Somewhere
in the world today lives a child who will change everything. Imagine
this child is called Sally. Today is her 11th birthday. She lives in
Esher in Surrey. Her parents are happy and wealthy. All her
grandparents are old, alive and well.
I’ve given her this background for specific
reasons. Sally is a girl because women live about five years longer
than men. She is 11 because, at that age, she has successfully
navigated the diseases of childhood and her body has yet to endure the
effects of ageing. She lives in Esher because it is one of the high
life expectancy areas of one of the richest countries in the world.
Her parents are happy so they are less
likely to divorce and cause life-threatening stress to Sally. They are
wealthy because that means they can afford private medical care and
Sally will not have to take the appalling risk of attending an NHS
hospital. Finally, her grandparents lived a long time so the family has
a history of longevity.
In short, Sally’s life prospects are
optimum for a human child in 2005. According to current projections,
she can expect to live well into her eighties. But it’s not going to be
like that, because Sally is not going to die until 3194.
Hundreds of thousands of people die in
the world every day, two-thirds of them from ageing. Is this just life,
the way things must be, or is it a problem to be solved? If, as the
western tradition teaches, every human life is valuable in and of
itself, shouldn’t we be doing more to stop this appalling carnage? Or
should we, as the eastern tradition teaches, accept it as the eternal
becoming, samsara, or the veil of Maya, the illusion of existence?
Forget all that. This is what will happen
to Sally. When she is at university in about 2013 she will hear news of
an astonishing experiment performed on a mouse. A healthy two-year-old
mouse will have been subjected to numerous protocols to suppress the
division of cells and clean them of debris. In critical areas of cell
depletion such as the brain and heart, stem cell therapy will have been
used to rejuvenate the organs. Mitochondrial and chromosomal DNA will
have been manipulated to stop damaging mutations.
The experiment began in 2010. The mouse
is now five. Being an average mouse it should have died at three,
almost certainly of cancer. At the genetic level, mice are surprisingly
like humans.
Society is transformed by the news. In
response to public demand, medical researchers are flooded with
government money in the expectation that science is on the verge of
delivering massive human life extension if not the holy grail itself —
immortality. People begin to look after themselves fanatically, cutting
out dangerous sports, smoking, excessive drinking, all sugar and red
meat, and exercising daily. Everybody wants to live long enough to live
for ever.
And sure enough in 2035, when Sally is 41
and beginning to feel the effects of ageing that humans have lamented
throughout history, human rejuvenation becomes available. Privileged
Sally is the first in the queue. Soon she looks and feels no more than
30 and, as the years pass, continued therapy ensures that she never
ages. She has become, in fact, the first immortal.
But not, in the event, invulnerable.
Accidents can still happen. Back in the early years of the third
millennium an American biologist, Professor Steven Austad, studied
death rates among 11-year-olds, the age at which disease is the least
likely killer. On the basis of these figures, which included death by
accidents of varying degrees of improbability, Austad calculated an
“immortal” human was likely to live an average of 1,200 years.
And so, in 3194, blooming, youthful,
beautiful, 1,200-year-old Sally is strolling along Esher High Street. A
piano falls from a sixth-floor window and kills her. Sad, but never
mind, she had a good innings.
All of this — well, not the piano — is
exactly what Aubrey de Grey and an increasing number of scientists
around the world expect to happen. De Grey is a brilliant, self-taught
gerontologist at Cambridge. He is a 41-year-old cyclist with a 2ft
beard, enormous whiskers and a rapid, high-pitched voice that on first
contact is frankly terrifying.
He is in excellent health. He knows this
because he has had one of the most rigorous medicals in the world at
Kronos, an anti-ageing research institute in Phoenix, Arizona. But, in
case it all goes wrong and he dies, he has arranged for his head to be
frozen and stored by the Alcor cryonics facility in nearby Scottsdale.
It will be revived when the technology becomes available so that Aubrey
can go on talking.
