The study of longevity is now in an almost feverish state. Twenty years ago, not many biologists worked on the problem. The field was small. It seemed old. You might say the science of eternal youth was looking and feeling its age. Efforts to extend the human life span in any serious, deliberate way had gotten nowhere since the studies of the ancient Greeks and Babylonians; since the tomb-builders and tomb-robbers of Egypt; since the glory days of the Taoist deep breathers, extreme dieters, and sexual athletes of China (“He who is able to have coitus several tens of times in a single day and night without allowing his essence to escape will be cured of all maladies…”). But today the science of longevity is growing fast. Once more it is turbulent, and painfully confused. It feels young again. The faces of the biologists who argue at international meetings about where we are, where we are going, and what we can or should do when we arrive, really are getting younger, because many new people are joining the field.
Specialists in this field call themselves gerontologists. The word comes from the Greek root geron, which means old man, but that suggests a focus that is misleadingly narrow. While it’s true that the problems that limit our life span are normally most visible and cruel when we are old, gerontologists care about much more than the last years of life. They want to understand the whole span. Pediatricians treat the young. Geriatricians treat the old. Gerontologists try to understand why our bodies change from youth to age, why we age at all—why we are mortal. The problem of longevity is a deep problem because to understand it well enough to do anything fundamental about it, you first have to answer the questions: What makes us mortal? Why do we die? Why do we get frail year by year and ever more likely to die? When does the decline start—at forty? At thirty? When sperm meets egg? And where does it start—in the cells that compose the fabric of our tissues? In the way the organs talk, or fail to talk, to each other? What is aging? This is one of the hardest problems in biology. It is even harder than explaining consciousness. No one has managed to explain consciousness yet, either, but for some time we’ve had the source narrowed to a zone above the neck.
As gerontologists do begin to locate and explore the sources of mortality, many of them feel an incredible excitement. It’s true, of course, that every mortal reaches the end of the road eventually—somewhere around the age of one hundred twenty, even supercentenarians seem to come up against a wall, and most gerontologists accept that wall as our limit. But they have hopes that they can help more of us reach it, and alleviate some of the suffering of old age along the way. As we approach some kind of limit now, it seems likely to most gerontologists that to go much further with either our average life expectancy or our maximum life span we would require a breakthrough in their science, in their understanding of the wellsprings of mortality. Only if they can figure out what aging is and what to do to change its rate will human life span take another big jump. Most gerontologists do not expect to see that breakthrough in their lifetimes. One group of conservative, well-respected gerontologists has proposed that our goal should be to add another seven good years to the human span. A few of the most enthusiastic people in the field have begun to argue for much more. If they are right, then our descendants in another few generations may expect to live as long as Moses, who is said to have lived 120 years; Noah, who lived 950 years; or Methuselah, the oldest man in the Bible: “And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.”
Aubrey de Grey thinks there is no limit. He is convinced that we can double or triple our life span again and again, and so onward and upward. We can engineer as long a life span as we like, “even life for evermore” (Psalm 133). That’s hardly the majority view in gerontology. On the other hand, the field is so splintered and spiky right now that it’s hard to find a majority view. Gerontologists can’t agree on a way to measure aging, or what they mean by aging. Because so much of the action takes place in the United Kingdom and the United States, they can’t even agree on how to spell the problem under discussion: aging or ageing. They fight over definitions of longevity, health, life expectancy, life span, maximum life span. But even in this overheated moment, Aubrey is the most fervent of them all.
Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey was born in London. His mother was a bohemian artist in Chelsea. She gave him his extraordinary name and some of his extraordinarily great expectations. (He never met his father.) He attended the University of Cambridge at the college of Trinity Hall, where he learned to drink beer, write computer code, and punt on the Cam, which is one of the favorite sports of students in Cambridge. He stayed in town after graduation, writing code.
Aubrey is six feet tall and medievally thin and pale, in spite of all the ale. When he stands up, his beard reaches a surprising distance toward his waist. When he sits down, it pools in his lap. “I find it useful to look unusual,” he told me once. He looks like Methuselah before the Flood. Father Time before his hair turned gray. Timothy Leary Unbound. The beard never changes in length because Aubrey is always worrying it away at the edges, twining strands of it around his long pale fingers, even twisting the whole thing into a rope and pressing it to his shoulder when he sups his soup or blows his nose. He is a compulsive debater for his cause, and the beard is one of his weapons. “When I am stroking it like this you know you are all right,” he says, “but when I begin to twist it like this you know I am about to pounce.” He’s made it his personal mission to demonize the bad old days when the science of gerontology was forlorn and we were all trapped and confined in a mortal existence; and to herald the days soon to come, when we will live a thousand years or more.
In a student town like Cambridge, with his beard, jeans, and T-shirt, whizzing around on his old bicycle, or striding through the campus with his faintly belligerent lope, or punting on the Cam, it would be hard to guess his age just by looking at him. In fact, he was born in 1963. That makes him one of the last babies of the great baby boom, or one of the first babies of the next.
