Long for This World

by Jonathan Weiner

  Many of the founders of modern science continued to hope that they or their followers would solve the problem of mortality. Who knew what wonders could be accomplished within a few centuries by the new natural philosophy? In 1780, Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter to Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, “We may learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce; all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard….” Beyond the standard of Moses, Noah, and Methuselah; or Seth, who lived to the age of 912; Enos, 905; Mahalaled, 895; and Jared, 962. “People that will live a long life and drink to the Bottom of the Cup expect to meet with some of the Dregs,” Franklin wrote in a letter eight years later, trying to be philosophical about what he called his three incurable maladies, “the Gout, the Stone, and Old Age.” But Franklin did not expect that people would have to meet and drink those dregs forever.

  In France, another friend of Franklin’s, the Marquis de Condorcet, one of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment, and a devout admirer of Francis Bacon, predicted that “a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect of extraordinary accidents,” when “the duration between the birth of man and his decay will have no assignable limit.” Condorcet saw immortality as the climax of the advancement of learning. He wrote this passage of prophecy in a Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind when he was in hiding from the Terror during the French Revolution. Soon after, Condorcet was captured, and died in one of the prisons of the Revolution at the age of fifty.

  The founders of modernity felt so purely sunny and wholehearted about its future in its first days, when they could wave the dreams of immortality and patriotism together like a pair of flags. Thomas Jefferson commissioned a portrait of Bacon to hang in Monticello. Enlightenment optimism appealed enormously to the American founding fathers. So much of the local culture of self-improvement uncurled from that first seed. “Knowledge is power,” said Bacon; and the chief value of power would be to buy us time. “Time is money,” said Franklin. He knew that we would always want time as much as money, love, fame, or any other prize we hope to win in this life, if time allows. We would use our science to buy time. Once when Franklin was visiting England, he had a cask of Madeira wine shipped to him from Virginia. He found three flies floating in the cask. They made him think of death, and the future of the great experiments he had helped to launch. Franklin wrote to a friend in Paris:

  I wish it were possible…to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they may be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to any ordinary death, the being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, till that time, to be then recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country!

  Mixing, in one barrel, his hopes for science, immortality, and the United States of America.

  Mortality seems to be a problem for which every people on Earth began reporting solutions the moment they invented writing. And yet each generation is ready to believe the problem is solved or about to be solved at last. These overenthusiastic reports right from the beginning are like telltales, the ribbons that sailors tie to the tops of their masts to show which way the wind is blowing. Our perpetual readiness to believe we have the answer is a measure of the force of our private hopes and our ambitions as a civilization.

  The great Russian biologist Elie Metchnikoff took up the problem of mortality in 1914 with the complaint that “science knows very little about old age and death.” He developed a theory that we are slowly poisoned to death by the bacteria in our bowels. As a remedy, he drank sour milk every day. He explained his theory in a popular book, The Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies. Not long after Metchnikoff’s death, two biochemists at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, in New York, showed that fruit flies bred without bacteria in their guts live a shorter time than fruit flies with bacteria in their guts. Public fascination with Metchnikoff evaporated, but yogurt never went away.

  At about the same time there was a craze for grafting monkey testicles onto old men. It built on the work of a French neurologist and physiologist in the late nineteenth century, a man with the euphonious name of Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, who was Harvard’s first professor of the pathology of the nervous system, and who coined the word “rejuvenation.” Brown-Séquard gave himself shots of fluid that he’d extracted from the testicles of young dogs and guinea pigs. He was seventy-two at the time, but he looked at least twenty years younger, and he claimed that the injections restored some of the sexual potency of his youth. He announced his experiment in a famous lecture in which he told his audience that he had only just that morning “paid a visit” to his young wife Madame Brown-Séquard. With that “paid a visit,” which has a double meaning in French, Brown-Séquard created an international sensation. He inspired a series of doctors to take up rejuvenation, including Eugen Steinach in Austria and Serge Voronoff in Russia, who became celebrities themselves. It was Voronoff who specialized in transplants of ape testicles, beginning with his first operation in 1920. They were expensive procedures but three hundred men are said to have undergone them in the next five years. Steinach was nominated half a dozen times for a Nobel Prize for his rejuvenation operations (although he never won). He didn’t do transplants; he did vasectomies. The hope there, as a historian of medicine, Diana Wyndham, explains, “was that, instead of giving life to children, aging men would give life to themselves.” Steinach was even more celebrated in his day than Brown-Séquard and Voronoff, thanks in part to his book Rejuvenation through the Experimental Revitalization of the Aging Puberty Gland, which he published in 1920, the year that he began offering the operation. Men who got the vasectomy were said to have been “Steinached.” An article in Scientific American Monthly reported that year, “It seems that the magic hand of science has found that Elixir of Life…for which Faust bartered his soul.” According to the article, old men who had been Steinached “not only looked fresher and young, but felt an increase in strength and vigor, while aged trembling hands grew steady, feeble tottering steps became firm and failing masculine instincts and impulses acquired new vitality.” In the 1920s, more than one hundred Viennese university professors and teachers were said to have been Steinached, including Sigmund Freud. Freud may or may not have felt younger after being Steinached. He didn’t like to talk about it.

