Man About Town
The Politics of Immortality
Jamie Pollock writes in praise of old age in the first post for Man About Town, the blog about politics and everything in between.
Rasputin lives. I saw him walking the streets of Cambridge, beard in hand, singing that Boney M song about himself. The mystic was telling everyone he was a healer, claiming that he could reverse the forces of aging and extend life for thousands of years.
I didn’t actually see Rasputin. But I did see Cambridge University’s heavily bearded Dr. Aubrey de Grey on CNN, claiming that regenerative medicine could one day reverse the effects of aging. According to him, the first person who will live to 1000 has already been born.
Aubrey de Grey was awarded his PhD for his theory that a few mutant mitochondria in our cells might explain why our bodies age, he now heads the SENS Foundation which seeks to research and develop anti-aging technologies or as De Grey is calling them, ‘Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence’. He claims that if we can combat what he has identified as the seven deadly causes of aging, we will be able to live indefinitely. Using the ‘Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence’ which he is developing, he argues that we are not far away from being able to achieve this.
In fact, De Grey is convinced that these strategies, some of which are already under clinical trials, will greatly extend the life expectancy of individuals alive today. His theory of ‘escape velocity’ dictates that the advancement of anti-aging technologies will mean that those individuals who constantly have access to state of the art medicine will stay alive long enough to see a cure for aging.
The plan includes such strategies as replacing cells which might be lost through diseases like Alzheimer’s, the prevention of mutations in chromosomes and mitochondria and the removal of ‘molecular garbage’ from cells. Dr. De Grey believes that by using techniques such as stem cell research and tissue engineering, we will be able to end aging- ‘rejuvenative medicine is simply the application of regenerative medicine to the problem of aging’.
As a bit of a Not-Sci, I am happy to leave the science to De Grey and his adversaries (of those, there are many). Quite the figure of controversy, the scientific community has not been particularly welcoming to the biogerontologist with a two-foot beard. Sherwin Nuland, professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine, has accused Dr. De Grey of ‘oversimplifying science’. Technology Review, a magazine sponsored by MIT, even offered a $20,000 prize to anybody who could prove that de Grey’s theory was “so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate.” There was no winner.
Dr. De Grey’s work is quickly gaining both funding and legitimacy. Actuaries are already warning businesses to consider the implications of the research on pension policies. You can even register your support and ‘join the cause’ on Facebook- ‘Once we reach 10,000 members, every one of us will donate $100 to defeat aging!’
But why? As we saw in Copenhagen, politics all too frequently stands in the way of positive scientific progress. But this is just ridiculous. Of course we should fund and celebrate medical advancement. Of course we should pay for medicine to help individuals suffering from the diseases which age brings and try our best to give everyone a good innings – that is the purpose of medicine. But a project to ‘defeat aging’ is something else. Let politics interfere.
Dr. De Grey promises us that ‘we can actually turn the biological clock backwards’. The project is not about preventing disease, but preventing aging. This is the ultimate manifestation of self-obsession, the absolute rejection of old age, the cowering away from death and the worst case of fomo.
The list of problems is endless. Dr. De Grey suggests that over-population could be resolved with the imposition of a choice between having children and living forever. Good luck. The world he proposes sounds solitary, stagnant and stale. It has been suggested that the problem of overpopulation caused by these medicines might coincide with other advancements such as the colonisation of space- an immortal race occupying another world, a journey to a land of eternal life where a race of demigods judge who joins their ranks. Science would have built the pearly gates.
I applaud the ambition and the ingenuity. But I do not believe that ‘curing aging’, as De Grey puts it, is something which should be pursued or encouraged. It devalues the immortality we achieve in passing on our genes to somebody truly young. It proposes the end of humanity, which has always been defined by the inevitability of death.
Perhaps a time will come when we’ll mock the normalcy of Benjamin Button, we’ll joke about the days when people used to die and we’ll despondently toast to the prospect of another happy millennium with people that just won’t go away. Count me out.
What a super blog! I laughed then cried. But mostly cried.
It is far too easy to romanticise something like aging, and so miss it’s true horror. After all, it is what we know. It is the way things have always been. It is natural. But natural does not always equal good, and there is nothing healthy or good about the destructive process of degenerative aging.
On the contrary, aging (which is the accumulation of cellular damage in our tissues) causes 100,000 deaths every single day, many of which occur after tortuous periods of prolonged suffering and indignity. Aging causes Cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease, Type II Diabetes, Stroke, Parkinson’s Disease, Arthritis, blindness, muscle wastage, and so on, and so on, and so on…
If you are against these things, you MUST be against aging as well, for they are literally one and the same.
Far from being an exercise in narcissism, the defeat of aging is a moral and humanitarian imperative, and now that success is a real possibility, we are positively obligated to pursue this research to the absolute best of our ability. To not do so would be to condemn thirty six million souls a year to a death that they might otherwise, if given the choice, opt to avoid.
And that’s what this is about in the end: Choice.
You, for example, have the right to choose not to avail yourself to regenerative medicine which would restore youthful function to your tissues and organs, thus preventing the onset of debilitating illness. You are free to make that choice, and to willingly face the inevitable onslaught of disease that will follow it. But others should not be denied that same freedom simply because you, and others like you, have made their decision for them.
Because you are quite right that, in years to come, society will look back in wonder at a time in which the human body was allowed simply to progressively degenerate and collapse at the cellular level, leading to decades of physical and emotional anguish, followed by certain death. But what you fail to realise is that it is the very ideas you have expressed here that will cause the most amazement.
Death doesn’t give life meaning. Life gives life meaning. It’s not cowardice to not want to die. It’s totally appropriate. It’s not self obsession to demand better for our loved ones than the suffering aging offers them. It’s an act of courage and compassion that befits the best in us.
Defeating aging is the most important humanitarian project occurring in the world today. The sooner we succeed the better. And may Heaven take mercy on anyone who would wilfully slow us down.