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| Romano - Allegory of Immortality |
Since
the beginning of recorded history, it seems, humankind has been
searching for the Fountain of Youth. Tales of such a pool appear in
legends across the globe as generation upon generation has set out to
undo the ravages of time. And while some early explorers may have sought
this pool in earnest, it remains largely a folkloric myth.
Today,
a new quest to discover the 21st-century version of this fountain has
been ignited: Exploring the possibilities of blood transfusions, digital
avatars, tissue freezing, and experimental drugs, a modern generation
of age- and death-phobic scientists and entrepreneurs are turning to
technology in an attempt to live forever — or, at least, a lot longer.
While
a fascination with youth has been a hallmark of the human species for
some time, our outright aversion to aging and fear of death are more
recent developments. This shift goes hand in hand with the rise of
modern medicine: As the field improved, life expectancy grew, once-fatal
diseases were cured, and death began to seem less like a looming
inevitability and more like something to be warded off and treated like
an illness.
Flash
forward to today, and you’ll find that these ideals have evolved into
full-on theories: More and more scientists are pushing to have aging officially classified as a disease, and an increasing number of splashy startups are spending millions to find a “cure” for mortality.
Unsurprisingly,
this crusade against death is being led by Silicon Valley’s biggest
tech billionaires, who are funding the notion that death is simply a
pain point in need of an innovative new fix.
Investor
Peter Thiel is perhaps the biggest proponent of immortality. He has
referred to death as “the great enemy” and has funded several biotech
companies working to hack aging, disease, and death.
“The
great unfinished task of the modern world is to turn death from a fact
of life into a problem to be solved — a problem towards whose solution I
hope to contribute in whatever way I can,” Thiel said in Sonia
Arrison’s book, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith.
So
far, this includes investments in Counsyl, a DNA screening service;
Immusoft, a platform that hacks white blood cells to “program” them to
create their own medicine; Cambrian Genomics, a maker of DNA-printing
technology; Stemcentrx, which is working on a new therapy for solid
tumors; Emerald Therapeutics, which is working to cure viral diseases
with nanotechnology; and SENS Research Foundation, an anti-aging and
longevity research firm focused on the cellular and molecular damage
that accumulates throughout a person’s life.
While
some of these companies are doing the noble work of curing disease, the
underlying theme for Thiel is not so much the elimination of suffering,
but the extension of life: He has also funded the research of molecular
biologist Cynthia Kenyon, who recently doubled the lifespan of a
roundworm by disabling a single gene, offering hope that the same can be
done to humans. Meanwhile, the founder of SENS has said that the
company’s goal is to figure out how to make humans remain biologically
25 years old indefinitely.
This
is just what the Silicon Valley billionaires want to hear. Oracle
co-founder Larry Ellison — who once lamented that “death makes me very
angry” and declared a wish to live forever — is also pouring cash into
the longevity cause: He has donated more than $430 million to anti-aging
research, including a donation to the aptly named Human Longevity.
Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page is also part of the crusade: He
founded Calico, Google’s sister company, which is working secretively on
interdisciplinary approaches to understanding “the biology that
controls human lifespan” with a $750 million infusion from Google.
So
far, a lot of this work is theoretical, but some researchers are
inching closer to “curing” age. Last year, the Salk Institute released a
study called “Aging May Be Reversible,”
based on an experiment its researchers conducted on mice with progeria,
a condition that causes premature aging. By giving the mice an
antibiotic, the researchers were able to genetically engineer them to
“turn on” four genes linked to aging. The mice ultimately lived 30
percent longer, and normal mice that were given the treatment seemed to
age in reverse.
“Our study shows that aging may not have to proceed in one single direction,” the researchers said.
Additionally, a drug called rapamycin is currently in clinical trials and has been shown to extend the life of mice by 25 percent,
as well as protect them against “diseases of aging,” including cancer
and neurodegeneration. But that’s just one of perhaps 20 such drugs that
have extended the lifespan or healthspan of mice, according to James Kirkland,
an age researcher at the Mayo Clinic. And the goal, of course, is to
start testing the drugs on humans sooner rather than later.
Scientists are also beginning to look into blood as a potential source of age-reversing intervention. A Calico-funded study found
that abnormal levels of proteins found in older blood could hinder the
growth of healthy body tissues. By “resetting” these protein levels, you
could theoretically slow the aging process; researchers will soon test
this on humans in a clinical trial.
In
a more vampiric experiment, the startup Ambrosia is currently
recruiting people for a clinical trial that will give older adults transfusions of the blood of the young in hopes of slowing aging.
All
of this is just the tip of the iceberg in the vast sea of anti-aging
research, and if Silicon Valley has anything to do with it, there is far
more to come. But the field of longevity extends beyond biotech
startups splicing genes and hacking blood cells in hopes of extending
biological life. For transhumanists, immortality will come in the form
of virtual technology — it’s not about preserving the body for eternity,
but the mind.
