Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  Sentaro was also far removed from his family and friends. To outlive everyone one knows and loves—even one’s own children—could easily be seen as a curse. This is the situation of the heroine in Karel Capek’s 1922 play The Makropulos Affair: she alone has the secret to the elixir of life. Like Sentaro, after three hundred years, she has had enough: nothing interests her, she has lost all passion; the men she once loved have grown old and died, and their young replacements seem absurd; she is beyond even boredom. In visions like Capek’s, the immortal is an outcast, envied and loathed and misunderstood by mortals.

  But we need not imagine such a lonely existence; many of those hoping or expecting to live forever are banking on there being enough elixir for everyone—or at least everyone they like. A society of immortals would of course need to be very different from this one: relationships—especially marriage—would have to adapt; study, work and retirement would take on different meanings. But humans are adaptable: we already take current life expectancy, historically exceptionally long, entirely for granted, and within a generation we have become so used to the revolutionary technologies of the Internet and mobile communications that we can barely imagine life without them. Those who seek a modern elixir—and we will see in the next chapter that they are many—are therefore optimistic that we will take immortality in our stride.

  When we dream of the elixir, we are dreaming of the familiar fairy-tale ending: “and they lived happily ever after.” But the Sentaro story tells us that we cannot take this for granted; there is much to be gained by death’s infinite postponement, but we need to look carefully at the price tag. We are driven to pursue unending life but not to ask where this drive is taking us. In the chapters to come, we will examine these costs and benefits in the context of the four immortality narratives and ask whether they would deliver the kind of eternity that we might want.

  THE QUICKSILVER SEA

  THE First Emperor was untroubled by doubts about immortality’s desirability: ruling all under heaven seemed an occupation with which he could happily continue for a long time to come. When we left him, he was standing on a beach, crossbow in hand, waiting to kill the sea demon that stood between him and eternal life. But all he managed was a few potshots at some sharks hauled in by his sailors—the demon, it seems, eluded him. As he returned inland toward his capital in 210 BCE, aged only forty-nine, he fell seriously ill and died.

  But while quaffing unsavory tonics and sending off expeditions in the search for the true elixir, the First Emperor had also been busy constructing a Plan B. For years, a staggering seven hundred thousand laborers, mostly convicts fallen foul of his draconian legal system, had been working on the complex that was to be the emperor’s tomb. Contemporary sources say that a replica of the entire empire was created underground in bronze, with China’s great rivers reproduced in flowing mercury that ran perpetually into a quicksilver sea, ever renewed by magical mechanisms. Above, the heavenly constellations were reproduced, representing the emperor’s status as ruler of the cosmos. The whole was guarded by automatic crossbows that would shoot dead anyone who approached.

  The First Emperor’s successor—a younger son whose reign was to prove brief—ordered that all his father’s concubines who had not borne a male child should be killed and buried with their master. They were soon followed by the craftsmen who had built the tomb’s defenses and therefore knew the whereabouts of its treasures. “Those who died were extremely numerous,” say the records. They were all buried with their king, then the tomb was sealed, covered with earth and planted with trees to disguise it as an ordinary hill.

  The emperor was following tradition in building his own tomb, though the scale was unprecedented. It is difficult to know if he believed he could live on in his replica empire—his words and deeds show clearly that he first and foremost strove to avoid physical death, in keeping with Taoist practice. But for anyone following the Staying Alive path, a Plan B is only prudent, and as we saw with ancient Egypt, it is by no means unknown for cultures to have multiple coexisting immortality narratives. According to Chinese traditions, what happened to spirits of the deceased depended much on proper burial and ritual. The First Emperor, if he was to go into the void, had every intention of going in the style to which he was accustomed.

  For centuries the extravagant accounts of this giant tomb were considered apocryphal. The mound beneath which the tomb was hidden was well-known to locals, but superstition and the legend of the deadly traps kept them away. Then in 1974 a few peasants began to dig a well about one mile from the mound itself. To their surprise, they broke through into an underground chamber. Staring back at them was a Qin soldier.

  This soldier was made of terracotta, and so far a further eight thousand of his comrades have been found. All are life-sized, intricately molded and as individual as their models in life. The terracotta army, as it is now known, is one of the most sensational finds of the last century and is widely recognized as on a par with the wonders of the ancient world. But what is perhaps more wondrous is that this great army represents only a tiny fraction of the enormous burial complex—a fraction that contemporary records did not even deem fit to mention when compared to the other treasures.

  The complex covers an extraordinary fourteen thousand acres and includes pits with terracotta administrators, acrobats, chariots and even a menagerie. The army guards the entrance to the tomb’s outer wall, which is nearly four miles long. The ongoing excavations are likely to continue to uncover treasures for decades to come; the main tomb itself has not yet been opened for fear that its contents cannot yet be properly preserved—and perhaps for fear of the automatic crossbows. But preliminary scans of the soil have revealed unusually high levels of mercury, suggesting the ancient account of a quicksilver sea is true.

  But how did the First Emperor, who had the finest physicians of the day at his disposal and who followed a strict regimen designed to promote longevity, come to die at such a relatively tender age? The court sorcerers and doctors blamed his punishing work schedule—even while traveling, he would not rest until he had worked through some sixty-six pounds of state documents per day. This control-freakery, they thought, was blocking the beneficial effects of their medicines.

