THE oldest living thing on the planet is King’s Holly, a bush that has been growing in a Tasmanian river gully for more than 40,000 years. There are bivalve molluscs in Iceland that reach ages over 370. Bowhead whales have been discovered roaming the cold oceans with antique ivory spear points still stuck in their hides, which means these creatures have survived for at least two centuries longer than the pre-industrial sailors who tried to harpoon them. Harriet, a tortoise brought to England from the Galapagos by Charles Darwin himself in 1835, finally died last June at the age of 176. If we envy these hardy plants and animals, it’s for their stoicism as much as their longevity – human experience has given us a generally fearful and justifiably defeatist attitude to ageing and death. Now an international community of scientists and thinkers are suggesting that we change it for good.
“Death is a disease like any other, ” says a lab researcher played by Hugh Jackman in the bold new movie The Fountain, which meditates on the past, present, and possible future of our quest for eternal life. “There is a cure and I will find it.” The story takes place across 1000 years, with Jackman also playing a 16th century Spanish explorer commissioned by Queen Isabella to search the new world for a fountain of youth and a 25th century spaceman, preserved in a bubble and haunted by distant memories. But his present-day incarnation seems to speak for those “immortalists” who now believe that medicine will soon be in a position to contest the ultimate fact of life.
Most prominent and optimistic among them is the Dr Aubrey de Grey, director of Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (Sens), founder of The Methuselah Foundation, and editor-in-chief of the journal Rejuvenation Research. He is world-renowned for his claim that the first person who will live for a millennium has “probably” been born already, perhaps as long ago as 1945. “That’s certainly what I think, ” says de Grey. “I’m not alone, but I am more or less the only person in the field who is prepared to come out and say it.” As far as he’s concerned, the only thing standing between certain death and a preferable alternative is our basic acceptance of fate.
“Ageing, ” he says, “is nothing more or less than a set of accumulated side-effects from the metabolism that eventually kills us. It should be considered a health condition, rather than something natural. 100,000 elderly people lose their lives every day. It may look like they’ve died of cancer, or diabetes, or stroke, but actually they have died of the latest stage of ageing itself. If we could arrest that slaughter for even one month, more than one million people would be saved, at least temporarily. Now imagine if we could extend life by 30 years, or 100 . . . ” In 2003, de Grey established the Methuselah Mouse Prize, to encourage research into doubling the average lifespan of lab mice. (William Haseltine of Human Genome Sciences credited the prize as a “significant contribution to the awareness that regenerative medicine is a near-term reality, not an if”. ) Once “robust mouse rejuvenation” is achieved, which de Grey predicts will happen in the next decade or two, then the human equivalent should follow somewhere between five and 80 years later. “It all depends on funding, ” says de Grey.
“At present, major contributors to medical research, like the Gates Foundation and Warren Buffet, tend to put money toward helping the disadvantaged, which is obviously very important, but ultimately quite a short-term fix. We’re asking people to think about the long term. Technology has to be pushed forward, and donors will look a lot more distinctive funding this kind of radical work than giving to causes which are basically just one more drop in the ocean.” Some, even fellow gerontologists (who study ageing at a molecular level), argue that all the money in the world will not solve this problem, and that the metabolic processes involved are so complex that they can barely be understood, let alone reversed. Every one of Sens’s many biomedical goals relies on technology which has not yet been developed. It’s possible in theory, but not in practice, to repair or replace those cells lost or damaged by everyday glitches in our systems, which build up over a lifetime of DNA replication to cause fatal diseases in the elderly.
De Grey, however, doesn’t think it will be necessary to explain all the mysteries of living tissue before anything can be done to halt its decline. “The fact is, ” he says, “that cellular damage doesn’t begin to accumulate in a problematic way until the second half of the average lifetime. This tells us that there is a threshold at which the body starts to deteriorate. We don’t have to repair all the damage that occurs after that, we just have to keep buying time with a reasonably selective set of interventions, which will rejuvenate people to the point that they are biologically younger, and so avoid the onset of those age-related conditions which become terminal.” No such treatments exist at the moment, as Professor Leonard Hayflick, a veteran authority on biological senescence, recently became exasperated enough to state flat out: “There is no intervention that has been proven to slow, stop, or reverse ageing. Period.” He went on to describe de Grey and his ilk as “dangerous ignorami”.
