When I heard immortality researcher Aubrey de Gray make the hubristic claim that funding his work to end human death was more important than funding health care for destitute Africa, and indeed, that failing to do so was equivalent to terrorism (about which I wrote here), he lost me as someone to admire, much less to follow. But his obsessive quest to defeat death continues to fascinate observers–perhaps because of his ZZ-Top looks and the hot gleam in his eye.
In any event the NYT Book Review reviewed a new book on the human immortality project yesterday that focuses on de Gray’s belief that we can reach immortality by “curing” aging (as he stated in the speech I attended), a quest about which the author–and reviewer, physician Abraham Verghese–apparently take a dim view. From the review of Long For This World: The Strange Science of Immortality, by Jonathan Weiner:
But as Weiner points out, there is a big problem with immortality. Traditionally, we have viewed our lives as unfolding in stages: Shakespeare’s seven ages of man capture our progression from infant to schoolboy to lover to soldier to justice to clown, ending finally in “second childishness and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Immortality could wind up being a terrible stasis. “A huge part of the action and the drama in the seven ages comes from the sense of an ending, the knowledge that all these ages must have an end,” Weiner writes. We might live forever in a state of unending boredom. And the technology might benefit the wrong people: “If biologists could have done for the dictators of the 20th century what they can now do for roundworms and flies — double their life span — then Mao Zedong might still be alive.”
As a young physician caught up in the early years of the H.I.V. epidemic, I was struck by my patients’ will to live, even as their quality of life became miserable and when loved ones and caregivers would urge the patient to let go. I thought it remarkable that patients never asked me to help end their lives (and found it strange that Dr. Kevorkian managed to encounter so many who did). My patients were dying young and felt cheated out of their best years. They did not want immortality, just the chance to live the life span that their peers could expect. What de Grey and other immortalists seem to have lost sight of is that simply living a full life span is a laudable goal. Partial success in extending life might simply extend the years of infirmity and suffering — something that to some degree is already happening in the West.
Think of the people you have known who died too young. Surely, our research dollars should be devoted to helping more of us reach the proverbial three score and ten rather than tilt at the human immortality windmill.
But even if the morbidity problem were solved, it seems to me that immortality would be unwise. It would cheat posterity of its chance on the stage and create a terrible and stultifying cultural inertia that would grind humanity to a reactionary halt. Moreover, as Leon Kass has oft noted, it could rob us of a meaningful life in the time we do have. The author of the book and reviewer agree:
Weiner brings his insightful book to a close with this thought: “The trouble with immortality is endless. The thought of it brings us into contact with problems of time itself — with shapeless problems we have never grasped and may never put into words. Our ability to exist in time may require our being mortal, although we can’t understand that any more than the fish can understand water. What we call the stream of consciousness may depend upon mortality in ways that we can hardly glimpse.”
I think that is right. Just look at the drive in Netherlands to allow euthanasia for elderly people who are healthy but just “tired of life.” I suspect that immortality would profoundly disappoint.
August 2nd, 2010 | 11:05 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stand In The Gap, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley J. Smith said: New Book on Unwise and Futile Human Immortality Quest » Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog http://shar.es/0nMJG [...]
August 2nd, 2010 | 5:32 pm
Immortality might be disappointing, but fortunately life is always going to be optional.
August 2nd, 2010 | 6:24 pm
As Susan Ertz famously said, “millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a Sunday afternoon”. Such a quest (as an end in itself) would indeed be both unwise and futile. However the scientific windmill against which de Grey tilts is, strictly speaking, not mortality but senescence (the process of age-related degeneration). If his goal were technically feasible (and there is no evidence that it is) it would be desirable. We would still be susceptible to infections, cancers, accidental deaths etc but our bodies wouldn’t experience the same degree of age-induced decline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence
August 2nd, 2010 | 6:57 pm
I have a suggestion. Let’s go ahead and develop radical life extension and then whoever becomes irreversibly bored, let them voluntarily end their lives. Everybody gets what they want.
August 3rd, 2010 | 8:34 am
Whether living forever would be a positive experience I can’t say but what I can say with certainty is I would like the opportunity to find out.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
August 3rd, 2010 at 9:49 am
DrJohnty: Why?
August 3rd, 2010 | 8:57 pm
You may be joking, kurt9, but that’s more or less the position of a lot of transhumanist types.
August 3rd, 2010 | 10:02 pm
The problem is, if the members of a species don’t die, then the species doesn’t evolve. There are some simple organisms that may be in effect “immortal” in that they completely regenerate over time, some jellyfish I believe. But it’s the old bit: you may live forever, but you’re still a jellyfish.
Side note: One of my favorite old sci-fi books is “Time Enough for Love” by Robert Heinlein, which dealt with the issues a 3000-year old man ran into, for instance, outliving everyone he knew every 70 years.
August 4th, 2010 | 2:35 pm
You may be joking, kurt9
I’m totally and 100% serious. It is impossible for this suggestion to be the least bit unreasonable.
Its funny. I actually agree with just about everything Wesley Smith posts on his blog, even the repro-genetics stuff. I just disagree with him on the radical life extension. I want to live forever young.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
August 4th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Why kurt9?
August 4th, 2010 | 3:31 pm
There is no doubt that technology will one day make us immortal but would require the defeat of disease and cell senescence. Immortality would be just one achievement of such a technological revolution and would include the unlimited power of IT, nanotechnology, biotech and robotics and we would manage our own evolution. The big news is that all those technologies are developing so rapidly that we are likely to achieve the technology required in twenty years. This is because the power of IT, the core technology is doubling in power every year and it has no limits. A cell-phone is a trillion times the power per £ of the most powerful computer in the world in 1965. The human genome project cost $3trn and took ten years. Craig Venter expects it to cost 1p and done in a minute in the 2020s and it is due to the power of IT. We will have limitless solar power, robots to make everything and technological things to excite the most jaded palate and eventually populate the moon and other planets. Life is not going to be boring and I do not think that losing my senses, mobility and brains with pain, suffering and slipping into decrepitude and death is good. We are the first generation that can realistically hope to live forever. I think we should go for it.
August 4th, 2010 | 10:35 pm
I work in IT, Rob Mason. I’ve spent my entire career there. The idea that we can solve all of humanity’s problems by throwing enough processing cycles at them is absurd, as is the idea that computing power will continue to increase exponentially forever. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a plateau in my lifetime.
August 5th, 2010 | 7:41 am
[...] Read more from The New York Times, August 01, 2010. About the author you can look here. A critical comment you’ll find in the blog of First Things magazine, August 02, [...]
August 22nd, 2010 | 9:55 pm
A very disappointing article.
The quest to defeat aging has nothing to do with immortality and everything to do with ridding the world of disease. Getting old is bad for you. It makes you sick. It makes you frail. It robs you of your memories and your identity. There is nothing good or romantic about it. That it also kills you is but the icing on the cake. I dream of a world where humanity no longer has to suffer the indignity and torment of Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, stroke, type II diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, macular degeneration, and so on and so forth. A world where all of humanity may be of able body and mind until the day they die. Defeating aging is essential of we are ever to live in such a place. How could ANYONE think a project with the potential to improve the quality of life of ALL of us is ‘futile’ or ‘unwise’?
I simply cannot begin to understand it.
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