The
notion that humans will be able to upload their brains to computers has
been tossed around by futurists and neuroscientists for decades. And
though Tesla founder Elon Musk is in the early stages of merging our minds with machines, we are nowhere near the point of living on in the form of a computer.
However,
futurists and technologists are already achieving pared-down versions
of this grand aspiration: Several companies are offering the ability to
have our memories, stories, and digital footprints uploaded onto artificially intelligent platforms
that could ultimately communicate in our voice with our loved ones
after we’re gone. It may not be an actual evasion of death, but it’s a
start.
This digital “avatarization” has been the premise of several recent on-screen story lines. Black Mirror, the techno-paranoia series, features an episode
where a woman’s partner is “brought back to life” by a service much
like the ones we’re on the precipice of building, and the movie Marjorie Prime
imagines holographic recreations of loved ones that learn the
mannerisms and memories of their real-life counterparts through
conversations with those who remember them.
Today,
in its simplest form, this transhumanist dream is taking the form of
chatbots. Companies like Eterni.me and Replika collect your history and
mannerisms and turn them into a bot that mimics your speech patterns and
attitudes in text-based conversations with the living after your death.
A similar bot service was the center of a Wired cover story, “A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality,”
which chronicles the author James Vlahd’s quest to record as much of
his father’s memories and personality on tape as possible before his
death, and then program the chatbot PullString to carry on a
conversation in his (textual) voice, with occasional recordings peppered
in for a fuller effect.
“If
even a hint of a digital afterlife is possible, then of course the
person I want to make immortal is my father,” Vlahd writes.
A
more rudimentary form of this artificial conversationalist is the
service LivesOn, which promises to maintain your social media presence
after death by drawing on past Twitter activity to generate postmortem
tweets based on your own syntax. The company’s slogan? “When your heart
stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.”
Taking
it a step further, some companies, including Eterni.me and even
Facebook, are working on building virtual or even three-dimensional avatars of the deceased and incorporating actual recordings of the voice, programmed to build new sentences from the building blocks of the old.
Researchers
at the MIT Media Lab are working on a version of this called “augmented
eternity,” which incorporates all data produced by a living individual,
including personal emails, tweets, text messages, and any published
works. All of this is fed into an artificial neural network, which is
able to process and replicate the deceased’s speech and even patterns of
thought.
For
some, this idea of merging the brain with the cloud is just a temporary
solution until technology is advanced enough to reanimate the dead.
While cryogenics — otherwise known as cryopreservation or cryonics — may
conjure images of hokey ’90s futurisms, the field is still going strong
and advancing its methods: Many companies are currently housing hundreds of frozen bodies in hopes of one day bringing them back to life.
Within
this push for an immortal future is a multitude of ethical issues
around class, privilege, overpopulation, the environment, and more. Who
gets to decide who lives forever? Will longevity treatments only be
accessible to the rich? What about access to lifelong health care?
Social security? Job benefits? How will we ensure enough resources to
house the billions of extra people this would add to the planet? And
what about those who do not believe in the merits of immortality? Would
this stigmatize the choice to die?
And
then there are philosophical questions. For the religious, death is a
final passage into the realm of God. Would this defy God’s wishes? And
for the secular, physician and ethicist Leon Kass asks, “Could life be
serious or meaningful without the limit of mortality?”
As
of now, the populous is not acutely interested in immortality. A 2017
Pew Research Center survey found that 51 percent said they believed
treatments to slow, stop, or reverse aging would have a negative impact
on society, with 58 percent saying treatments to allow people to live
decades longer would be “fundamentally unnatural.”
But
that still leaves nearly half the population toying, in some form, with
the idea of skipping death. And while we’re still years away from
actually confronting this reality, it’s safe to say that soon enough,
the afterlife may indeed be life after all.
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God…”
– Genesis 3:1-5
"But the devil whispered to him, saying: O Adam! Shall I show thee the tree of immortality and power that wasteth not away?"
– Quran 20:120
I find it fascinating that the first temptation humans ever faced is the same one beneath every other temptation that we still face today. “Do this,” Satan says, “and you will be like God.”
"You Will Be Like God"
Genesis 3:3-5
“But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat of it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’” And the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God know that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (NKJV)
In the temptation of Eve, the devil said, "Ye shall be as gods" (Genesis 3:5), "knowing good and evil." The New King James rendering of this phrase is more accurate, "You will be like God." Behind this is the Hebrew word “Elohim”, which is the plural for gods. But, like in Genesis 1:1, it is here used of Almighty God, being the plural majestic reference (in respect to the three personalities of the Godhead). Also consider the verb bara ("created") being joined in the singular number with this plural noun, demonstrating the unity of the divine “Persons” in the work of creation. As sin had not yet entered into the world (idol worship), Eve could not have possessed a knowledge of "gods" (just the one God). Therefore, "God" best represents what is meant here. The purpose of Satan was to entice (by eating the forbidden fruit) our first parents into believing that they would become as wise and powerful as God and thus be able to exist forever, independently of Him.
