Long for This World

by Jonathan Weiner

  “So what’s going on during early life is a gradual laying down of damage,” Aubrey said. We already have the start of atherosclerotic plaques in our major arteries and cross-links in our skin as toddlers.

  “All the things I’ve been talking about happen all through life. The only reason it looked to Bacon as just described is that those types of damage, until they reach a threshold, a certain level of abundance—” Until we are thirty or forty, Aubrey said, the damage is too insignificant to matter. “Until then it looks like there’s no aging going on.”

  That really is a sensible description of aging, according to present thinking. Unfortunately, I thought, Aubrey’s prescriptions were carefully posed to sound more sensible and plausible than they might to skeptics who are aware of the trade-offs involved. Stimulating the immune system can be dangerous, for instance. The body develops inflammation to try to disperse a foreign body or kill it. And it is usually very effective; but the downside is that cells do it by releasing oxidants, and that’s bad. So acute inflammation can be healthy, but chronic inflammation is not. That is why Caleb Finch, of the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, argues that inflammation may be a crucial problem in aging itself.

  But Aubrey had his stump speech about the Seven Deadly Things and he stayed right on that stump. Accumulating damage drives our cells more or less crazy, Aubrey writes in Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime, by Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., with Michael Rae. (On the back jacket, in big capital letters: “PEOPLE ALIVE TODAY COULD LIVE TO BE A THOUSAND YEARS OLD. A LEADING RESEARCHER SKETCHES THE REAL ‘FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH.’”) The damage, he writes, “forces our cells to flail about in increasingly desperate, disorderly, and panicked attempts to keep their heads above the waters of the aging process.” The way to keep the forty-year-old’s life expectancy the same as the twenty-year-old’s is to keep cleaning up all of that detritus, by stimulating the immune system, etcetera. And we don’t have to clean up everything that will ever matter to the aging body; only those insults that matter within our life spans now—only those things that slow us down in threescore years and ten. “Once this is accomplished,” Aubrey writes, “our bodies will remain youthful during the years in which they are now undergoing a slow descent into decrepitude.” So we will try to stay young and fit while we wait for more help from science, the way other generations strove to stay virtuous while they waited for the Messiah.

  Once we did it, once we fixed all seven weak links, eliminated all of Aubrey’s Seven Deadly Things, we would live long enough at last to achieve “escape velocity.” We would live virtually forever. We would have achieved negligible senescence. At that point human life would be completely transformed, of course. Among other things, virtually everyone on this planet would feel as Aubrey did, that there was little point in having children, because there was so much to do. Each of us would feel that we had so much life ahead to enjoy just for ourselves.

  “We’d have no one under the age of fifty soon enough,” he said cheerfully.

  I went down to the refrigerator with Aubrey to get him another bottle of beer, and we ran into my two boys. They were fourteen and seventeen years old, and they were curious about him. You don’t meet many characters like Aubrey de Grey in small-town Pennsylvania.

  Aubrey was wound or overwound, singing his long saga of the Seven Deadly Things, and he went straight back to the top when he saw my boys.

  “Suppose we fix aging,” Aubrey told them in the kitchen. “So your risk of death is postponed indefinitely. You’d live in the region of a thousand years. You have a better chance than you, and you have a better chance than you,” Aubrey said, pointing with his right hand to each one of us in order of age, from the youngest to the oldest (me), while he squirreled his left hand deep into his beard.

  “But once we have learned to postpone senescence indefinitely, our life span will become limited only by accidents, and that will give us an average life expectancy of one thousand years. So people are likely to live a long, long time,” he said. “It seems extremely plausible to me that by then you’d live long enough to live essentially indefinitely.”

  My boys, both of them science-fiction fans, seemed comfortable with Aubrey’s confidence that they would live indefinitely. One of them mentioned Star Trek teleportation. “Beam me up.” The beam from the spaceship lifts the astronaut from here to there, sometimes thousands of miles away, or more—but maintains the same person.

