Long for This World

by Jonathan Weiner

  Raff told me both stories at length. Because euthanasia is illegal in Florida, where his parents lived, and in New York, where his friend Gavin lived, they were both horror stories: lawyers, doctors, obstacles of a dozen kinds; anguish, torment, involuntary confinements, a shotgun under an invalid’s bed.

  When he was done, there was a long silence between us. At last, Raff sighed. “So that’s what I meant when I said you have to be lucky. I mean, it’s a crapshoot whether you end up in their position. But surely what anybody would want is the assurance that when the time comes, and you want to end it, you’ll be in a position to do it. Then people could stop worrying.

  “I mean, if you ask people, most people are not afraid of death. Most people are afraid of dying—of terrible dying. That’s what they’re afraid of. And justifiably so. I don’t know what percentage of deaths are awful, but in my time as a doctor it was high. And I’ll bet it’s still high.

  “I don’t understand why more people don’t feel the way I do. I wouldn’t want to extend my life for a second!” Raff said. “I wouldn’t want to go backward—not for a year, let alone twenty years. But people are very different. I remember Peter Medawar—he had stroke after stroke after stroke. It was just horrible. In the end he was bedridden, he was blind…. And he still wanted to live.”

  Raff said he would feel wretched if someone told him that he could now live 500 years. “That would be one of the most acutely depressing things anyone could say to me. My life has been terrific; I’ve been spared most of the awfulness—not all of it, but most of it. But I see life as stages. And the goal is, in every stage, to like it, to be lucky enough, to be healthy enough, to get through it with pleasure, and always be looking forward to the next stage. And when you get to the next stage, it doesn’t disappoint you but actually turns out to be better! And then, that would include death! Why not? Why not have a life where you’re looking forward to every stage, it always is better than you think, and even the end is just as good as you had been hoping? Why would that not be a goal?”

  As a boy, he told me, he’d loved football, basketball, ice hockey, skiing, tennis, and sailing. Now he’d made a list of a hundred-odd things he hoped to do in his retirement, and he was happy about them all, including his campaign for euthanasia, and his preparations for dying.

  Raff was flabbergasted that not everyone else in the world shares this ebullient view of life. He himself had made the most of each stage. He would never cry, like one of Shakespeare’s bitter kings, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” But he doubted that he could keep on being so lucky if there were, say, seventeen ages of man.

  “Now if you have this view of it, to extend life to five hundred years—you’re asking a lot, now!” Raff laughed a mortal laugh. “You know, it’s just too long to carry on this kind of thing.”

  So we worry that the regime of the self can go on too long. That is one of the chief reasons why we resist the idea of a cure for aging—why the question of desirability is as complicated for us as the question of feasibility.

  And then of course we have to consider not only the seven ages of man, but also the ages of humankind. In history, too, regimes can go on too long. This is true in science and art, where each wave of great ones makes way at last for the next. The German physicist Max Planck said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” This is often paraphrased, “Science advances funeral by funeral.” Most Young Turks of science like that quotation, including Aubrey de Grey, but it is a strange one for him to trumpet, if you think about it.

  Then consider what a cure for aging would mean in politics. If emperors could live forever, we might have no freedom anywhere. At the moment they are merely figures of romance in which we see our own struggles writ large—reminders of what the situation is for all of us, no matter how we try to defy it.

  In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare gave the queen of the Nile one of the greatest death scenes in the history of drama. “I have immortal longings in me,” she cries in the last act, just before she finds the asp in the basket of figs and holds it like a baby to her breast.

  In the East, one of the great examples of immortal longings in high places is Emperor Wu, who was to China what Julius Caesar was to the Roman Empire. Wu presided over China’s greatest expansion, during the Han dynasty. Like Caesar, he was a celebrated writer. One of his prose poems, “Autumn Wind,” ends, “Youth’s years how few, age how sure!”

  According to legend, Emperor Wu set up bronze statues of immortals at his palace, holding pans to catch the dew from the moon and make an elixir of immortality. He did rule China for more than half a century, but he grew old at the same rate as his subjects and died in 87 B.C. Centuries later, after the fall of the Han dynasty, in A.D. 233, Emperor Ming sent his court chamberlain to cart away the earlier emperor’s statues, pans and all, and set them up at his own palace. It is said that as the statues were hauled toward the carts, they wept.