De Grey doesn’t seem particularly insulted. “Some of my . . . hastier colleagues have come to knee-jerk conclusions based on the more extreme end of what I’m suggesting, without considering the very solid scientific basis of the detail. They haven’t done their homework.” De Grey can foresee a time when an “actuarial escape velocity” is reached: the average human lifespan will be prolonged to the point where medicine is sufficiently advanced to prolong it even further, and throughout this extended grace period, scientific progress will be accelerating to intervene again before it’s too late. Thus may death be forever delayed.
If the biggest names in global bioethics did not in some way share this vision, they would not be so vocally opposed to it. Dr George Annas and others have called for the genetic modification of our lifespan to be classified “a crime against humanity”, theorising that “normal” and “super” humans may one day consider themselves justified in committing acts of genocide against each other. Francis Fukayama, a member of President George W Bush’s Council On Bioethics, has called it “the world’s most dangerous idea”. And Dr Leon Kass, chairman of that council, has said that “the finitude of human life is a blessing, whether we know it or not”.
To put it more succinctly, as Freddie Mercury did in Queen’s soundtrack for the 1986 movie Highlander (in which lonely, immortal Scottish clansmen and Egyptian princes swordfight their way through history to win the right to grow old and die): “Who wants to live forever?” Before the end of the 21st century that question may have come to sound substantially less rhetorical, and the answer is unlikely to be unanimous.
“It’s the ultimate offer of science, ” says Bryan Appleyard, author of the How To Live Forever Or Die Trying, “but people do seem quite divided and agitated over whether they would accept it. Americans will usually say ‘Yeah!’. The British tend to go ‘Ooh no’. One woman in Cambridge said in theory she would take a pill to make her 29 forever, but when I told her that she couldn’t have kids because if nobody ever died there would be terrible overpopulation she changed her mind. She already had two daughters, she couldn’t imagine life without them. Which was perhaps a way of saying that love is stronger than death.” Fear may be even stronger, and immortalists themselves can display a certain ambivalence over whether they are motivated by a respect for life or a reluctance to die.
De Grey says he got into the field for humanitarian reasons, shifting from the study of artificial intelligence to gerontology after he married a biologist. “It dawned on me that ageing had become a scientific backwater, and the reasons why didn’t impress me. People said it was too hard a problem and so on. I thought I should have a go myself, because I definitely wanted to do something about it.” When he started out, he thought he might live to reap the eternal rewards of his own work. “I don’t think about that so much any more.”
If true, this separates him from many of his peers, predecessors and supporters, those self-declared “extropians”, “posthumans” and “transhumans” who feel that life-extension is right, good, and necessary. Ray Kurzweil, author of such key texts as Live Long Enough To Live Forever, reportedly consumes hundreds of nutritional supplements every day, in an ongoing campaign to stay alive until he can be made young again. He is far from the only one. “A lot of these guys are baby boomers, ” says Appleyard. “So when Aubrey predicts that anti-ageing treatments will be ready within 30 years, they get to thinking that they might not make it. To die before that point would really suck. They can’t stand the thought of just missing out, and being the last generation to die.”
They belong, in their own way, to an ancient tradition. Since human beings first found out that death is final and inevitable (anthropologists suggest that primitive man was similar to remote surviving tribal cultures, who still don’t see it as a natural event, but a consequence of violence or malicious magic), priests, philosophers, and psychoanalysts have all tried to resolve our pathological inability to process the concept of personal extinction. “In the unconscious, ” admitted Sigmund Freud, “no-one really believes in one’s own death.”
Proactive alchemists, explorers, and mythical heroes have attempted to find literal, physical ways to avoid the problem, with mixed or dubious results. In one of mankind’s earliest recorded stories, a Babylonian text written circa 2500 BC, King Gilgamesh goes in search of a river weed that confers eternal life, which a snake eats just moments before he can reach it. According to the Bible, Methuselah lived for 969 years, but apparently died in the Flood, and modern creationists say the genetic code for longevity was lost with him. Several Chinese emperors, including Jiajing of the Ming dynasty, died immediately after drinking so-called “elixirs of life” concocted from mercury, sulphur and arsenic.