  “Yes,” said Aubrey. “That is fast teleportation. This is slow teleportation. You’d be maintaining the same person from century to century by medical means. And if you suffered an accident, eventually we’d know enough to put you back together again no matter what happened.”

  I protested. We don’t know how the brain works. What about the brain, the mind, identity? Aubrey replied that there was no way of knowing what exactly the doctors would have to transfer into the reconstructed brain to make sure that identity is carried over. But in practice he was sure the doctors of the future would be able to do it.

  I gave Aubrey another look.

  We can’t do anything like that now, he conceded. “But it’s not implausible for, say, one hundred years from now.” To make a map of your patient you’d scan the brain. Then you’d have all the information you’d need to re-create your patient in case of an accident. “Not obvious you could not do it.” He found such scans perfectly easy to imagine. You’d get one every month. Then if you came to some sticky end, your doctor would use the last scan to reconstruct you. Beam you up. Restore you, and restore your memory files. You wouldn’t lose one bit.

  Aubrey went on, with the same sort of pleasure with which he’d just been talking about clearing away the junk from aging brains. “Well,” he said, “would you really be the same person that went under the truck? I’ve tried to think subjectively: What is my emotional attachment to the body that went to sleep in O’Hare last night?” He said he was perfectly able to reestablish a sense of continuity after sleep. Why not after a scan? “I think it’s very likely.”

  All this is far in the future, I cautioned my boys. We don’t know how to begin to do this now.

  Aubrey agreed. But we don’t have to worry about any of that today, he said. We are still very attached to our bodies. He used the phrase “meat puppets.” We want to keep our meat puppets. If we achieve immortality by uploading our minds into supercomputers, then we will have to say goodbye to our bodies, our meat puppets, forever. “So, not uploading,” Aubrey said. “I’ll stick with the meat-puppet approach. Of course, if you live a thousand years, driving will be outlawed! It could be a highly risk-averse world.” Here he returned to his theme in my car on the way from the airport. If you hope to live a thousand years and you are struck by a cab at twenty-five, you lose an awful lot. “That would piss people off. So there will be an incentive to improve medical care—traditional medical care. And there will be all kinds of safety precautions. Climb a mountain, they’ll catch you before you hit the ground if you fall. Automated cosseting. But of course there’s only so far you can go. Like how many people you could have sex with without catching something.” My boys looked impressed that Aubrey was talking so freely in front of them.

  I asked him how long he thought it might be before we arrive at this automated, cosseted world.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s here in a hundred years,” he replied. “I plan to be around. I will warn you that I was surer of that ten years ago than I am now. I feel it’s all very well to take this view selfishly. But ultimately if I can do something to add even one day to the human life span…”

  Here he went into his statistical rap. Already this was the third or fourth time I’d heard it. He was beginning to remind me of a wound-up clock that chimes on the hour, or a salesman who makes the same speeches so often that he forgets what he’s just said to you and lives in mortal danger of repeating the same anecdotes two or three times in
one pitch. He explained about escape velocity, and saving one hundred thousand lives a day.

  While Aubrey talked, I tried to read my boys’ faces. No, they did not seem shocked by his confidence that they would live forever. They took their immortality for granted. If anything, I thought they seemed happy to meet an adult who was willing to acknowledge the truth. They told me later on that they thought Aubrey’s argument was sensible. He seemed very full of himself, but his premise was only common sense. One of them told me, “I think he is knurd. He is excessively sober.” My son had gotten the word from Sourcery, a science-fiction novel by Terry Pratchett. “Knurd” is “drunk” spelled backward. Pratchett writes, “Knurdness strips away all illusion, all the comforting pink fog in which people normally spend their lives, and lets them see and think clearly for the first time ever. Then, after they’ve screamed a bit, they make sure that they never get knurd again.”