  With the benefit of hindsight, however, we can take a different view. From near-contemporary sources we know many of the ingredients that were used by the physicians and sorcerers to make their elixirs. For those who could afford them, the core ingredients were such incorruptible elements as gold, mercury and jade. Other common components included sulfur, lead and orpiment, a compound of arsenic with a striking golden color. The First Emperor’s daily dose of vitamins and minerals would therefore have induced any of mercury, lead or arsenic poisoning, and possibly all three. Symptoms would have ranged from headaches, bellyaches, sweating and seizures to insomnia, irritability and paranoia—traits he seems to have demonstrated in abundance. It seems the only time his doctor successfully managed to extend the First Emperor’s life was when he blocked the Yan assassin’s knife with his medicine bag. Contrary to their promise, his potions had proven to be elixirs of mortality; it was the emperor’s quest to stay alive forever that killed him.

  • • •

  IT was to be another two thousand years before the search for the elixir of life was put on a firm scientific footing: many believe that now, for the first time in history, we stand before the prospect of defeating aging and disease. Our chances of staying alive indefinitely have never looked better. The man responsible sacrificed his double Nobel Prize–crowned career in the process yet profoundly shaped our health-obsessed age. It is to him we now turn.

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  THE VITAMIN CURE

  SCIENCE VERSUS THE REAPER

  THE doctors said she was dying. The cancer was eating Ava Helen from the inside out; the hemorrhages were becoming more frequent. But Linus Pauling believed he could save her. He was after all the inventor of molecular biology, the winner of two Nobel Prizes and author of the boo
k Cancer and Vitamin C, arguing that megadoses of vitamins could slow, halt or even cure the Western world’s most dreaded disease. And Ava Helen was his wife. Now she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer; fate was daring him to test his theories.

  Ava Helen refused chemotherapy and, on her husband’s advice, increased her intake of vitamin C. Pauling’s views had been lambasted in both the scientific journals and the press. He had once been the star of American science, but as his claims for the benefits of vitamins grew ever wilder—that they could ward off cancer and help us live to 150—he found himself increasingly isolated. His scientific papers on the subject were rejected by the journals; his laboratory space was taken away; he was lampooned in the media as a senile old has-been.

  Pauling added raw fruits and vegetables to his wife’s diet; he made fresh juice for her from tomatoes and carrots. Her hemorrhages were growing worse and she needed ever more blood transfusions, but he was convinced that the enormous doses of vitamins would work a miracle. They had to: his personal and professional lives—his whole world—were at stake.

  THROUGH his enormous energy and intellect, Linus Pauling helped shape the century that his life spanned. From quantum mechanics to nuclear disarmament, from genetics to dieting, he was at the forefront of the developments that define the world we now live in. Yet his life was one of constant controversy and ended with very public accusations that he was nothing but a crank.

  As a young boy in Portland, Oregon, he watched his father at work in the back room of his drugstore. Herman Pauling made extravagant claims for his tinctures and ointments—that they could cure almost any ailment and even halt aging. But in 1910 medicine was far from an exact science, and the druggist was unable to heal himself: one day, Linus Pauling’s father collapsed in his store in agony, and within hours was dead of a perforated stomach ulcer.

  But Herman Pauling had lived long enough to pass on his faith in the healing power of science. By the time he was twenty-nine, Linus Pauling was a full professor at the newly established California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He had an extraordinary scientific instinct that he was able to apply to one field after another, each time bringing revolutionary insights that kept him at the forefront of research. This talent first brought him a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, before he turned his attention to the less orderly realm of biology. He passionately believed that the same underlying laws applied to both disciplines—and proved this when he discovered that the fatal sickle-cell disease was caused by a tiny abnormality in a single crucial protein, a discovery that helped launch the now-booming field of molecular biology.

  Then in 1966, at the height of his reputation and when most people would have been looking forward to a comfortable retirement, Pauling experienced a revelation. While giving a speech in New York City, he mentioned that he hoped to live for another fifteen or twenty years in order to witness the further developments in science and society. A few days later, he received a letter from a fellow biochemist, Irwin Stone, who had been in the audience. Stone promised Pauling that he could indeed live this long—if he would take massive doses of vitamin C. Pauling consulted the scientific literature and quickly concluded that vitamins were the compounds he—and his father before him—had been seeking, the magic molecules that could help the body ward off disease and even halt aging: the real elixirs of life.

  He launched a crusade advocating megadoses of vitamins that dominated the next twenty-five years of his long life and reshaped our understanding of medicine and nutrition. He saw it as the climax of his life’s work—applying the discoveries of science to bring health and longevity to the human race. But the rest of the scientific establishment did not share his enthusiasm for what they saw as a hippieish fad. In 1976, the editor of a respected medical journal wrote that the public was losing faith in scientists because they could no longer be relied on to present the evidence plainly, and “the most tragic example” was Linus Pauling. So when his wife was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, it was his chance to prove his critics wrong.

  ENGINEERING IMMORTALITY

  THE first of our paths to immortality—Staying Alive—is as widely pursued now as in the day of the First Emperor: the prospect of the elixir of life continues to intoxicate us. Indeed, it is at the foundation of contemporary Western society, with its faith in science and progress. In this chapter we will ask whether this powerful immortality narrative can deliver on its extravagant promise.

  We have seen that civilizations have always held out the hope of thwarting death. Indeed, the innovations that define advanced societies really do bring improvements to the human condition, which really do enable many people to live much longer, if not yet forever. But broadly speaking, early civilizations aspired mostly to maintain the gains they had made—to defend themselves against the onslaught of the barbarians and prevent a collapse into chaos. This is reflected in the form of their immortality narratives: they looked backward to their founding fathers, such as Xu Fu or Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, who were thought already to have found the elixir. Their ambition was to maintain or rediscover past glories, not to move toward something new.

  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 e
xpectancy.

  THE 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.”