The imagination of Eve was stirred. In some way beyond her immediate human experience she could be like God. The devil is pointing her in the route he had taken. The devil had taken his eyes off of God and placed them upon himself. The devil became the devil, the father of liars (Jn. 8:44). The rest is history. Even in the temptation of Jesus, the devil wanted to play the role of God (Matt. 4:9-10). Paul warns about falling into the same condemnation of the devil (1 Tim. 3:6). And so with mankind throughout history, it is not enough to be made in the image and likeness of God, men want to "be God" (Gen. 11:4; Isa. 31:3; Ezk. 28:2, 9; Dan. 4:28-30; Acts 12:22). The devil says, "Ye shall be as gods."
Man Wanting To Be God
"Ye shall be as gods" is seen in the ancient concept of the "divine right of kings," emperor worship, and in the totality of the modern, socialistic state that replaces God to control the lives of its citizens from the cradle to the grave. This can be seen in apostate religious systems wherein a man would be called "the Lord God, the pope" (2 Thess. 2:3-4), others being unduly exalted, and men arrogantly asserting themselves as determining the eternal destiny of their fellow mortals (i.e., Hitler’s regime). Then in saying that it doesn’t make any difference what a person believes, just so he is sincere, each person becomes his own god. Humanists in times past have subtly pushed religion aside in our society, but now dropping all subtlety, they have dethroned God with an intolerance that equals that of the radical religious zealots of the past.
Results Of Man Wanting To Be God
Legally God cannot be found in the public school system. Humanism sits enthroned. If a one-world government comes, there will be no place for the recognition of God in it. Man, in essence, wants to be God. He wants to determine and take life by abortion. Reportedly having successfully cloned animal life, he wants to clone human life, then when certain DNA and genetic codes are cracked, attention is drawn to the great discovery. Just look at our learned men. How smart they are! But the great and intricate mesh of intelligence as see in the genetic reading points to higher and supreme intelligence. It points to God. But man, who in his mind has dethroned God, will not admit this. Euthanasia and assisted suicide are gaining acceptance, already being legally accepted in some parts of the world. Job said referring to his life, “Jehovah gave, and Jehovah hath taken away; blessed be the name of Jehovah” (Job 1:21 - ASV), but modern man would look upon this as “his” prerogative as “he” tries to play the part of God. We are thankful for the medical profession that traditionally is devoted to life, health and healing, (but death is another thing).
Man Made In God’s Image!
All of us were made in the image and likeness of God for the glory of God (Gen. 1:27; Rom. 3:23; Isa. 42:8; 1 Cor. 10:31). That being the case, the Lord Jesus Christ said, "But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness" (Matt. 6:33). God must have “first” place in our lives, or “no” place. Anything that comes before God, in essence, becomes God to us (as it has taken the place of God). Therefore, if we leave God out of our lives or put Him in second place, living selfishly, we have become our own god. Perhaps not consciously, or even intentionally, we have succumbed to the temptation of Eve, "Ye shall become as gods."
Human beings have long desired immortality. In his book on the topic, cleverly-titled Immortality, Stephen Cave argues that this desire has taken on four distinct forms over the course of human history. In the first, people seek immortality by simply trying to stay alive, either through the help of magic or science. In the second, people seek resurrection, sometimes in the same physical form and sometimes in an altered plane of existence. In the third, people seek solace through the metaphysical/religious concept of the soul as an entity that houses the essence of our personalities and which will live on beyond the death of our physical bodies. And in the fourth, people seek immortality through their work or artistic creations.
With the exception of the last of these forms, most versions of the quest for immortality share the belief that the immortal existence of the self — i.e. the human person — is something worth pursuing. But some philosophers reject this notion. They do so not because they wish to die or think that death is a good thing, but because they think that without death there is no possibility of a recognisably human life. That is to say: they believe that the quest for an immortal human life is incoherent.
One such philosopher is Samuel Scheffler. In his recent(ish) book Death and Afterlife, Scheffler tries to defend the claim that an immortal life would be no life at all. More precisely, he tries to argue that temporal scarcity is a condition of value in human life, and that without the “threat” of death, it would be difficult to make sense of our existence. In this post, I will try to outline Scheffler’s argument and consider its implications for those who seek to promote radical life extension.
1. What is an immortal life anyway?
One thing I have noticed in the debate about life extension and immortality is a tendency for the participants to talk past one another. This is chiefly because the participants often conceive of an “immortal life” or the quest for “immortality” in very different ways. It’s important that we try to avoid this mistake here.