  For his part, when we were back in my study over the garage, Aubrey told me that he found it refreshing to talk about immortality with teenagers. They are people who are positive and adventurous about the future. He feels frustrated when he talks with those who are less adventurous. “That means nearly everybody in influence and power,” he says. “Middle-aged and older. They find it so shocking that we might create a world so different from the world they’re used to. They’re very resistant to even thinking about the desirability of it—that it might be a good thing. People are like that. There’s only so much change they can think about. I’m guilty of this myself. Young people talk about uploading. One of your sons brought this up. I just can’t see it—can’t see it being useful. It seems in no way desirable. But that may be a danger of being over thirty.”

  Of course, we were getting ahead of ourselves. There were really two enormous questions to discuss: feasibility and desirability. As philosophers say, “can” is not the same as “ought.” Aubrey and I agreed that we would save “ought” for another conversation.

  I felt sure that the answer to the first question was no. The conquest of aging was impossible. The point that bothered me most in Aubrey’s spiel was his assumption that we could understand the machinery of our bodies well enough to clean them up. “But we don’t have to understand metabolism,” he insisted, once again. “I say, go in early enough but also late enough. Early enough to help, but late enough so that you are out of the way of the really complicated stuff.”

  He saw himself as working in the tradition of the theoretical biologists. “Theoretical biology has an incredibly bad name,” he said. “And the reason it’s got a bad name is well understood. Since we deal with such complicated systems, biology is a big big subject, and it’s very easy if you’re an amateur to read a bunch of literature and come up with a nice hypothesis to explain all this data; and if you’re careless, you tend to rush into print without checking to see if your idea is consistent with the other 99 percent of data that you haven’t got around to reading. This has happened a lot. That’s how theoretical biology got into the fix it’s in today.

  “But the other side of it is that if you have any decent ideas, and the biologists can’t see any gaping holes—you do it once and people take you seriously. Twice or three times and you’re a phenomenon. So I basically kept my foot out of my mouth for two or three years and everyone was very happy to treat me as a proper scientist, even though I had no idea how to work a pipette.” He took a swig of beer and wriggled his fingers together to illustrate his pleasure.

  In fact, after his moment of revelation at the Marriott in California, Aubrey had done a huge amount of work with established scientists. He’d kept his job as a computer programmer in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. It was only in his spare time that he worked on the conquest of immortality, or “the engineering of negligible senescence,” the creation of human bodies that hardly age. He was an amateur—but an extraordinary one. He’d published a paper about mitochondrial diseases with one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject. Papers with famous gerontologists; venerated epidemiologists; legendary cell biologists.

  He was the most accomplished amateur scientist I’d ever met. He was also the most arrogant. “At the moment,” Aubrey told me, “probably I’m the only person in the world who has reasonably in-depth knowledge of all the related fields of life extension. That’s not going to remain the case for very long. People are going to start putting two and two together. People will start realizing the reason for their pessimism is they haven’t been paying enough attention to the facts.” He railed against gerontologists. “It would be very hard to find anybody to debate me and make a good fight of it without my making a fool of them. Because they are fools. Not in the sense of their intelligence but in terms of what they know. They just haven’t done their homework. They’re not fools in terms of intellect. But they just haven’t had the time or inclination to get the right constellation of knowledge.” When Aubrey was explaining one of his most daring and disturbing ideas about longevity, he told me, “In two or three years the whole area will be two or three times bigger than it is now. Due almost entirely to my own efforts.”

  That evening in Bucks County, my wife and I took Aubrey to a dinner party honoring a friend of ours, a painter. We were celebrating his retrospective at the local art museum. Because Aubrey would not know anyone, we worried that he might feel lost and out of place. He’d had a long day. Besides, I’d gotten the impression from Aubrey’s nervous spell in my car on the way to my house from the airport, and from his rapid, thick speech in my study, that he might be shy. A guru needs tremendous force of personality. All in all, I didn’t think much of his prospects. At moments as I’d listened to him unspool his spiel I thought he might have something. At other moments, I thought his Seven Deadly Things was nothing more than a list of seven of the hardest problems in medicine. The field of longevity was already full of larger-than-life personalities, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. I doubted that he would find a place at the table of the great world. I was afraid he might have trouble just finding a place at the dinner party.