  Some of China’s greatest artists have celebrated those legends, notably Li Ho, who had the short life of a lyric poet, from the years 791 to 817. Li Ho laments the failure of our quest for immortality without feeling the least guilty about it. His poem about the weeping of the bronze immortals is all pathos, autumn winds, and withering orchids. “His pessimism,” the translator and scholar of Chinese poetry A. C. Graham observes, “has none of the ambivalence which one expects in a Western artist obsessed by original sin, who is at least half on the side of the destructive element because he finds it at the bottom of his own heart.”

  “This is why I fear research into aging,” writes David Gems, a gerontologist at University College London who is one of the most prominent researchers in his field. If biologists could have done for the dictators of the twentieth century what they can now do for roundworms and flies—double their life span—then Mao Zedong might still be alive. Mao would be in the middle of his life, as Gems says, “and might not be expected to die a natural death until 2059.” Joseph Stalin would still be alive, too, and perhaps going strong. You can argue that dictators seldom die of natural causes. But giving very bad men very long lives would not be good for the world. Thousand-year Hitlers, thousand-year Reichs. Gems sometimes remembers the words of Winston Smith’s torturer in George Orwell’s 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” “This ‘forever,’” says Gems, “is what biogerontological research has the potential to achieve.”

  The regime of the self can go on too long, and the regime of the ruler. We can even worry about the regime of the species.

  Virginia Woolf watched a moth die on her windowsill one morning as she was writing at her desk. “Oh, yes,” it seemed to say, “death is more powerful than we are.”

  We already overcrowd much of the planet. We bestride and consume it, present and future. We eat so much more than our share that the generations following us will inherit a very poor place to live.

  If a cure for aging became available to the rich before the poor, which is the way the world always turns, then the unfairness of life might become absolutely unsustainable. How would our world of haves and have-nots go on spinning if the haves lived for a thousand years while the children of have-nots went right on dying hungry at the age of five? And what would happen to the rest of the living world? Would the other species on the planet, the other earthlings, have even less? Woolf pitied the moth on her windowsill. The poet Robert Burns felt for the field mouse revealed by his plow. How often would we pause to look beyond ourselves, or stop the plow, if we lost that fundamental connection with the rest of life—tenuous as it is already—and loosed the bonds of age?

  We want a good long life. We also want a good life. It’s hard to see how members of our species could have both for very long if more and more of us had to make do with less and less. Still, the adventure of livin
g another five hundred years on a planet as over-burdened as ours would be, if nothing else, an antidote to boredom.

  Maybe, just maybe, we would tread more lightly on the Earth because we would each preserve one body, one piece of human equipment, instead of continually having to replace it. In that sense, thousand-year lives would be the ultimate in conservation. We might even grow up faster as a species if we lived long enough to pay the price for our species’s sins in our own skins. But when we talk about the health of the body and the health of the planet, we deal in goods that are difficult to reconcile.

  The skin-in people, the molecular biologists, explorers of the interior, worry about the body. The skin-out people, the evolutionary biologists, students of the rest of the living world, worry about the biosphere. They worry outward. And in the end, we need both. We won’t be long for this world unless both stay healthy. Although it was written in a different connection, there is a beautiful passage in one of the papers of William Hamilton, the theorist of the evolution of aging, that speaks to our situation. “Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of the realization of possible conflict within the genome is a philosophical one,” Hamilton writes. “We see that we are not even in principle the consistent wholes that some schools of philosophy would have us be. Perhaps this is some comfort when we face agonizing decisions, when we cannot ‘make sense’ of the decisions we do make, when the bitterness of a civil war seems to be breaking out in our inmost heart.”

  And then we have decisions that bear on the human genome itself. In the Gospel according to Luke, in the King James version, Jesus asks, “And which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?” This line is rendered, in the New International Version: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” And Jesus caps his question: “Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?” A cubit for the ancients was the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, about twenty inches. Now we live in an era when we really can add a bit, if not quite a cubit, to our stature, with the help of human growth hormone (HGH). This hormone adds inches to the stature of thousands of very short children every year. In the same way, in our lifetimes, or the lifetimes of those children, we may figure out how to add years to our lives by slowing aging. Oddly enough, HGH has been taken for that purpose ever since 1990. There’s no solid evidence that it works. Even so, it is sold by antiaging companies, hawked everywhere on the Web, and recommended by the controversial American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, although biogerontologists denounce the academy and its claims.