Let’s suppose that there are four types of human life that we could be arguing about (I am aware that this fourfold distinction doesn’t exhaust the possibilities, but I think it suffices for now):
Ordinary Contingent Human Life: This is the kind of life we all currently lead. We are organic beings, whose bodies are susceptible to injury, disease and decay. We can stave off some of these existential threats, but eventually our bodies will give up and we will die. At present, we can expect to live (roughly) between 80-100 years. With medical advancements we might expect to increase that life expectancy (maybe even up to 150 years), but still we will eventually die.
Necessarily Immortal Human Life: This the kind of life in which we continue to exist in something roughly equivalent to our current form, but we do so forever, without the risk or possibility of death. In other words, it is the kind of life in which we must continue to exist, irrespective of our wishes.
Contingently Immortal Human Life (Type 1): This is the kind of life in which we continue to exist in something roughly equivalent to our current form, and we do so with the continuing risk of death by injury or, maybe, some diseases. In other words, our bodies no longer decay or degrade over time, but they are still vulnerable to some external existential threats (perhaps the main one being the risk of fatal attack from other human beings).
Contingently Immortal Human Life (Type 2):: This is the kind of life in which we continue to exist in something roughly equivalent to our current form, without the risk of death by injury or disease, but with the periodic option of ending our lives. In other words, it is the kind of life in which we are free from all existential threats, apart from “threats” realised by our own volition.
Let’s agree, for the sake of argument, that we want to escape the limitations of the first option and live forever. Which of the remaining three options do we hope for? In my experience, most life extensionists and scientifically-inclined immortalists argue for something like the third and fourth options, i.e. lives of indefinite duration with the lingering possibility of death. Most of them don’t really consider the second option. On the other hand, many religious believers seem more committed to the second possibility. The most obvious examples of this are those that believe in the traditional conceptions of heaven and hell, which often seem to require involuntary immortality.
So which type of existence is the subject of Scheffler’s argument? The answer is the second. It is the necessarily immortal human life that he deems to be an incoherent concept. This immediately limits the audience for his argument. Most life extensionists will be non-plussed by what he has to say because it doesn’t touch upon the sort of life they wish to live; religious believers (at least, those who are committed to the idea of immortality) will more plussed about what he has to say.
I think it is important to acknowledge these limitations at the outset as it helps to avoid potential misinterpretations of Scheffler’s argument. That said, in making the case against the necessarily immortal life, Scheffler says some things about temporal scarcity and conditions of value that could have a (lesser) effect on contingently immortal lives. This is something worth bearing in mind.
2. The Argument for Incoherence
With that clarification out of the way, we can proceed to address Scheffler’s argument for the incoherence of a necessarily immortal life. Scheffler doesn’t present this with any degree of formality. Instead, he adduces a number of considerations and tries to informally draw out some conclusions. I’ll try to adopt a more formal approach here. I take it that the argument is something like this:
- (1) Much of what is central to our conception of human life (including our conception of value in life) tacitly assumes that that life will come to an end, and/or is persistently vulnerable to existential threat.
- (2) A necessarily immortal life is one that does not come to an end and is not persistently vulnerable to existential threat.
- (3) Therefore, much of what is central to our conception of human life (including our conception of value) would be lost if we lived necessarily immortal lives.
- (4) If a form of existence entails the loss of much of what is central to our conception of human life, it is not clear that that form of existence can be deemed “human”.
- (5) Therefore, there may be no such thing a necessarily immortal human life (i.e. the concept of a necessarily immortal human life may be incoherent).
The argument can be dragged in different directions once this main conclusion is reached. In particular, it can be used to support the claim that we ought not to desire a necessarily immortal life, or, perhaps more interestingly, to argue against certain religious doctrines that presuppose such an existence (Brian Ribeiro does this in his article “The Problem of Heaven”).
But I am not too interested in those possibilities. I am more interested in how Scheffler defends the main premises of the argument. In particular, I am interested in how he defends premise (1). I take it that the rest of the argument is relatively uncontroversial. Premise (2) is true by definition. (3) looks to be a valid conclusion from (1) and (2). (4) might be controversial because it is vague, but that can be corrected by having a more detailed account of what is taken from the concept of human life by immortality. That is something that the defence of (1) helps to provide. And, finally, (5) also looks to be a reasonable inference from (3) and (4).
So let’s consider the defence of premise (1). In the book, Scheffler offers three reasons in support of premise (1). The first is:
- (6) Our conception of life, and of success in life, is bound up with the notion that life has stages that come to an end.
Scheffler provides more detail on what he is talking about in the book. He notes how the standard conception of a human life has a finite duration, i.e. a beginning (birth) and an end (death). Between these two endpoints, the living person passes through a number of stages, childhood, adolescence, adulthood etc.. These stages, and their durations, vary somewhat from culture to culture. Nevertheless, all cultures share the notion that life is broken down into distinct stages and that these stages come to an end. More importantly, our sense of accomplishment and satisfaction is often intimately linked to our conception of these stages. Thus, what counts as an achievement for a child (first words, learning to read) would not count as an achievement for an adult, and vice versa. As Scheffler puts it:
Our collective understanding of the range of goals, activities, and pursuits that are available to the person, the challenges that he faces, and the satisfactions that he may reasonably hope for are all indexed to these stages. The very fact that the accomplishments and satisfactions of each stage count as accomplishments and satisfactions depends on their association with the stage in question…”
(Scheffler 2013, p 96)
Scheffler’s point is that this division of life into stages, each with its own characteristic virtues and vices would be lost if we lived necessarily immortal lives.