  Another famous man to be Steinached was William Butler Yeats, who read about the rejuvenation operation in a popular book called The Conquest of Old Age. Yeats underwent the operation in the spring of 1934, and his surgeon continued the experiment afterward by inviting Yeats and a beautiful young poet to dinner at his house. Yeats was sixty-nine. His wife was forty-two. The young poet, Ethel Mannin, was thirty-four. They may have had an affair. Yeats did start an affair with another young poet and actress, Margot Ruddock, six months later. Around Dublin people began calling him “the gland old man.” Yeats believed the operation had made him a new man. Only a month before his death he wrote, “I am happy, and I think full of an energy, of an energy I had despaired of.” The operation, or faith in the operation, seems to have helped give Yeats an outpouring of great poetry and wild romance in the last years of his life.

  Eventually the world forgot Steinach, but kept the poetry.

  Of course, it’s easy to laugh at these early attempts at rejuvenation. Sympathetic historians of aging remind us that these were sophisticated and reasonable projects for their time. Brown-Séquard is now recognized as the founder of the science of endocrinology and the study of sex hormones. Metchnikoff won the Nobel Prize in 1908 for research in immunology. And it was Metchnikoff who coined the word “gerontology.”

  One of the most d
istinguished biologists who tried to solve the problem of mortality in the early twentieth century was Alexis Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize in 1912 for his pioneering work in vascular surgery. Carrel was a star researcher at the Rockefeller Institute. His labs and surgery rooms filled the whole top floor and the attic of Founder’s Hall, which was the first building on the campus. The fifth floor was given over to his labs, and his operating rooms were in the attic. Carrel had them all painted black. The walls, the furniture, and every piece of equipment in his operating rooms had to be black, and everyone who worked in them had to wear black surgical masks and gowns. (Whatever else it did for the experiments, the black added drama.) Carrel had developed an early antiseptic, as a surgeon in the French army during World War I. Then he turned to, among other things, the project of breeding mice for longevity. He was a short, odd-looking man, one eye brown, one blue, and he spoke with a heavy French accent. He got extraordinary attention in the papers for his claims that he was keeping cells alive year after year in a petri dish. Carrel wrote in 1911 in the Journal of the American Medical Association that his results “demonstrate…that death is not a necessary, but merely a contingent, phenomenon.” Carrel thought it might soon be possible to keep a human head alive as long as he wanted. Like Brown-Séquard, Voronoff, and Steinach, he made headlines: “Carrel’s New Miracle Points Way to Avert Old Age,” trumpeted the New York Times. “Flesh That Is Immortal,” shouted the World’s Week.

  But Carrel’s immortality project turned out to be premature, too. The cells in his petri dishes were not immortal after all; they were being replenished with young cells month after month by the young scientists and assistants who tended them in the black attic, wearing their black gowns. No one knows if the sorcerer’s apprentices deceived the great man deliberately, or if it was an honest mistake. Carrel’s claim was proved wrong only in 1961, when Leonard Hayflick, a cell biologist at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, demonstrated that normal human cells do not divide indefinitely in a petri dish. Hayflick was able to show that in the open air (which is 21 percent oxygen) our cells divide about fifty times. In air with the reduced level of oxygen that prevails inside our bodies (about 3 percent) human cells in a petri dish will divide about seventy times. Then the cells get old and tired, a state that is known to cell biologists as senescence. The cells in Carrel’s dish went from symbols of immortality to symbols of mortality. Hayflick has spent the rest of his career (he is now eighty-one) arguing that it is impossible for gerontologists to extend the human life span.

  Our long lives now are made up of all the extra seconds, minutes, hours, and years that the advancement of learning has given us. These gifts of time come down to us from even the least and meanest inventions, from the privy, the chamber pot, the mousetrap, the pitchfork and scythe, the broom and dustpan, from every little life-saving or timesaving gadget ever invented, including the first nail and the first screw. Benjamin Franklin contributed more than a few of those inventions, including the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, and Franklin bifocals. With the bifocals, he was tickled that he had solved at least one of the problems of old age. He wrote to a friend that “if all the other Defects and Infirmities were as easily and cheaply remedied, it would be worth while for Friends to live a good deal longer.” But they’ve all contributed to the same project, from the first fire, and the first chipped, serrated flints; from the first look our ancestors took at the horizon when they stood upright on hind legs; to those bifocals.