In 1990 he met an older woman, an American geneticist named Adelaide Carpenter. She was born in 1944, in the dark of the war years. They met at a wild party that he threw in Cambridge. At the time he was a young man who liked to throw wild parties; she was an established biologist who’d made her reputation early and had lost her way in her career. She joined Aubrey in Cambridge. They married, and soon afterward, Aubrey became fascinated by biology and began his quest for immortality.
Aubrey thinks of aging as a medical problem. Since we all have this problem and it is invariably fatal, he believes we should hit it as hard as we can. He’s convinced that every one of us will join the quest as soon as we realize that there are no technical obstacles to the cure for aging that can’t be overcome, at least in principle. Our bodies are molecular machines. As they run they make mistakes, or give off toxic wastes they can’t quite manage to get rid of. The mistakes are tiny. The wastes are submicroscopic. If we are lucky and enterprising we may find that the conquest of aging may require nothing more than a series of cleanup projects. Our bodies are like houses and cars. What we have to do (Aubrey puts this more positively: all we have to do) is keep up with the cleaning and repairs. If we looked after our bodies properly we would stay healthy year after year after year, until we finally misjudged our step off a curb and ran into that truck. We would no longer die of our years. That is, we’d be no more likely to die at the age of ninety or 290 than we had been at the age of twenty. We would achieve a kind of practical immortality. Aubrey prefers the term “the engineering of negligible senescence,” the creation of human bodies that hardly age at all.
It’s a very British approach, in a way, consonant with a certain brisk stiff-upper-lip approach to immortality. In matters of the heart and mind and spirit, avoid muddle. In matters of the body, avoid rubbish. In some ways, you might even say, what Aubrey is proposing to do for the body is what civilization has accomplished for public health at large. Life expectancy stayed so low for most of human history because so many babies died at bi
rth, along with their mothers. Improvements in housing, heating, farming, public health, the construction of sewage systems, the washing of hands in hospitals, and, in the twentieth century, the discovery of antibiotics—all these things together transformed our life expectancy. Public hygiene in Cambridge was horrible back in 1353. Aubrey proposes we clean up our bodies the way we have learned to clean up our cities and towns.
From time to time that summer I’d reminded Aubrey that I was listening as a reporter, not a disciple, that I was talking to many other gerontologists, trying to get the whole picture. Aubrey said brilliant and incisive things about what he called his Strategies for the Engineering of Negligible Senescense, or SENS. He’d published his manifesto, “Time to Talk SENS,” in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, in 2002, with half a dozen coauthors, including some highly respected scientists. And Aubrey had published many papers since—he was incredibly prolific, he seemed to write as fast as he talked—and often those papers were coauthored by specialists at the top of their fields. It seemed clear to me that Aubrey was a gifted amateur and provocateur. He’d pulled together a great store of arguments that the conquest of aging is at least a good goal, more than half a century after Watson and Crick, and that as a goal it makes sense. But he was also riding out into combat against almost everyone in gerontology. And in fact soon after that summer almost everyone in gerontology really did wheel around on Aubrey in one of the most spectacular, almost theological controversies in science in recent memory. Twenty-eight of the field’s leaders signed a broadside in which they tried, in effect, to excommunicate Aubrey de Grey. “Ageing research is a discipline that is only just emerging from a reputation for charlatanry,” they wrote. What a shame to see journals and scientific meetings give space “to empty fantasies of immortality.” The goal of a few more good years or even good decades of life might be reasonable, but Aubrey de Grey’s scribblings about SENS, with his talk of five hundred years, a thousand years, a cure for aging, were like essays on Aladdin’s lamp. “Only a few people didn’t sign,” says the gerontologist Jan Vijg, one of the abstainers. Another abstainer was Judith Campisi. Vijg and Campisi are both distinguished gerontologists with a special interest in cancer. They think the conquest of aging is as reasonable a goal as the conquest of cancer, diabetes, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, or any of the other killers that rise up to get us in old age. If we have a War on Cancer, why not a War on Aging?
Once, talking with Campisi about all the controversies in gerontology, I threw up my hands. Maybe I shouldn’t write about gerontology at all, I said. It’s too confusing. It’s too soon! “Well,” she said, “it’s not solved. You’re writing about a problem that is not solved. I mean, if you want to write about a problem that’s solved then you can write about smallpox.” However, she said, if you want to talk about how a field has been muddled by human longings and blunderings for thousands of years, and has matured, then this is the problem to look at, because this is arguably the oldest problem in science, and it has suddenly come of age. “And if it matures even to the point where the field of cancer is now,” she said, “if it can get to the point where cancer is now, it has the potential to change the course of human history.”
Although I often reminded Aubrey that I wasn’t riding out to the jousts with him, he seemed to forget my warnings from one meeting to the next. On that last day at the Eagle, he talked as if we were both believers; and now that I was leaving he was talking extra-fast, trying to sum up the situation and the needs of the campaign. With more and more hubbub around us and more and more ale inside him, Aubrey really was getting hard to follow.