So much for the first reason. The second reason Scheffler offers is linked to the concepts of loss, illness, injury and so on:
- (7) Concepts such as loss, illness, injury, harm, health, gain, security, safety (and so on), all of which are central to how we understand value in life, derive a good deal of their content from the assumption that life is temporally limited.
This is probably a more significant claim than the first since it focuses directly on things that are deemed to be of value (or disvalue) in human life. Scheffler doesn’t offer much in the way of support for this claim. He simply points out that much of human life is spent trying to avoid things like loss, illness, injury and harm, and trying to pursue health, gain, security and safety. And then adds that these concepts “derive much of their content from our standing recognition that our lives are temporally bounded, that we are subject to death at any moment, and that we are certain to succumb to it in the end.” (p. 97) Since that temporal boundedness is lost in a necessarily immortal life it follows that such a life would consist in a radically altered set of values. (It should also be added that if you are necessarily immortal you would presumably be free from many physical limitations and needs, e.g. hunger and thirst).
Arising from this is Scheffler’s third reason for supporting premise (1). This reason has to do with human planning and decision-making:
- (8) Much of human decision-making and planning only make sense against a background assumption of temporal scarcity.
As I say, this arises from the same set of considerations as the previous reason, and so it may not be fair to treat it as a distinct ground for supporting premise (1). Still, I think it is worth separating it out because the planning and making of decisions (sacrifices, choices etc.) is central to human existence and may well be radically altered in a necessarily immortal life. The reasoning would be, roughly, that whenever we plan or decide to do something we do so on the basis that we must “give up” something (what economists call the “opportunity cost”). The presence of that opportunity cost lends some normative significance to our decision-making and adds to our sense of urgency and motivation. These things would be lost if we lived forever because we would always have a second chance (or a third or fourth or fifth…). Some people might welcome this fact, but even still it would make for a very different type of existence. (I wrote about this argument in much more detail before).
3. Concluding Thoughts
So what are we to make of all this? Let me close with two reflections on Scheffler’s argument. First, I accept most of Scheffler’s argument and I think it says something important about the desire for a (necessarily) immortal life. For example, I accept that a necessarily immortal life would be free from many of the limitations that currently shape our conception of what is or is not of value. Consequently, I am largely persuaded by his use of (7) and (8). I am less persuaded by his use of (6). It seems conceivable to me that an immortal life could still be broken down into stages of finite duration. Maybe it would be more difficult to then associate those stages with distinctive accomplishments and satisfactions, but sufficient ingenuity may make it possible. That said, I believe this to be a minor point. The larger point is that a necessarily immortal life would be radically different from what we currently have, and there is no doubt that much of our current understanding of value would be altered. Although this might not make the desire for a necessarily immortal life incoherent, it may make it silly or misconceived: such a life cannot hope to preserve the things we value about our present lives.
Second, although I accept he was not arguing about contingently immortal lives, I think it is worth asking how much of his argument would carry over to such lives. It seems fair to say that some of it would. After all, a contingently immortal life would reduce at least some of the existential threats that Scheffler thinks are essential to our conception of a human life. For instance, it would force some restructuring of the stages of life and their associated accomplishments and satisfactions (I considered this before). Likewise, with a contingently immortal life of the second type (i.e. one free from all involuntary existential threats) things like loss, illness, harm, safety, health and so on would be deeply affected. How exactly they would be affected is difficult to say. There would still, presumably, be some values that are independent of existential threats (e.g. the intrinsic value of pleasure, or of enhancing theoretical knowledge), but we may find that a good deal of our values are lost or radically altered. We may also, of course, acquire new values that compensate for these losses. But there is something of bet taking place: we risk trading one set of familiar values for another, less familiar, set.
When on his travels Gulliver discovers that among the inhabitants of Luggnagg live the Struldbrugs, born with a red spot on their foreheads indicating that they never die, he is delighted. “Happy nation, where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal!” he exclaims.
It is true, says Gulliver’s interpreter in Jonathan Swift’s novel, that long life seems to be the universal desire and wish of mankind. But that is just because of “the common imbecility of human nature”. Then Gulliver learns that the Struldbrugs, thoughimmune to death, are not protected from old age, and he is horrified. “No tyrant could invent a death, into which I would not run with pleasure, from such a life,” he decides.