Alexander the Great, the Arab sage al-Khidr, 12th century Englishman Sir John Mandeville and Juan Ponce de Leon are all supposed to have sought, found, or even drunk from the fountain of youth. Such tales were especially popular in 16th century Europe after 200 years of the Black Death, and the legend of de Leon, a Spanish shipmate of Columbus who was in fact commissioned to search Florida for gold and slaves, has most recently provided the inspiration for Jackman’s conquistador in The Fountain.
But if all such unverified claims are discounted including rival propagandist boasts of American and Soviet citizens living up to 160 during the cold war and the Taoist herbalist Li Chang Yun, who spent the early 1930s giving public lectures in Peking explaining how he had reached the age of 256 “sit like a turtle, walk like a pigeon, sleep like a dog, ” he recommended then no human being has ever lived longer than the Frenchwoman Jeanne Louise Calment, who died in 1997 at the undisputed age of 122. She had a few stories to pass on (Vincent Van Gogh had visited her father’s shop in Arles, and Calment remembered him as “dirty, badly-dressed, and disagreeable”) but no secrets of longevity, having smoked cigarettes until she was 117. “I have been forgotten by the Good Lord, ” she said. Calment remained witty to the end, so it’s not clear if she was joking, or describing how she genuinely felt.
APPLEYARD thinks that the already fractious relationship between science and religion will be aggravated by the future work of immortalists. “Aubrey de Grey is a brilliant man, ” he says, “but I also think he’s naïve. He believes this kind of work will generate a revolutionary process which will make the world more peaceful, but I don’t find that credible in the light of human history. It seems obvious that some people would consider it an evil, and we’ve seen how powerful and violent religious feeling can be.”
De Grey has indeed prepared utopian answers to every question a sceptic might have. If you’re worried about overpopulation, he points out that any successful intervention against ageing could and should preserve everybody on Earth in a state of youthful vigour, thus freeing up the time, wealth and manpower to house, feed and educate us all. If you think that such treatment would be so expensive that only the rich could afford to cheat death, de Grey concedes that the high price of HIV antiretrovirals “might give you cause to be cynical”, but reminds us that “not everyone in Western government is dying of HIV, whereas everyone in the world is dying of ageing”.
“Enlightened self-interest, ” he says, “would logically demand that the treatment be made universally available.” In the end though, and by his own admission, de Grey is a “theoretician” – even he can’t completely dismiss what his ideological nemesis Dr Leon Kass has called “the wisdom of repugnance”. “In crucial cases, ” wrote Kass in 1997, “repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom. We intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things we rightfully hold dear . . . ” This line of thought has been used to sanction the US government’s ban on stem cell research in foetal tissue, but it also applies to the sense that death itself may be something we hold dear. It may be, in fact, exactly what makes us human.
“We love dying things, ” says Appleyard, “because that’s what we are. A plastic flower that lasts forever could never be as beautiful as a real one. Even the idea of a genetically modified flower gives you a slightly queasy feeling. If we were able to live for 1000 years or more, would we love novels, or paintings, or even people in the same way? The world as we know it would be swept away, and our species would become something else.”
It might also be that evolution has its own plans for our future. Professor Thomas Kirkwood of Newcastle University has spent a career studying the genetics of ageing, and found that life is already extending itself in increments less dramatic than the breakthroughs dreamt of by immortalists, but perhaps more worthy of immediate attention in our short time on Earth.
“Our lifespan, “is increasing, much to everyone’s surprise,” says Kirkwood. “Demographers predicted it would reach a ceiling in the 1970s, after we’d absorbed all the benefits of sanitation, immunisation, and the reduction of the infant mortality rate from the early 20th century. But life expectancy is proving even more malleable than anyone thought. In the West at least, more people are reaching an older age in better shape than any previous generation.
“The clock is not against us as we once thought it was. We need to temper our excitement about what isn’t currently feasible and celebrate the real successes. We need to translate those successes into improving and expanding the quality of life. On average, human lives are getting longer at a rate of five hours a day, and our great concern should be ensuring that those five hours are as well-spent by us as they could be.”
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