Immortality (9 page)

But the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Europe, with its newfound faith in reason, changed all that. This was when the modern scientific method emerged, promising previously undreamed-of knowledge. Its followers began to hope that they might surpass the achievements of the past, that the real utopia lay not in a long-gone golden age, but in the future. The scientific version of the Staying Alive Narrative therefore looks forward for inspiration, believing it is there that the Mount of the Immortals is to be found—and that the route to it is called “progress.”

The success of civilization comes from breaking down the problems that humans face and solving them one by one, using specialized tools and learned skills—so, for example, agriculture solves the problem of hunger, medicine of disease. We can see
progress
in these terms: as the breaking down of civilization’s problems into ever-smaller parts so as to provide ever-better and more specialized solutions. Once we lived in huts, but now we (in the developed world) have houses with air-conditioning and central heating; separate rooms for washing and cooking; and correspondingly complex property laws, building regulations and the like. Whereas in simpler societies, the problem of shelter was solved with a basic roof over one’s head, in developed countries houses address countless specific needs and eventualities.

In the past few centuries this form of progress has reached new heights through the effects of science and engineering. Science advances by systematically dividing and subdividing the world in the hope of achieving the fullest possible account of nature’s laws; engineering, broadly conceived, puts this newly won knowledge to work in solving our problems. The result is new forms of travel and communication, new drugs and prostheses—all the luxuries and benefits of the modern world. Material progress consists of exactly these engineering solutions, ever more specialized, solving ever-more-specific problems.

But one way or another, lurking behind all the problems we attempt to solve—disease, hunger, cold—is death. The possibility that they may kill us is what makes all these problems so problematic. Progress, therefore, means that we are better at diagnosing death’s many modes of attack and developing sophisticated defenses to fend them off. The most comprehensive of the surviving ancient Egyptian medical papyruses, for example, contains an impressive seven hundred afflictions and remedies, but the World Health Organization today recognizes over twelve thousand diseases—and counting. Ever-finer distinctions help us to make ever-finer treatments.

The scientific approach to the problem of death is therefore to break it down into increasingly specific elements and tackle them one by one. This piecemeal problem-solving strategy defines the modern narrative of how we might succeed in staying alive. I will call it the
Engineering Approach
to immortality. It provides both a story we can tell ourselves to assuage the fear of dying and also a genuine source of innovation that really is increasing life expectancy.

T
HE
Engineering Approach begins with an insight neatly summarized by Linus Pauling—that “life is a relationship between molecules.” Pauling firmly believed that humans and other living things are made of the very same stuff as stones, sea and sand, and obey the same laws. This is now the accepted view in the scientific community,
but it was only a few centuries old—and still controversial—when Pauling expressed it in 1962.

The great majority of traditional belief systems and religions have assumed that life requires some kind of vital spark to ignite it. Usually this magic stuff is a gift from God or gods; it might be equated with the soul or spirit, like the Egyptian
ka
; and it separates absolutely the living from the nonliving—men from mud, birds from rocks. But the pioneering philosophers and early scientists of the Enlightenment challenged this view, arguing that living things were natural phenomena, obeying the same rules that governed all matter. By careful study, they argued, we could understand those rules.

To the founders of the scientific method, from René Descartes to Nicolas de Condorcet, man was a machine. Therefore just as a good watchmaker could ensure that a watch continues to run perfectly, so the physicians would one day be able to keep humans in perfect working order indefinitely. By the time Condorcet was writing in the late eighteenth century, this link between science, progress and indefinitely extended lifespans was well established. If we employ the tools of reason, he argued, then “we are bound to believe that the average duration of human life will forever increase.”

If Condorcet, who died in the upheavals of the French Revolution, had lived longer, he would have witnessed something like the progress he described. Life expectancy in the France of his day, as in most of the rest of the world, was around thirty years. These people—your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents—lived in a world of grand cities and gunpowder, yet still their life expectancy was little better than that of cavemen. By the end of the nineteenth century, life expectancy had made the significant leap to over forty, as the scientific method began to be applied to questions of public hygiene and the practice of medicine. But then came the real breakthrough: if we fast-forward just a few more generations, children born at the end of the twentieth century in France, as in most of the
Western world, could expect to live to over eighty years of age. That is, in one century, life expectancy
doubled
. This is one of the most extraordinary achievements in history—without which there is a high chance that neither I nor you, dear reader, would be here.

A host of discoveries came together to make this leap possible. One of the most important was that deadly infectious diseases were caused by microbes—tiny organisms that could be spread through contaminated water or bodily fluids. This led to the development of the first vaccines, as well as huge programs of sanitation to clean up the stinking cities of the newly industrialized world. Combined with the discovery in 1928 of the antibiotic penicillin, this sent infectious diseases into rapid retreat: whooping cough, measles, diphtheria and scarlet fever, for example, together accounted for thirty-four thousand deaths in England in 1901, and exactly none in 2001.

Which means we who are alive today are very lucky indeed. Those born in a developed country in the second half of the twentieth century have a very high chance of living well into retirement age, a situation previously entirely unknown in the long history of our species. This was the first longevity revolution—the first real revolution in humanity’s attempt to transcend its natural limits and stay alive for longer. After countless thousands of years of trying in vain, in the last few generations humanity has finally managed to make measurable progress toward taming mortality.