The strange thing about our dreams of immortality is that they persist even while so many of the stories we tell about them end badly. The Immortal in Jorge Luis Borges’s story of that name ends up wearily treading the world in search of an antidote to the elixir of youth that, in his foolishness, he sought out. This ennui with eternity is shared by the characters of Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time novels and the immortal Q in the Death Wish episode of Star Trek: Voyager.
Even if the ravages of age are not physical, they are moral, as the perpetually youthful Dorian Gray discovers when his ageing portrait records his soul’s corruption. When Odysseus elects to return home to Penelope rather than remain in an island paradise with the beautiful nymph Calypso and become immortal, we suspect that he has chosen well.
But still we can’t stop craving eternity, which is why many religions have found “life everlasting” such a powerful recruiting tool. This irreconcilable conflict – experiencing the sadness, frustration and discomfort of the ageing process, yet knowing the folly of wishing it away indefinitely – is precisely why we need myths. Yet myths may be fed, not banished, by science. Once scientists researching the biology of ageing – biogerontology – found that some of its depredations can be slowed, a quasi-scientific cult of technological immortality was inevitable.
Myths live on by disguising themselves in the apparel of modernity. So it is fully to be expected that immortality today is a business offering to tailor clients’ diet regimes, that it is expounded at conferences in PowerPoint presentations, that it announces itself with words such as “telomere extension” and “immune regulation”. This is distressing to serious biogerontologists, who worry that funding of their careful work on age-related disease and infirmity will seem boring in comparison to supporting folks who promise to let us live for ever. They are right to be concerned but sadly theirs will ever be the fate of scientists working in a field that touches on fabled and legendary themes, where both calculating opportunists and well-meaning fantasists can thrive. Age-related research until recently has been rather marginalised in medicine, and the gerontologist Richard Miller of the University of Michigan suggests one reason for this: “Most gerontologists who are widely known to the public are unscrupulous purveyors of useless nostrums.”
***
For an introduction to this biogerontological mythology, I recommend last year’s documentary The Immortalists, which profiles two of the most vocal advocates of scientific immortality: the computer scientist Aubrey de Grey and the biotech entrepreneur Bill Andrews. Yet the film shows that these men aren’t lone mavericks with unconventional ideas about ageing and its abolition, but participants in a complex and self-supporting network of techno-myth. And as is the case with, for example, human cloning, nutrition and the surprising properties of water, there is no convenient partitioning here into respectable and cranky science. In consequence, the immortality market can’t simply be eliminated by the appliance of science; it needs to be understood as a cultural phenomenon.
Ageing is partly genetic but there are no “ageing genes” – merely ordinary genes that may cause problems in later life. Age-related conditions such as heart failure, dementia and cancer typically stem from an interplay between genes and environment: we can inherit predispositions but environmental factors such as diet and pollution affect whether they manifest. (Research that was widely reported early this year as showing that most cancers are due to “bad luck”, irrespective of environmental influences, in fact had a more complex message.)
It is surprising, perhaps alarming, that we know so little about ageing. We get old in many ways. For instance, some of our cells just stop dividing – they senesce. While this shutdown stops them becoming cancerous, the senescent cells are a waste of space and may create problems for the immune system. Cell senescence may be related to a process called telomere shortening: repeated cell division wears away the end caps, called telomeres, on the chromosomes that contain our genes. Although shortened telomeres seem to be related to the early onset of age-related disease, the relationship is complex. It is partly because cancer cells are good at regenerating their telomeres that they can divide and proliferate out of control. Cells also suffer general wear and tear because of so-called oxidative damage, in which reactive forms of oxygen – an inevitable by-product of respiration – attack and disrupt the molecules that sustain life. This has made “antioxidants” such as Vitamins C and E, and the compound resveratrol, found in red wine, buzzwords in nutrition. But the effects of oxidative damage and antioxidants are still poorly understood.
These factors and others can interact with each other in complex ways. A group of UK experts called the Longevity Science Panel, funded by the insurers Legal & General, concluded in a 2014 report: “There is little consensus on which mechanisms of ageing are the most important in humans.” Biogerontologists don’t even agree about whether the ageing process itself is best considered as a single effect, or many.
Extreme ideas always fare best in areas where less is known. Which brings us to the star of The Immortalists and the self-styled poster-boy of the scientific-immortality movement: Aubrey de Grey. It is easy to see why the media like him. With his ponytail and Rasputin beard, his piercing eyes and dishevelled appearance, his delight in real ale and naked sunbathing and his mesmerising articulacy, the 52-year-old de Grey is every inch the prophet, a John the Baptist offering technological salvation. It is hard to know how much of this impression is calculated but it exerts a compelling effect that has won over some respected biologists, even if they insist they don’t fully buy his theories. The archetypal magazine article presents him as a colourful maverick, a self-taught biologist with a Cambridge degree in computer science, up against the scepticism of stodgy biogerontologists. De Grey knows how to wield this narrative to advantage, insisting that all he wants is to debate with a closed-minded community.