He is generally regarded as the leading
theorist of anti-ageing technologies or, as he calls them, Strategies
for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He is convinced the first
thousand-year-old human has already been born. He is convinced because
of his theory of “escape velocity” which, he says, almost nobody has
taken into account.
Future life expectancies are usually
calculated on the basis of extrapolations from the past. Life
expectancies soared in the 20th century largely because of the
reduction of infant mortality, improved sewage systems and the
development of antibiotics. Clearly there cannot continue to be such
huge changes, but demographers make cautious forecasts of increases in
life expectancy by extrapolating underlying trends. De Grey snorts.
“Extrapolation is complete nonsense. I
call these demographers Extrapaholics Anonymous. They know perfectly
well that it’s all guesswork.”
“Escape velocity” is the opposite of
extrapolation. Say, for example, we manage to extend life expectancy by
30 or 40 years. This is not inconceivable even within the limitations
of present medical knowledge. Increasing numbers of people in the
developed world are living to 100 and beyond. If we simply improve
people’s behaviour and treatment consistently, many more will live to
about 120, the age generally accepted as the maximum for humans beings.
And if stem cell therapy works, they will live clear-headed, without
the effects of Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.
At that point de Grey’s theory kicks in
because, if you do live that long and scientific knowledge continues to
expand at its present rate, then you will almost certainly live a lot
longer. In other words, the first 150-year-old is quite likely also to
be the first 1,000-year-old.
So how will this happen? De Grey has
seven strategies of Engineered Negligible Senescence — replacing cells
that are lost, for example, through Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s,
stopping cells that multiply as in cancer, preventing mutations in
chromosomes and mitochondria, the cells’ power plants, removing junk
from inside cells and from outside and, finally, getting rid of
“extracellular protein crosslinks” which cause hardening of the
arteries. Find ways of doing all seven and nobody need ever die again.
“We have a pretty good idea of how to fix
all of them,” says de Grey, “and some of the fixes are already in
clinical trials. The beauty of it is that we don’t have to fix all of
them completely. For example, we don’t have to clear all the junk out
of the cells, just enough to stop its ageing effects.”
Cancer, he admits, is the tough one. Even if we
cured all other diseases of ageing, life expectancy would not increase
radically simply because cancer would strike us down in the end. De
Grey has a complex anti-cancer strategy that is now being studied
around the world.
The central conceptual element in this approach is that the
human body is a machine which can be fixed. This was not, until
recently, widely accepted. Either the body was not viewed as a machine
or it was seen as a particular type of machine that was programmed to
fail. The physicist Geoffrey West, for example, calculates that 120 is
the maximum age for a human being by comparing us with other creatures.
Biological systems simply cannot sustain themselves beyond a certain
point.
The genes that specify maintenance functions — DNA repair,
antioxidant enzymes, stress proteins — weaken in their effects. Disease
finally strikes us down. The soma — the body — is disposable. But the
point is we do not die, we are killed.
“There is no in principle reason why we should die,” says John
Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester University. “Tom Kirkwood
was largely responsible for changing our view that ageing and dying
were programmed into us as part of the evolutionary process.”
As Kirkwood puts it: “Maximum lifespan is not clock-driven but
malleable, eg through modifying exposure to damage or enhancing somatic
maintenance functions.” The body, in short, can be fixed.
The idea is, in medical terms, revolutionary; in social,
political, psychological, philosophical, economic and even aesthetic
terms it is earth-shaking, transformative, unimaginable in its
implications. In a nutshell, it signals the end of the human.
Death has always defined us. The first creatures to laugh,
said Vladimir Nabokov, were also the first creatures that knew they
were to die. Self-awareness means, above all, awareness of one’s own
ultimate extinction. But, as La Rochefoucauld pointed out in the 17th
century, looking directly at death is like staring at the sun. It
cannot be done.
And so conscious creatures have always embarked on elaborate
programmes of death denial or death justification. Even the
Neanderthals decorated their graves and positioned the corpses as if
for another life. The great religions promised immortality in another
realm or as part of the great wheel of existence. In fact, as the
philosopher Roger Scruton has pointed out, all human civilisation might
be defined as an attempt to give meaning to death.
