Immortality Revisited

Back in high school, I had my first sleepless night contemplating mortality:  what happens when we die – Heaven? Hell? oblivion? - and the fact that (apparently) there is nothing we can do to stop it.  I managed to put that monster to sleep, for some time, but recently he woke up again.  My father’s sudden death in December 2004 probably did more than anything else to resurrect this monster.

 The mortality monster presented me with two additional blows, thought-wise.  1. I’m 39.  We usually think of age 50 as “middle age”, but that assumes a life expectancy of 100, well above the 75 year standard life expectancy for males in industrial nations such as the US.  By that token, I’m already middle-aged.  John Rutsey, the original drummer for Rush, recently died at age 55, meaning he was middle aged at 27, and was probably unaware of the milestone on his 27^th birthday.  2.  If we die eventually, what is the point of all our efforts?  Even our own children (if we have them) will eventually die, our grandchildren, etc. – our entire “line”.  All our possessions, our accomplishments, everything we worked so hard for all our lives, down to NOTHING, absolutely nothing, with the laziest slacker, the most productive saint, the prince and pauper, and the vilest of criminals and murderers all equalized in the oblivion of death.  It seems the happier our all-too-brief lives are, the more we have to fear the inevitable loss thereof that death will bring.  So the only solution to a fear of death is to have a life so dull, miserable, or even painful, that death is actually welcome and not feared.  Brilliant, we have two choices:  happy life with fear of death, or shitty life with no fear of death.  Is that it?

So it should come to no surprise that mankind has sought, for ages, immortality, whether in reality or fiction. 

Vampires.  One of the more glamorous, or horrifying, “solutions” to this topic, are vampires.  First Bram Stoker, then Bela Lugosi (Hungarian, not Romanian, though Transylvania qualifies as both), and most recently the “gay” vampires of Anne Rice (yes, I know that as “vampires” they’re not gay, but funny that Lestat seemed to prefer drinking the blood of male vampires almost exclusively...and the company of David Talbot).  Of course, vampires suffer the drawbacks of having to suck blood constantly and only go about at night, which cuts back on the usefulness of immortality.

Highlander.  “There can be only one.”  Personally, I was never a big fan of these movies, or the TV show.  Christopher Lambert, a French actor, portraying Connor McLeod, a Scotsman, whereas the true Scotsman, Sean Connery, portrays an Egyptian pretending to be a Spaniard (Ramirez).  No one ever seems to explain how these “Immortals” came to be so, or why there can be only one.  We just have to enjoy the Queen soundtrack and go along for the ride.   However, they were not vampires and could exist in daylight, with the only drawback being apparently sterile.  Is that it?? Hey, I’ll take that.

Futurama.  Matt Groening “solves” the mortality issue by time travel (Fry) and also keeping heads (not only brains) inside jars.  However, this sort of immortality would appear to be disturbing: the heads are sentient and conscious in real time, but cannot move under their own power.  The sole exception was when Nixon managed to buy Bender’s body from him.  This is all more of a ludicrous plot device to get contemporary celebrities into a time frame of the 31^st century.

I Will Fear No Evil.  Robert Heinlein, one of my favorite science fiction authors, took a stab in this direction in this book.  A Montgomery Burns type old man, filthy rich and obnoxiously misanthropic, manages to get his brain transplanted into the body of his young (female) secretary and experiences a second youth, albeit as a woman.  The fix turns out to be quite an adventure, though ultimately short-lived.

Time Enough For Love.  Heinlein clearly hits the mortality issue head on, and here he takes another stab, this time considerably more serious and actually (as discussed below) remarkably more plausible.  The Howard Families selectively breed for longevity, but also use certain periodic rejuvenation treatments which detoxify the body and reverse aging.  They therefore appear considerably younger than their chronological ages.  As noted in Methuselah’s Children, these treatments, though, are exclusively for the Howard Family group and not available to the population at large, which in that book forces the group to escape Earth to avoid uncertain – but certainly unpleasant – consequences at the hands of a jealous and angry population at large.  Lazarus Long is the most important, and longest-lived, member of the family.  Among other things he goes back in time to 1916, engages in a romantic and sexual relationship with his own mother, Maureen (the mother’s side of the story is told in To Sail Beyond The Sunset, Heinlein’s last book) and even volunteers (against his better judgment) for the AEF and goes off to France in 1917.  Time Enough For Love is one of the best of these series of books, as it has longevity/rejuvenation, time travel, Lazarus Long, and LOTS of sex.  The Cat Who Walks Through Walls also has many of the same characters, including a husband who discovers that his “younger” wife turns out to be a Howard old enough to be his grandmother.

Ending Aging, by Aubrey de Grey.  In my earlier blog, “Mein Kampf vs. O Alquimista”, I discussed immortality and decided, after some thought, that it must be theoretically impossible.  And the prior examples I gave are all fiction, so they had no hope of convincing me otherwise.  But it turns out that Heinlein was on to something.

            In this book, de Grey discusses various technologies to treat aging, and makes an astonishing series of arguments:
            A.  No one dies of “old age”, per se; we simply die of some disease or other brought about by either the overaccumulation of waste products in our cells or some disease which our weakened immune system could not defeat.  Therefore, defeating aging is twofold: attack and cure diseases (including cancer) and “throw out the trash”.
            B. He mentioned the Howard Family breeding, but clearly that was only half the story.  We’re not talking about merely slowing the aging process, but actually reversing it, by periodically eliminating waste inside cells which the body’s own system (lysosomes) cannot handle, and by replenishing dead cells, which the body cannot replenish itself, through stem cells.  Anyone who reads this book (myself included) will realize how important stem cell research is and how idiotic the opposition to it is.  Maybe Bush doesn’t want to live forever, but I certainly do.
            C. The fight against cancer is a major part of this.  Cancer, in various forms, is one of the most serious killers.  It basically involves mutant cells which overreproduce and crowd out normal cells.  De Grey’s proposed cure involves gene therapy to permanently switch off cells’ ability to reproduce (cancer cells as well as all others), which would have to be introduced after a person reaches some level of physical maturity, and combine this with stem cells to compensate for this.
            D.  At first the treatments will simply extend life; aging will still take its toll, though not as rapidly.  But eventually, possibly within the lifetime of people alive today, treatment of harder-to-fix damage will become practical, giving us what he calls “longevity escape velocity” (LEV), the ability to reverse aging indefinitely.  While he doesn’t want to scare people off by indulging in wild fantasies, let’s face it: LEV could more clearly be described as nothing less than IMMORTALITY, eternal youth.
            De Grey is a biologist, not a science fiction writer.  He certainly knows far more about this than I do, and far more than Heinlein, though from what I can recall, Heinlein had the basic ideas and principles but was light years away from the details.  My own experience in biology ended in high school, so I’m in a poor position to second-guess de Grey, let alone to pick apart the extensive research he cites.  For all I know it may be complete nonsense, each and every study cited taken out of context and deliberately misquoted – or completely fabricated.  Or perhaps he’s right, but simply overoptimistic about various details or the overall timing – they may discover immortality the day after I die (just so long as they discover resurrection!).  But de Grey has made an argument, at last, for real, true, eternal youth, in our lifetimes.  I’ll take false hope over no hope any time.