This, his critics have come to realise, is a game they can’t win. As a group of leading authorities in the field wrote in the biology journal EMBO Reports in 2005, in response to an article published there by de Grey:
Journalists with papers to sell or airtime to fill too often fall for the idea of a Cambridge scientist who knows how to help us live for ever with telomerase, allotopic mitochondrial-coded proteins and marker-tagged toxins. To explain to a layman why de Grey’s programme falls into the realm of fantasy rather than science requires time, attention and the presentation of detailed background information . . . anyone who is tempted to do so is easily cast as a Luddite, an enemy of creativity and noble ambition, and someone whose prissy reluctance to confront de Grey’s ideas might prevent us from living for ever.
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Is Aubrey de Grey a charlatan? For all the artful self-promotion, he genuinely seems to believe not only that he is on to something but that his ideas are of humanitarian importance. He is nothing if not sincere in thinking that to slow and ultimately reverse ageing is an obligation that science is failing dismally to fulfil. He regards old age as a disease like any other: it is scandalous, he says, that it kills 90 per cent of all human beings and yet we are doing so little about it. De Grey calls his quest a “crusade to defeat ageing”, which he regards as “the single most urgent imperative for humanity”. Death, he says, “is quite simply repugnant”, and he equates our acceptance of it in elderly people with our past casual acceptance of the slaughter of other races.
To many, the ethics face quite the other way. Don’t we die off to make room for our children and aren’t there already too many of us? De Grey’s response reveals a lot about the man. Imagining procreation as simply our best current shot at immortality (for isn’t this, in the end, all that our genes are after?), he argues that the desire to have children will wane once we can live for ever. And who is to say that future technologies won’t give the planet a far greater carrying capacity than it has at present? Such optimism can be alluring.
How does de Grey think we will stop our bodies from ageing? He proposes a seven-point plan called Sens (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) that, in his view, picks off all the processes by which our cells decline, one by one. We can get rid of unwanted cells, such as excess fat cells and senescent cells, by training the immune system or triggering the cells into eliminating themselves. We can suppress cancer by silencing the genes that enable cancer cells to repair their telomeres. We can avoid harmful mutations in the handful of genes housed in our energy-generating cell compartments called mitochondria by making back-up copies, to be housed in the better-protected confines of the cell’s nucleus, where the chromosomes reside. We can find drugs that inhibit the degradation of tissues at the molecular level. And so on.
Some critics are outspoken. The neurobiologist Colin Blakemore of the University of London’s School of Advanced Study appears in The Immortalists calling de Grey’s views “foolish” and “naive”, and denouncing his proposed remedies for ageing as “dangerous snake oil”. De Grey is confident that the ranks of such critics are dwindling – but that might be because they are wary of even giving him the respectability of debate. “I think giving any publicity to crackpots like de Grey and his ilk is distinctly bad for the field. It makes it harder for people outside the research community to take ageing research seriously,” said one gerontologist I contacted, who asked to remain anonymous. “I do not, however, particularly want to get drawn into character assassinations of Aubrey, or my take on the more extremist views,” said another.
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Regardless of what the Sens Research Foundation does or does not achieve, the immortality business seems certain to thrive. There will never be a shortage of customers for places such as the physician Terry Grossman’s Wellness Centre in Golden, Colorado, which offers personalised plans for lifespan extension, any more than there was ever a shortage of kings and emperors happy to fund alchemists seeking the elixir of life. (In The Immortalists, de Grey and Andrews are shown competitively working out at Grossman’s clinic.) The market sustains conferences such as Global Future 2045, held in New York in 2013 – an event bizarre even in a country sometimes eerily blind to its own strangeness. Experts in artificial intelligence and genomics rubbed shoulders with “quantum consciousness activists”, “self-realised Siddha masters”, “human enhancement trailblazers” and with the guru of this arena: the billionaire inventor of computer and music technologies, Google’s futurist and “singularitarian immortalist”, Ray Kurzweil.
Kurzweil’s concept of the Singularity provides the immortalists with their equivalent of the Resurrection: a moment in the foreseeable future when computer technology and artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nanotechnology will all converge to make it possible for us to download our minds and attain virtual immortality. Like de Grey, Kurzweil is holding out for this moment with a carefully designed regime of exercise and diet.
There is a symbiosis of fantasies at play here that flows into the currents of the so-called transhumanist movement, the truly eschatological branch of technological futurology. Transhumanists maintain that the destiny of humanity is to merge with technology, whereupon immortality will be just one superpower among many. Transhumanism brandishes a handful of motifs with totemic significance, Kurzweil’s Singularity being perhaps the most revered. Its prophets are the spurned visionaries of every field: de Grey for ageing, Kurzweil for artificial intelligence, the maverick guru Eric Drexler for nanotechnology. They cite each other’s predictions to support the feasibility of their own. A horror of looming mortality pervades the field in ways that are all too easy to map on to the preoccupations of religious millenarians of former times.
