Immortality (10 page)

The most ardent transhumanists paint a picture of a world in which humans are fully transformed, like the Taoist sages after drinking the elixir. They argue that there is no real difference between preventing disease and enhancing our bodies to become stronger and cleverer. The same technologies that might enable us to triumph over decay will be exactly those technologies that offer superhuman powers: the interventions that, for example, could save our fading senses could also give us X-ray vision; the therapies that allow us to cure muscle wasting would allow each of us to become as strong as Hercules.

Even more revolutionary will be our ability to remodel our gray matter. Researchers believe we will soon be able to control our attention, emotions and appetites. Some transhumanists argue that nanobots be used not only to heal disease and halt aging but to literally expand our minds: within a couple of decades we might be able to supplement the hundred trillion or so existing neuronal connections in our brains with vast armies of nanobots, exponentially
increasing our powers to remember, reason and create. Such implants could also be wirelessly connected to each other and to the outside world: we would control computers simply by thinking about it—which, given that all complex objects will soon be computer driven, will mean everything from flicking TV channels to driving the car. We would be effectively telepathic—communicating with each other over vast distances by thought alone and surfing the Internet in our heads.

This, dream the futurists, is the point at which humans and their technology will become effectively indistinguishable. At this point our ability to take hold of our biological destinies will, they believe, take off exponentially. As we use enhancements to become cleverer, new discoveries will become easier and we will be able to design computers and machines that are ever more powerful, which in turn will lead to further enhancements. Before too long we will reach an apotheosis they call
superintelligence
—the point at which some person or device or combination thereof becomes so phenomenally clever that its understanding of the physical universe is effectively total. At that point, everything would become possible: it is the last thing we would ever need to invent; after that, it (or he or she) would be able to do all the work for us, not least answer the little question of how to live forever.

S
UCH
fantasies of cyborgs and supermen are hugely prevalent in popular culture, reflecting the widespread narrative that we are on the verge of transcending these mortal frames. Of course, not everyone is comfortable with this idea, and it has many outright critics. Many of these subscribe to alternative immortality narratives that could be threatened by the Engineering Approach, such as religions that teach that bodily death is decreed by God for a reason. But when it comes to assessing the plausibility of the Staying Alive Narrative,
it is the attacks from within science itself that are the most damaging.

The transhumanists believe that science is on their side—that it has shown that we are reparable machines and already granted us decades of extra life. But science has other lessons to teach us, not all so optimistic. The progress of the Engineering Approach to immortality has not been as smooth as some would like to think—indeed, it keeps running into one very determined foe. His name is Tithonus.

According to ancient Greek legend, Tithonus was a youth so handsome that he was kidnapped by Eos, goddess of the dawn, to be her lover. Terrified at the prospect of his one day dying, Eos begged Zeus to make Tithonus immortal like her. This the god did; but Eos had forgotten to ask that her lover also be granted eternal youth. As he aged, Tithonus lost all his strength, becoming weak and demented. When all he could do was babble, Eos in desperation turned him into a cicada, forever alive but calling for death.

The Tithonus problem is that we are succeeding in postponing death but are still being struck down by debilitating illnesses. By allowing people to live into very old age, we are unleashing a host of diseases that were once rare, such as dementia, and by relying on technology that can postpone death, we are able to keep people alive who are suffering from terrible sickness and senescence. The result is not a utopia of strong-bodied demigods but a plethora of care homes and hospitals filled with the depressed, the diseased and the incontinent old.

T
HE
transhumanists believe that if we have doubled life expectancy once we can do it again—and again. But this is not as straightforward as it sounds. The breakthroughs behind the first longevity revolution mostly prevent people from dying when young. Just a few generations ago, one in five babies died in their first twelve months—in western Europe that number is now fewer than one in two hundred. This has an enormous impact on life expectancy figures, which
are based on calculations of average lifespans—dying young really brings down the averages. It is (relatively) easy to add eighty years to the life of a baby; once you have fended off infections, nature is on your side. A second longevity revolution, however, would require adding eighty years to the life of an eighty-year-old. And that comes at a much higher price.

In recent times, life expectancy in the developed world has continued to increase at the rate of about two years every decade—i.e., those born in 1990 could expect to live two years longer than those born in 1980. But only
one-quarter
of this additional time is spent
healthy
. In other words, of those additional two years, eighteen months are spent in ill health or disability. We are living longer, but we can all expect to spend many of those extra years unable to wash or dress ourselves, unable to recognize loved ones, our senses fading and our strength gone.

The brutal fact is that increasing survival rates from the deadly infections of the past means keeping people alive long enough to develop the much more lingering diseases of modernity. In the developed world, one-third of people will develop cancer in their lifetimes, while a third can also expect to suffer from some form of serious dementia such as Alzheimer’s before they die. This is not what the gung-ho transhumanists dream of when they claim science can defeat death—but it is the nightmare reality. It is not so much living longer as just dying slower.

Some researchers believe that these debilitating diseases like cancer and dementia cannot be separated from aging itself—that they are really just symptoms of the deep underlying degeneration. One demographer calculated that curing all forms of cancer would only add around three years to life expectancy, as by the time we reach the age at which cancer usually strikes, our bodies are already failing in myriad other ways. And even if we found cures for cancer, heart disease and stroke—currently the three biggest killers in developed countries—life expectancy would only push up to just over ninety
years. We tell ourselves that we get these diseases only because we do not eat enough fruit and vegetables or do enough exercise. But the reality is we get them because, unlike most of our forebears, we live long enough to suffer the full effects of our bodily systems collapsing. Therefore even if we find cures for these killers, our bodies are already going into shutdown.