In our day, civilisation might be defined not as giving
meaning to death but as a desperate attempt to defer it. Staying young
is our religion, and every health, cosmetic or diet fad offers just
that. The rise of individual, as opposed to collective thinking, has
inspired the conviction that the extinction of the individual is the
only conceivable evil.
Furthermore, science has relativised death. Death used to be
defined as the moment the heartbeat and breathing stopped. But then it
was found that people could be revived from this condition, so the
concept of brain-stem death was introduced. Now even this turns out to
have uncertainties. Death, apparently, is no more than the moment when
current medical competencies expire. Perhaps, in fact, death is
optional.
Oddly, men fight for this idea more than women. Research by
the psychologist Professor Sarah Hampson has shown that, in extremis,
men are the sex that most clings on to life. Only 25% of women say they
want radical interventions — resuscitation, ventilation, tube-feeding —
to save their lives; 75% of men demand such actions as their right.
Perhaps this is why men are the leaders in immortality research. But
what will it all mean?
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” cries Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Mortals” just means people. That’s what we are, things that die.
But if we don’t die, what are we? Not human. Thinkers like
Francis Fukuyama have argued that the destruction of human nature would
be a catastrophe. Medical interventions aimed at immortality are,
therefore, a potential source of evil. Others, like John Harris, argue
that there is nothing so great about being human.
“I don’t think it’s important to be human. I have no
attachment to my species membership. We know we’re descended from a
small number of apes. If they’d got together and decided not to evolve
into us, we’d not be here talking about this. There’s no reason why we
should not evolve into something else.”
And yet some argue that the pursuit of immortality is deeply
irrational. Leon Kass, an American biochemist and philosopher, points
out that even if our bodies last for a thousand years or more our
memories won’t. There will be no psychological continuity. We will
still, in a sense, suffer extinction because our first self will change
into a second and so on.
But Harris says: suppose we go through three selves — A, B and
C. C can’t remember being A but can remember being B just as B can
remember being A. There is a continuity, therefore, and it is much the
same as the one in our lives now. We cannot remember being, say, three
with any accuracy, but we know we were three and we have evidence —
photographs, the memories of others — to prove it. Immortality may be
strange, but not necessarily that much stranger than the lives we now
live.
All of which is in the distant future. Closer at hand is the
immediate impact of these new technologies on individuals and society.
“It will be total mayhem,” says de Grey of the moment when
people realise that mouse experiments suggest immortality may soon be
available.
“It will cease to be just me saying this sort of thing: all my
colleagues will be agreeing that serious extension of the human healthy
lifespan is foreseeable. No one will want to stay in risky jobs. But
the biggest thing of all is that people will behave as in wartime. It
will be a true war on ageing with everyone’s first priority being to
end the slaughter.
“It will mean voting huge expenditure to expedite the
remaining science to translate the technology from mice to humans, but
also voting even bigger expenditure to train the staggering number of
medical personnel to administer the therapy when it arrives. That’s why
there will be no expense problems; the money will have already been
spent, by governments, before the treatments are even developed.”
In other words, de Grey thinks most of the social problems
will be solved by the time the technology arrives. He also thinks that
at that point people will have to choose between living for ever and
having children. Clearly they can’t do both as the population explosion
would be huge.
He regards the imposition of such choices as reasonable.
Others, however, believe the impact of immortality therapies would be
to widen the gap between rich and poor and create intolerable global
frictions. We are already facing the possibility of resource wars over
water and oil; imagine the ferocity of the conflict if the resource in
question was immortality.
On a lighter but no less gripping note, de Grey’s timescale
presents a nice problem for a very spoilt generation, the babyboomers.
This population bulge, caused by the increasing number of births after
the second world war, covers people aged roughly between 50 and 60. If
it is to be 30 years before immortality technology becomes available,
this most pampered generation in human history might also be the last
generation to die. They got their decaff lattes but they didn’t get
eternal life. It is hard not to laugh.
Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman are babyboomers in their
mid-fifties and both have decided they want to live for ever. Their
book describing how to do it — Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to
Live Forever — is to be published here in May. A three-step process is
involved. The last step will be the advent of nanotechnology, when
molecular-sized robots will run and repair our bodies continuously. The
second step will be biotechnology — for example, the benefits of stem
cell research, which are currently at least a decade away. But the
first step is what you have to do now to stay alive.
It doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs. Kurzweil takes 250 supplements a day and spend one whole day a week at a clinic.
“Whereas some of my contemporaries may be satisfied to embrace
ageing gracefully as part of the cycle of life, that is not my view. It
may be ‘natural’, but I don’t see anything positive in losing my mental
agility, sensory acuity, physical limberness, sexual desire, or any
other human ability. I view disease and death at any age as a calamity,
as problems to be overcome. Until recently there was relatively little
that could be done about our short lifespan other than to rationalise
this tragedy as actually a good thing.”
Immortality or even just extreme longevity is, in this
context, such a supreme goal that babyboomers in the dangerous fifties
may be willing to pay for it by the extreme measures taken by Kurzweil
and Grossman. After all, if the alternative is mere extinction, what
choice do these secular, materialist individualists have?
It is a hard question to answer. Almost any of the traditional
answers would be dismissed as deluded mythologies — attempts “to
rationalise this tragedy as a good thing” — constructed in the face of
what we took to be the inevitability of death. If death is not
inevitable, all such mythologies becomes meaningless. We will no longer
be foolish mortals, but wise immortals. We will no longer be human, we
will have become the gods we have aspired to be ever since 1609 when
Galileo proved the church’s astronomy wrong and human reason right.
Only accidents — the falling piano, the hurtling asteroid — will remain
to thwart our pretensions.
Welcome to immortality, the last consumer good, available soon at your local pharmacy.
HOW TO LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO LIVE FOREVER: THE 13-STEP APPLEYARD PROGRAMME
1 Don’t even think about smoking and, preferably, don’t hang glide.
2 Eliminate sugar to lower blood insulin
levels. Use stevia as a sweetener. It is a South American plant that is
both very sweet and good for you.
3 Don’t eat any animal fats. Government
guidelies tend to say cut these down, but they probably only say this
because they think it’s the best people can manage. No saturated fat at
all is probably best.
4 Eat lots of vegetables that grow above
ground. Those below ground are heavy in carbohydrates that turn into
sugar and raise insulin levels.
5 Don’t overdo the fruit. Contrary to popular
wisdom it’s not unconditionally good as it contains sugar. Non-drinking
Arabs and Indians who sit around sipping orange juice all day end up
with diabetes.
6 Eat nuts. For incompletely understood reasons, people who eat nuts live longer. Not salted peanuts, however (see 7).
7 Don’t salt things. Salt raises blood pressure
and will kill you through a stroke or heart attack. For this reason,
don’t touch processed food.
8 Don’t have heart bypass surgery or have a
stent installed to hold a blocked artery open. Latest figures suggest
neither works. People who live longer after them probably do so because
the shock made them eat better and exercise more.
9 Have a massive medical assessment, preferably
at Kronos in Phoenix, Arizona, to establish what you are doing wrong
and, if possible, what genetic weaknesses you have. Continue these
assessments throughout your life and adjust supplements accordingly.
Read all the latest medical journals to keep up.
10 Exercise vigorously and daily but don’t run. Running is bad for your skeleton.
11 Take a child’s aspirin once a day to thin
your blood and a much larger dose before you get on a plane. Ideally,
don’t get on a plane.
12 Eat very little. Rats on restricted diets
live longer but it is not known if this would damage humans —
particularly their brains. So if you forget what 2+2 equals, eat more.
13 Ignore all of the above. They may be wrong and, if a piano falls on you, pointless.
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1522606_1,00.html