No wonder, then, that the narrative that promises we can engineer our way to immortality is so prevalent: it has already produced very real results. The belief that death is an insurmountable problem is paralyzing: if death is certain and could come at any time, then what is the point in struggle or innovation? The belief that death is a set of solvable problems, on the other hand, is a great motivator: it encourages exactly the kind of research and development that brings progress and drives our civilization forward. Now every week come new breakthroughs in our understanding of cancer, heart disease
and countless other ailments. This progress is real and is lengthening lives, and every time we read about it, the promise that we can one day altogether eliminate aging and disease is renewed and made more credible. The Engineering Approach appears to be working.

T
HE
modern version of the Staying Alive Narrative is working because it focuses on the details, taking problems apart and analyzing them. But this approach has another benefit in addition to actually solving some of these problems: it also distracts us wonderfully from the first part of the Mortality Paradox—the awareness that we will die. By breaking mortality down into innumerable bite-sized problems, we all end up with a lengthy to-do list of tasks to keep ourselves busy, and so we go jogging, do yoga, watch our weight, read food labels for the right kind of fat, drink coffee or avoid coffee, drink wine or avoid wine, and so forth. Newspapers are daily full of such prescriptions. They give the illusion that mortality is something we can do something about—that it is in our hands.

The Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich called this the “medicalization of daily life.” The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has subsequently described it as the primary strategy of modern times for suppressing the fear of death. Following the Engineering Approach, we break death down into its individual manifestations—from salmonella to car accidents—and persuade ourselves that they are individually avoidable if we take the right precautions. “Keeping fit, taking exercise, ‘balancing the diet,’ eating fibres and not eating fat, avoiding smokers or fighting the pollution of drinking water are all feasible tasks,” wrote Bauman, “tasks that can be performed and that redefine the unmanageable problem … of death … as a series of utterly manageable problems.” And through pursuing those precautions, by avoiding smokers or keeping fit, we can avoid facing up to what Bauman calls “the great metaphysical futility of it all.”

For the most part, the ultimate goal of this strategy goes unstated; the promise of immortality is implicit in the illusion of control and the downgrading of death, fed by the continual stream of new cures and other innovations announced by the press. Our ever-expanding death-avoidance to-do lists successfully distract us from dwelling too long on the real prospects of the Engineering Approach. Only occasionally does the underlying promise come to the surface when the media declares once again that science is on the verge of finding an elixir of life.

But all such movements need their prophets and rabble-rousers to restore flagging faith and inspire the masses, and this version of the Staying Alive Narrative has a growing band. The most ardent of them claim not only that “medical immortality”—that is, immunity to aging and disease—is theoretically possible, but that it is attainable by those alive today, such as you and me. One prominent group of such believers goes by the name of “transhumanists,” so called because they believe we are entering a transitional stage in our development, evolving from mere humans into something far superior—posthuman immortals.

The transhumanists are an odd mix of engineers and ethicists, entrepreneurs and otherwise ordinary people. They are conducting experiments, writing pamphlets and lobbying governments in order to make their vision a reality. For the real advocates of the Engineering Approach believe that radically extending life is not only possible; it is our moral obligation.

They point out that around 150,000 people die worldwide each day—and of those, 100,000 die from age-related diseases. That is a body count the equivalent of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami or the 2010 Haiti earthquake every two days. When such tragedies occur the world pools its resources to ensure such massive loss of life never happens again. Yet we accept those hundreds of thousands who fade away because of aging. This must change, the transhumanists argue. If we believe it is right to save lives, then we should do
everything we can to save the lives of those being taken by infirmity and old age.

The transhumanists are aware, however, that the task is immense. No one even yet fully understands what causes aging. Indeed, it seems most likely that it is not one single process but a whole host of malfunctions and accumulated damage. This complexity means we will not in the near future invent a simple pill that stops aging in its tracks. Yet many of those who dream of conquering death are already feeling the first effects of time’s passing—they know that they cannot wait forever for the cure to come.

Fortunately, they believe they won’t need to. This is the beauty of the Engineering Approach: we do not have to win the war against aging all at once. The twentieth century already saw an additional forty years added to life expectancy in developed countries; perhaps, they argue, the next wave of breakthroughs will give us another forty. And in this time, we could be developing the technology that could buy us yet more decades; and in those decades, we could then achieve the breakthroughs that would give us another century—and so on, until the discovery is made that can grant us medical immortality. This is what the optimistic transhumanists describe as achieving “longevity escape velocity,” or living long enough to live forever.

T
HE
transhumanists have various strategies for breaking down the problems of mortality into manageable chunks. One prominent advocate, the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, has suggested that there are exactly seven problems that must—and can—be solved for humans to achieve indefinite youth. They are summed up in his “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” (“senescence” being a term for the deterioration caused by aging), a paradigmatic example of the Engineering Approach to immortality.

Like most people in his field, de Grey relies on technologies that are now in their infancy but whose promise seems immense—in particular genetics, stem cells and nanomedicine. Genetic engineering
should enable us to rewrite our bodies’ instruction books, ensuring many diseases that are now fatal never arise. Stem cells, which have the ability to develop into any kind of tissue, from skin to neurons, hold out the promise of growing healthy tissue to replace that which is diseased or worn out—even whole organs. And nanotechnology (engineering on the scale of atoms or molecules) gives hope of the ability to repair our bodies from the inside out using billions of tiny, targeted machines.

These technologies—especially genetics—are already starting to produce real results. As they steadily advance, they demonstrate the huge creative power of the Engineering Approach to the Staying Alive Narrative. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the belief that the problems of mortality can be solved is helping to make it so, as thousands of researchers dedicate themselves to finding new cures. As a consequence, life expectancy continues to rise, further confirming faith in the underlying narrative of progress.