Kurzweil and Grossman’s 2009 book Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever describes a programme of diet, exercise and vitamin supplements that should sustain you until the Singularity takes over. In their future vision, Drexler’s nano-robots maintain our memories and repair our cells. If it takes a little longer, you can always preserve your body or brain cryogenically (we don’t know how to avoid serious tissue damage – yet!), as de Grey and Kurzweil intend to do. The Soviets tried it with Lenin in 1924, as John Gray explains in his 2011 book on early 20th-century efforts to cheat death, The Immortalization Commission. The technology didn’t work; Lenin turned green.
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Others aren’t persuaded that caloric restriction would be effective at all for slowing ageing in human beings – studies on rhesus monkeys have been inconclusive – and they point out that it is a bad idea for elderly people. “If we can understand how to uncouple the benefits of a low-calorie diet from its detrimental effects, we may be able to develop therapeutics that have broad impacts on many age-related diseases,” William Mair of the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health tells me. “I think in the long term this is an achievable goal.”
Couldn’t we just make an anti-ageing pill? There are candidates. The drug rapamycin, which is used to suppress immune rejection in organ transplants and as an anti-cancer agent, also has effects on ageing. It stops cells dividing and suppresses the immune system – and increases the lifespan of fruit flies and small mammals such as mice. But it has nasty side effects, including urinary-tract infections, anaemia, nausea, even skin cancer. So it won’t be used as a routine anti-ageing drug unless a milder version can be found. Other drugs are under trial. One developed by the anti-ageing company Sirtris in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now undergoing clinical trials with GlaxoSmithKline (which bought and then shut down Sirtris) aims to switch on a class of proteins called sirtuins, which some researchers believe are involved in the cellular processes of ageing. The red-wine compound resveratrol is thought to activate sirtuins, although exactly what they do in ageing is still unclear and controversial. GSK seems to be hoping for drugs that can combat age-related diseases; the aim was never anything as broad as an “anti-ageing pill”.
Other researchers think that the answer lies with genetics. The genomics pioneer Craig Venter, whose company Celera privately sequenced the human genome in the early 2000s, recently launched Human Longevity, Inc together with the spaceflight entrepreneur Peter Diamand. It aims to compile a database of genomes to identify the genetic characteristics of long-lived individuals. There is generally no evolutionary driving force for “longevity genes”, because animals don’t usually die of old age in the wild – they get eaten, suffer disease or injury, or fall off a cliff. Old age among animals happens mostly in zoos and domestic pets.
But “during times of food scarcity, organisms can switch their ageing rate, turning off growth and turning on stress defences and self-maintenance, to maintain themselves for better times”, as Mair, the Harvard expert on ageing, explains. “So ageing rate can be altered. And animals in this self-protecting state are not just long-lived but protected against diseases of old age, from cancer to Alzheimer’s to diabetes.”
Whether Venter will find genes responsible for the exceptional longevity of some individuals, and whether they would be of any use for extending average lifespan, is another matter. “His approach has some serious conceptual limitations,” the Michigan gerontologist Richard Miller tells me. “I think he’s radically overestimating the degree to which the ageing process is modulated by genetic variation.”
To read one script, we are on the cusp of a revolution in ageing research. Google has recently created the California Life Company, or CALICO, which seems to be seeking life-extending drugs. The hedge-fund billionaire Joon Yun has launched the $1m Palo Alto Longevity Prize to bring about the “end of ageing”, so that “human capacity would finally be fully unleashed”.
But the Longevity Science Panel, composed of scientists rather than venture capitalists, had a much more sobering message. To get a substantial increase in lifespan – an extra decade or so, say – we would need to find ways of slowing the ageing rate by half (which the panel deemed barely plausible given the current knowledge) and apply that treatment throughout a person’s life from an early age. If you’re already middle-aged today, even major breakthroughs are barely going to make any difference to how long you will live.
As for the immortalists, a few specialists are prepared to be blunt. After reading a March 2005 article on Aubrey de Grey in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Technology Review, Miller asked the magazine to forward a letter to him. It began by explaining that Miller “was hoping that now that the ageing problem has been solved, you might have time to help me in my publicity campaign to solve a similar engineering challenge, one that has been too long ignored by the ultra-conservative, fraidy-cat mainstream scientific community: the problem of producing flying pigs”.
Jonathan Swift would have approved of the satirical critique. Had the laws of Luggnagg not forbidden it in Gulliver’s Travels, the narrator attests that he would have been glad to send a couple of the immortal Struldbrugs back to England “to arm our people against the fear of death”. The fantasies spun about scientific immortality, rather than being showered with scorn, should be met with some sensitivity to that fear, and an acceptance of the myths it will always engender. But the immortalists, striving for eternal life with dietary supplements and techno-fables, will serve well enough as our own cautionary Struldbrugs.