  This is just what Bacon hoped for the advancement of learning. The goal and index of all our learning would be long life. And Bacon’s prediction did come true. Each of us lives on the capstone of a pyramid that is the sum of the contributions of every invention and material improvement since the Stone Age. Our bodies survive for seventy or eighty years because of every advance in medical knowledge from the most basic discoveries in anatomy to the latest discoveries of Baconian “secrecies of the passages.” The hipbone is connected to the thighbone. The sacrum is connected to the iliac. (And the joint that connects them is the sacroiliac.) Scientific revolution and technological transformation have changed human life for better and for worse in innumerable ways, and the greatest change, the sum of it all, the ultimate payoff, is indexed by our life spans. This is the biggest accomplishment of our species to date: it is the cumulative gift of fire, language, science, art, law, and medicine. This is the apex of the pyramid that we’ve been constructing from the beginning. The building of this Rome took the whole of human history, and all the roads led here.

  Better food, better water. Better public sanitation and personal hygiene. Better education, also known as the advancement of learning. You can frame all of this as a quest to extend our lives, just as the founders of the Enlightenment hoped. The failures have been staggering. But the progresss of our civilization has made life, on the whole, less nasty, less brutish—and certainly longer. And even though the quest for immortality keeps falling short of its ultimate goal, generation after generation, it does succeed in the most practical, pragmatic, basic ways in the task of sustaining each generation for a little longer than the year before. That thought goes back way before Bacon, too. According to Sumerian legend, Gilgamesh was the first to dig wells. At least one Babylonian tablet seems to suggest that Sumerians invoked his name whenever they started to dig a well. They chanted, “Well of Gilgamesh!”

  Chapter 3

  LIFE AND DEATH OF A CELL

  Ever since he was a boy, Aubrey de Grey has felt that he was cut out for an extraordinary destiny. He was always interested in making a difference in the world by doing things that were hard, things that required a certain virtuosity, things that the world thought well-nigh impossible. It started with playing piano. His mother wanted him to play, but he wasn’t particularly apt. He came to the conclusion early on that it was a waste of his time. If he was out to contribute something unique to the world, to change the world, this was not his way: With lots of people good at it, much better than he would ever be, why did the world need another piano player? He still sees no point in doing things that other people are doing well already. “That’s certainly one of the reasons why I don’t have kids—one of the main reasons,” he says. “Anyone can have kids. A lot of people are very good at it. I want to make a difference.” Nor does he claim to understand people who work in highly crowded fields of science, fields in which, if they went up in a puff of smoke, the very same thing they’d done would be achieved by someone else five minutes later. “That’s completely incomprehensible to me.”

  He has a sort of roguish strut. His arrogance is made just tolerable by his matey readiness to confess it, and his willingness to try and fail at great things. At Cambridge it is traditional to race around the Great Court of Trinity College. A student named David George Burghley once ran all the way around while the Trinity clock chimed one, two, three…to twenty-four, a sprint of 373 yards in 43 seconds. Burghley later became an Olympian and the hero of the movie Chariots of Fire. Once, after a party, when Aubrey was a student at Cambridge, he ran that race against the Trinity clock, trying in a way to go Burghley one better. Aubrey sprinted around the Great Court stark naked. He was happy to get more than two-thirds of the way around before the bells tolled twenty-four. But he slipped on some cobblestones along the way and fell on his face. The next day he hobbled around Cambridge with a magnificent pair of purple-and-black eggplant-colored circles around his eyes. That adventure earned him the nickname Aubrey Aubergine, after a sad-eyed character in a British series of children’s books, part of a gang of unwanted fruits, vegetables, and nuts. “Aubergine” is not only the color of eggplants, it is also computer jargon: “A secret term used to refer to computers in the presence of computerphobic third parties,” according to the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing.

  Aubrey studied computer science at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. When he graduated, in June 1985, he was hired by Sinclair Research, a high-tech company in town. There he got involved almost immediately in
a suitably difficult artificial-intelligence project. A computer program involves a long sequence of commands written in code. If even one line contains a glitch the whole program can crash. Aubrey and a friend at Sinclair, a software engineer named Aaron Turner, began working on the design of a program that could inspect any other program on Earth and debug it automatically. The creation of such a Cure-All is one of the legendary problems of computer science. Its solution is believed by most programmers to be virtually impossible.

  While Aubrey was working on the Cure-All, Adelaide Carpenter arrived in Cambridge on a sabbatical. She was a professor at the University of California, in San Diego, at the time. It was her second sabbatical and she was burned out and thinking of quitting science. One day she heard about a party from a graduate student in her laboratory, a young man from whom she bummed cigarettes. Every day she bummed a cigarette, and every week she bought him a pack.

  It was a birthday party for someone young, and she did not expect to enjoy herself. As she tells the story, she was standing nervously in the front room when a handsome young bloke came up to her and said, “Justify your existence!” Almost immediately he was called away to deal with something electrical. Apparently it was the bloke’s place. She watched him go. She thought he was charming and cocky. He was twenty years younger, the age of her students. He walked with the air of a man who owns every place he goes, a man who is always saying: Remember my name. She lost him for a time, but later on they bumped into each other again by the wine. Then they danced at each other for a while. There was a couch. Then his bedroom was free.