Oregon Humanities

Long for this World

If developments in science could extend your life by five or more healthy, vital years, would you opt in? Probably, right?

Ten weeks ago, my company took on a project for a New York publisher. A Pulitzer Prize winner had written a book about “the strange science of immortality.” The publisher knew that his resume would attract critical attention. They suspected, however—rightly, I thought—that the book would appeal to a much wider audience, not just readers of Bookforum and Scientic American. Life and death: topics get no more universal.

I proposed that instead of traditional marketing approaches, we instead get people talking about the subject. Not about the book, per se, but the subject: longevity.

Would you want those extra years?

We’re talking young years here, lengthening your physical prime. That’s the goal some biologists are after. Imagine, for instance, having the body of a thirty-five-year-old as you approach sixty. And assume for the sake of debate that your friends and family would live longer, too.

Now ask yourself: What if instead of five or six or ten extra years, medical advances allowed your body and brain to thrive for a hundred additional years? Or a thousand. Sounds absurd, but some gerontologists believe that it’s possible. Few expect that it will happen in our lifetime. In our grandchildren’s, it can’t be ruled out.

These are smart people we’re talking about, PhDs in biology and such. “Smart but cracked,” according to a funny writer I know whose grandfather will soon celebrate his hundredth birthday.

From earliest childhood, we’re conditioned to the prospect of mortality, bearing expiration dates seven or eight decades hence. Is it possible that we’ve merely closed our minds to the idea of extraordinarily long lives? Ask a child these questions and see how differently they respond. “I would want to live until a hundred and seventy,” my friend’s daughter told me. She’s six.

What do we ever know for sure? Once upon a time, flying across an ocean seemed preposterous, too.

At the center of Jonathan Weiner’s investigation in Long for This World, we meet Aubrey de Grey, a beer-drinking, fast-talking, keynote-giving scholar who has identified seven cellular fixes that collectively, in theory, would enable our bodies to regenerate indefinitely.

The logic behind de Grey’s argument is simple. He asks, Why do we accept aging? Why do we take for granted the general decay of our bodies while at the same time fighting specific modes of decay tooth and nail? Billions of dollars support research to combat cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes. We decry the loss of victims whose lives are cut short by disease. Dying “of natural causes” we count as some kind of victory. Death as blessed reprieve.

We don’t yet understand the ravages of aging, de Grey argues, but we’re learning at a startling rate. What’s at stake? “Thirty World Trade Centers a day,” as he puts it.

Weiner admits, “I felt sure that the conquest of aging was impossible.” He presumes that it could be achieved, however, to broach a more approachable question: whether we should cure aging. Feasibility versus desirability. Can versus ought. How would extending our lives indefinitely change us, Weiner wants to know, as individuals, as communities, as nations, and as a planet?

For weeks now, I’ve been interviewing friends, and friends of friends, and colleagues, and strangers at parties. Virtually everyone over thirty reflexively shrinks from the idea. “I get tired just thinking about it,” they’ll say. But soon a strange thing happens. They become animated. They ask someone nearby (or someone nearby approaches unsolicited, seeing arms waving or hearing a raised voice), and in this way the conversation continues.

Consider: Since 1900, the human life span has increased from 47 to 80 in developed countries. Better infant mortality rates are only one factor. Every day, our life expectancies increase by five hours, Weiner notes. (Existential punch cards: Live five days, get one free!)

Simply put, our lives continue to get longer and, together, we celebrate the news. These incremental gains we accept as our due. But living twice as long, or longer? We can’t wrap our heads around it. Somewhere between five years and five hundred, the ethics change.

Already, overpopulation may be the great global threat of our century. Could we possibly adapt to accommodate 200-year life spans? Would populations soar? Would birth rates plummet? Would generation gaps become untenable? (Try seeing eye-to-eye with your parents when they’re a hundred years older.) Would we stop taking risks with our bodies? Would suicide become commonplace? And would that be acceptable?

Could we cope with so much experience, witnessing war after war, tragedy after tragedy? And think of the power that could be abused, doling out the cure. “It seems like the premise for a dystopian science fiction novel,” commented a friend here in Portland, Alison, who’s twenty-seven. And then she laughed. “One that I would read, for sure.”

02 July 2010 | Posted by Dave Weich in Inside O. Hm. New Ideas
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