by specific biopolitics of successful aging and the types of life, and types of person, that fit into its imagination.

This observation that anti-aging is a fundamentally value-laden enterprise leads to a final question regarding what extent a hypothetical fully functioning anti-aging technoscience might be able to address cumulative biological inequalities if it were not under the influence of successful aging. For example, could the original cosmic rationales of parabiosis be realized? First, it is important to reiterate that the successes of anti-aging to date are principally it's founding of institutions and accrual of resources, rather than its production of any clinically effective interventions. Furthermore, its dissolution of boundaries between "serious" science and promissory populism undermines any attempt to ascertain its practical potential. Putting technical feasibility to one side, it also seems unlikely that the neologization of inequality could ever furnish sincere solutions, because it attends to effects rather than causes, and is hence inherently more palliative than curative. Moreover, biologization distracts from social causes, undermining the case for interventions to target those causes. Even a cosmic approach would hence likely preclude the effective amelioration of the political and economic pathologies so deftly explicated by the critical social sciences. Can the affinities discussed herein be exploited for critical ends? Perhaps not.

Conclusion

The emergence of affinities between anti-aging technoscience and social scientific aging research is remarkable, yet rarely remarked upon. This paper has sought to address this deficit as a means of provoking more critical thought on social scientific engagements with biological aging. Both endeavors share a rejection of chronological aging as a form of falsely homogenizing temporal determinism that obscures more than it reveals. Instead, both favor sophisticated biological operationalizations that are intended to generate more legitimate, or perhaps more useful, depictions of age, aging, and agedness. This is not simply interesting parallelism; it is an indication of specific imaginings of age that propagate within and contribute to, broader biopolitics of successful aging. Ultimately, this biopolitics begets a blurring of boundaries (Neilson,2012), whereby separate enterprises of biotech start-ups and methodological innovation converge to produce new intellectual infrastructures for governing later life.

Social scientists must remain alert to the ways in which their engagement with biological age reflects and extend specific biopolitics, firstly by individualizing age, aging, and agedness in a manner that dismisses structural determinants (or at least makes them more culturally palatable), secondly by presenting age as a technoscientific problem, and thirdly by moralizing that problem as compelling technoscientific intervention. Insights into biological age have enhanced social scientific work on aging and health, and the links between the two, but they are vulnerable to corruption in the service of unintended, or even perverse, consequences. This is especially true in relation to CAD and cumulative inequality, which highlight problematic aspects of aging and inspire sincere desires to intervene and improve the lives of older people. Very different types of intervention can be justified in reference to biosocial insights into cumulative inequality, ranging from redistributive public pensions to the marketing of personal training regimes. Scholars must remain alert to the important similarities and differences between such initiatives.

Though long associated with the individual in mainstream gerontology (Moreira,2015), biological age need not be an essentially individual concern. It becomes so within the biopolitics of successful aging (Neilson,2006). The neologization of cumulative inequality offers considerable potential for drawing our attention to new and profound manifestations of structural inequalities. Yet within an influential portion of the contemporary sociology of aging, biological age is progressing down a theoretical route similar to that of lifestyle, tending away from a complex structure-agency nexus and toward a simplified matter of personal action, and, poignantly, consumption. This micro-fiction of biological aging is framed as a progressive endeavor. It facilitates better recognition of the great diversity of later life and draws attention to those for whom aging is a more detrimental phenomenon, yet it is also used to promote the sale of young plasma for $8000 a liter to consumers who will go to extreme lengths to be less"old"(Pandika, 2019). Social science has the potential to either challenge or facilitates such scenarios.

This article is extracted from Journal of Aging Studies 55 (2020) 100899