W
HY
is it that science seems unable to bring health and happiness to those whose lives it has rescued? The answer most likely has much to do with the nature of aging itself. Traits that manifest themselves in an organism only after it has reproduced will not be weeded out by natural selection. So, for example, a mouse might have genes that make it particularly strong and frisky but highly susceptible to colon cancer in old age. Being strong and frisky, the mouse is likely to successfully pass on its genes in abundance. If it makes it to old age, it will however die of colon cancer. But by the time it dies, there will already be lots of little mice running around carrying its genes. So, even though those genes carry a cancerous death sentence, they will not be weeded out by natural selection. This applies not only to genes that promote cancer but to any genes that have negative effects only after a creature has reproduced.

Therefore, over millions of years, a veritable genetic junkyard has arisen, full of unsorted, useless and downright dangerous genes that nature has allowed to stay in place. As we pass our reproductive age, these genes kick in, undermining our defenses and bringing disease—in other words, we begin to crumble. To try to keep us indefinitely healthy is like trying to hold together a statue that is turning to dust.

Making the repair job even more difficult is the fact that some genes seem to have a positive effect when an organism is young but a negative one when it is old. For example, our genes allow us to make essential vitamin D by exposing our skin to sunlight, but over time the exposure to the sun’s UV rays causes skin cancer. More
worrying still, some researchers believe that we have genes that are essential for energy production and that at some point in our evolutionary history made us significantly stronger and faster—but only by producing toxins (free radicals) that slowly accumulate in the body until in old age they become fatal. If the accumulation of damage to our various bodily systems is an inevitable by-product of their normal functioning, then aging will have no easy fix—there will be no molecular switch that can be flicked without turning ourselves off altogether.

As our understanding of our bodies grows, the immortality engineers’ to-do list is therefore getting longer rather than shorter. The prescription for their elixir of life becomes ever more complex: cut back on fats, except omega-3; on alcohol, but not red wine; on bad cholesterol, but not good. One leading transhumanist, the respected inventor Ray Kurzweil, describes taking 250 supplements per day, a diet that would have made even the elixir-obsessed First Emperor balk. All of this might succeed in distracting us from the brute fact of our mortality, but it will not cure us of it.

For centuries, many talented researchers have pursued the secret of aging—and believed they had found it. When Linus Pauling was a boy, sex hormones were considered the thing: one Paris-based medical professor had claimed to have turned back his biological clock by injecting himself with crushed dogs’ testicles; another became rich and famous by grafting slices of monkeys’ balls onto the private parts of aging millionaires with the claim it would make them twenty years younger. None of these methods have stood the test of time and rigorous trials. Although we might hope for the contrary, we should not be surprised if currently fashionable cure-alls prove to be just as disappointing.

Science holds out the abstract promise that we are molecular machines that can be kept on the road indefinitely. But this is as unlikely to become reality as all other utopian dreams. The odds are stacked high against unlimited lifespans. This is not to say that we should not
keep trying: life is precious—we should support the research that buys us a few more years. But life lived in good health is even more precious, so we should be wary of technology that promises to make a Tithonus of each of us—prolonging death but at the price of misery and decrepitude—and we should support the policies and research that make our last years more likely to be happy ones.

There will surely be significant further advances in medicine, and perhaps one day we will all expect to live as long as the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, the longest-lived person whose dates have been verified. But even 122 years and 164 days is still a long way from infinity.

L
INUS
Pauling was a pioneer of the Engineering Approach to immortality, a bold thinker who saw the enormous potential of the new sciences to bring health and longevity to the human race. But Pauling’s vision did not only cover the benefits of science—he was also very much aware of the terrible risks posed by the headlong advance in mankind’s ability to reshape the world. Indeed, this is what motivated his first sortie out of the laboratory and into the world of politics—one that made him just as many enemies as his later conversion to vitamin C.

Having labored diligently for the war effort, Pauling was horrified on the morning of August 7, 1945, when he picked up the daily paper to read “Tokyo Admits Atomic Havoc” and the details of a single bomb that had obliterated an entire city. He was deeply affected by the scale of the destruction—not least because he had been asked to lead the chemistry division of the project to develop the atomic bomb, turning it down only because of his many other commitments. When he was invited the following year by Albert Einstein to form the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an elite group who would alert the public to the dangers of nuclear
technology, he immediately accepted and began speaking out against atomic weapons testing.

But this was the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was convinced that Soviet sympathizers were working to undermine America; as a prominent scientist speaking out against nuclear weapons, Pauling could not hope to escape his attentions. Just ten days before Pauling was due to attend a symposium in his honor organized by London’s prestigious Royal Society in 1952, he was told by the U.S. State Department that he would not be granted a passport: the House Un-American Activities Committee had declared him a supporter of the “Communist peace effort.”

It is a nice irony that if Pauling had been allowed to travel to England in 1952 he would most likely have visited the laboratory of a certain young researcher, Rosalind Franklin, at King’s College, London, who was producing detailed images of DNA crystals. Pauling was at the time attempting to deduce the structure of DNA—a fact that, when they heard it, almost made the Cambridge University team including Francis Crick and James Watson give up immediately. But, unlike Pauling, Crick and Watson had seen Franklin’s crucial images and so were able to work out the now-famous double helix structure—a huge leap forward and triumph of the Engineering Approach. It is likely that if Pauling had been allowed to travel, he would have beaten them to it: by denying him a passport, the U.S. government ironically prevented one of the great achievements of twentieth-century science from being claimed by America.