“A v’iety—va’iety—variety of opinions…”
Both his hands fiddled rapidly with his apocalyptic beard and mustachios, although I could tell that he was trying to speak slowly. When Aubrey was in his cups, I’d noticed, his words came out thick and bushy, as if his tongue were cramped by his mouth, or his lips were too big. His voice itself stayed clear and reedy as a clarinet, his arguments remained as clever as ever, but something seemed to happen to the words. Somewhere in the tangles of his beard, they got brushy and muffled and indefinably squiggly, like a glimpse of figures, a line of horsemen, advancing through the brambles and the trees of a forest.
He wanted me to understand the difficult political situation he faced. Not only did he make the public nervous. He terrified most of his senior colleagues. They thought he was a menace. They were afraid that he would turn politicians and taxpayers against them. “And the main reason tha’ I’m fabulously dangerous,” Aubrey said, “is that I talk about these long life spans. Which is going to scare peo’le off doing anything. They’re goin’ to say, ‘Oh, no, no, no—let’s not fund any gerontology at all!’”
Tap, tap, tap…
“I’m no’ a diplomat, you know,” Aubrey said, and paused for a swallow.
Tap!
“A political animal, but no diplomat.”
Pause. Tap!
“I don’ find it easy to compromise. I find it easier to find solutions—to fin’ killer punches.” Aubrey mimed a roundhouse right at the air—ka-pow!—and laughed a roguish laugh, grinning at me eye to eye, conspirator to conspirator, as if the two of us really were about to witness the defeat of old age and the conquest of death, the cosmic victories that the world has longed for ever since Adam and Eve lost Paradise.
Pause. Clonk!
“Fucking aitch!” Aubrey cried. He’d just drained his glass and glanced at his watch. “It’s already quarter past five! I mean, it’s fine, you know, it’s fine—this is valuable time. I’m scheduled to be at home for dinner at half past six—so what I ought to do is try to delay that. Let me nip over to the bar—they have a phone at the bar—and see if I can—”
From a stool at the far end of the bar, an old codger kept staring over at our table. I thought that same man—or someone just like him—had stared that way before from that same bar stool, with just that same ruddy, wrecked, xenophobic amusement, that leer from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. (Was it the Eagle? The Live & Let Live?)
Aubrey’s talk was toxic and intoxicating. Here was the dream of the ages. And yet, in some ways, what an awful moment to be dreaming about it, with so many mortal humans alive already; with so much of the living world in ashes around us, or near the flames.
“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” said Dr. Johnson. And when we are told that the sentence of death under which we all live may be lifted, it makes our minds expand wonderfully, as if we have lived all our lives in a state of compression, increasing concentration, like a bird that is being lifted slowly on a finger toward the roof of its cage, or like a human body that is compressing with age, drawn down by gravity. It is strange and novel even to consider for a moment the possibility of negligible senescence; to consider that aging really might have a cure—a cure that we would desire, that is, not the one cure that the world has known since the beginning of time, which is death.
Of course, some of the gerontologists were so excited by the possibilities that they were only partly sober. They went weaving around the hard consonants and the insoluble problems that loomed up in the middle of their sentences the way a drinker emerging from the Eagle will sometimes go dodging around the lampposts and the parking meters.
This is where the science of mortality can take you. You can sit in the House of Watson and Crick, more than half a century past the Secret of Life, and pop down the rabbit hole, where every twist and turn is Wonderland, where each view is curioser and curioser, until you wonder how in the world you will ever get out. You can cross over the river and descend into depths where mortals have wandered for a thousand thousand years, trying to solve the riddle, wanting to know for sure, longing to climb back up and see the stars.
Chapter 2
THE PROBLEM OF MORTALITY
Sitting in the Eagle that summer, watching Aubrey try to sell me the conquest of aging, I so
metimes thought, What a piece of work! He seemed to have almost limitless energy. Even after a whole day of talk, he still acted out every phrase. “Hard to know,” he would say, with fevered miming of deep thought, eyes darting hither and yon. Then he’d fix me with a piercing pointed stare, or bow forward steeply, bringing the upper portion of the beard alarmingly close to the open mouth of his pint. The lower portion of his beard was safely out of sight, and I could imagine it brushing the floor.
He was given to mind-dumps, as computer geeks call them, which means the tipping and dumping of his entire stock of ideas from his cranium directly into yours with the help of all those gestures—the monkey and the organ-grinder and the music all in one.
What a piece of work!
But then, who can be cool about the problem of mortality? There is a heat around this topic from which we can never insulate ourselves. We are all mortals. It’s our own body heat we are feeling. We can never cast a cold eye on life and death no matter how we try.
I’ve followed this science off and on for a quarter of a century. I was still a young man the first time I went to the New York Public Library, on Fifth Avenue, to read a little about the quest and its long history. I sprinted up the stone stairs between the stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, and looked up immortality in the card catalog, and thumbed through an almost endless series of titles on time-yellowed cards. I can remember a mystical sensation, browsing the old titles in those marble halls, a feeling of joining mortal souls throughout the ages in the investigation of this possibility of possibilities—the cure of cures, the conquest of conquests, the outwitting of all the powers that be. It was in the vaulted Reading Room that I first became acquainted with the plans for immortality proposed by Francis Bacon four centuries before us, and by Roger Bacon almost four centuries before him, and by many others far, far back before that.
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