  But I did not know Aubrey. He strode into the party like a conqueror. “Since I’ve been drinking beer all day I think I’ll stick to that,” he told our host briskly, when she offered him a glass of wine. Then he seated himself at the center of a long table in our host’s living room and took over. Lifting his beer, he began explaining his mission, and the Seven Deadly Things, to our friends up and down the table.

  I don’t remember every word he said at that dinner. In ten years, the feasibility of his plan would be clear, he said. Within ten years, people would realize that they have been sleepwalking for the last six millennia, “or whatever it is.” Soon the explosion of interest in life extension would be a more or less catastrophic phenomenon around the world, instead of the slow steady buildup we’re seeing now. Pandemonium! “What will also change is the amount of trouble I’m making,” he said. He did have force of personality. He seemed to feed on the stares of our friends. He grew larger and larger in his chair, there at the center of the long table, until he looked like Jesus at the Last Supper. (Since Aubrey predicts the coming of the kingdom of eternal life not in Heaven but right here on Earth, maybe I should call it the First Breakfast.) My wife borrowed my notebook and wrote to me in block letters: “HE IS MORE SURE OF HIMSELF THAN GOD.”

  After that first meeting, I tried to catch up with Aubrey now and then when he was in the States. When he’s in New York on one of his lecture tours he sometimes drops in on Janet Sparrow’s lab at Columbia’s medical school to see how she is doing with the junk that builds up in the retinas of elderly eyeballs. I joined him there recently. Listening to them talk gave me a glimpse of the different perspectives of a careful specialist like Sparrow and a theatrical figure like Aubrey, who is a general and impresario in the War on Aging. There’s a great difference in temperament and tempo between the bench scientists in laboratories, scientists who take things one half-step at a time, and
the planners of millennial campaigns. In Aubrey’s presence I asked Sparrow what she thought of his idea of attacking and clearing away the lipofuscin from aging retinas.

  “Yes, people ask—what about breaking it down?” Sparrow said, speaking very, very carefully. “But then you’ve got to worry about the health of the cell.” Breaking down trash inside living cells might cause new problems, she said.

  “We’re lucky in the location of the lysosome,” Aubrey countered. Because the junk is already packed into the lysosome, the cell’s garbage-disposal and recycling unit, it is sequestered from the rest of the cell. “So that sidesteps our ignorance,” Aubrey said. Nothing in our lysosome is intended to get out. If through our ignorance we break the junk into toxic by-products, those poisons will still be locked away safely in the lysosomes.

  Sparrow did not quite agree. Molecules of lipofuscin do fragment and diffuse out of the lysosomes, she said quietly. Those fragments may be damaging. The garbage disposal is always breaking down and self-repairing, so stuff is always getting out of there and drifting around in the cell, like the dustlike floaters and motes in aging eyes.

  In Sparrow’s field, as in many specialized areas of medicine, there are debates over whether junk like this does harm or is merely benign, a by-product of the disease process, whatever that may be. For instance, in the study of Alzheimer’s, there are those debates between the Baptists and the Tauists. The Baptists think beta-amyloid is what makes us sick and the Tauists think it’s tau. Then there are experts who think that neither compound is toxic. They are just innocent by-products. Something else, something that is bad for us, is going wrong in our brain cells. So I asked Sparrow if the same debate applied in the retinas, which are, in fact, derived from our brain cells—our retinas are the only parts of our brains that are not enclosed in our skulls. Are there squabbles about lipofuscin too—with some people arguing that it hurts our eyes and others arguing that it’s harmless?