  What happens when we have real antiaging pills that pass the tests of clinical trials? As bioethicists have begun to note, this is a problem that would make all of our bioethical debates to date look small. What are the bioethical problems that have exercised us in the last ten or twenty years? Stem cells. Cloning. Gene therapy. The privacy of genetic information. Steroids. All of these problems matter in themselves, but all of them would be subsumed in the transformations of society and human nature that would be wreaked by a significant success with the human life span. And then will come the option of changing the genome itself. We will add or subtract genes to lengthen our lives, until there is no going back, because no human beings alive (however long they may live) will ever be human in the same way again. Then there will be no escape from Luz.

  The regime of the self, the regime of the ruler, and the regime of the species. If we are going to survive to enjoy a good portion of the future, our health and happiness depend on a great deal of luck with them all. We all know this, and it is part of the alternating currents of hope and dread that we feel when we listen to the engineers of longevity. It’s a mad regime that tries to make itself immortal at the cost of the world around it; as mad as a regime that surrenders life and throws it away.

  There may even be some hidden likeness between the skin-ins who try to conquer aging and death, and the skin-outs who are willing to let the natural world conquer them. Either the will to power or the will toward submission can be carried to a pitch that is near madness. In all the annals of the surrender to nature in the writings of naturalists, Hamilton’s essay “My Intended Burial and Why” is probably the most extreme. It is beautiful, too, in its own way. “I will leave a sum in my last will for my body to be carried to Brazil and to these forests,” he writes. “It will be laid out in a manner secure against the possums and the vultures just as we make our chickens secure.” That is, his body should be enclosed in a coop to keep out the larger carrion-eaters. He bequeathed it, instead, to the Coprophanaeus beetles. “They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of their children and mine, I will escape death. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motor-bikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.”

  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.

  Not long before he died, I paid a call on the eminent molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg, who, toward the end of his life, had helped lead the science of gerontology. In his twenties he’d done work in genetics that won him a Nobel Prize. In his eighties, he had been invited to serve as the chief scientific adviser to the Ellison Foundation, which became, at his suggestion, one of the world’s largest private supporters of gerontological research. We met in his office in Founder’s Hall, at Rockefeller University, where he had once served as president.

  Lederberg still had a strong, alert stare, but his steps were feeble now. He used a walker to move around the desk and greet me. His beard and his gravity gave him a famously rabbinical look; he was descended from rabbis on both sides, and his mother could trace her family tree back through a long series of rabbis and rabbinical scholars all the way to Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch—the Great Maggid, who led the Hassids of Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century.

  “Did the Maggid live a long life?” I asked him.

  “I have no idea,” he said brusquely. “Elie Wiesel might know.” Lederberg said he’d never thought much of the idea of glorifying one’s heritage by tracing one’s distant ancestors. “So we go back. After Methuselah, then what?”

  We talked about the evolution of aging, and soon got into very deep water—or else very shallow water, because one realizes, in conversations like this, how shallow all our precepts and percepts may be.

  “But exactly what is it that’s being conserved, when you talk about immortality?” Lederberg asked at one point. “Do you want to freeze your identity or are you willing to die a little bit to let innovation creep in?”

  Some part of you dies every second, he said, as your neurons go one by one. And a certain number of neurons are also born every second. That’s part of neuronal turnover. “And the whole corpus of our memories, our recollections, changes from instant to instant. If we could do it, exactly how much of that do we necessarily need to conserve?”

  He gave me a long level stare. “In other words,” he said, “how much immortality do you want?”

  Chapter 12

  THE EVERLASTING YES AND NO

  Not long ago I had breakfast with Eric Roth, a Hollywood screenwriter who lives in a beach house in Malibu. He had just finished a screenplay about a character who is born old and grows younger and younger, living the seven ages of man in reverse. This screenplay was inspired by a short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which F. Scott Fitzgerald published in Collier’s magazine in 1922 and incl
uded in his book Tales of the Jazz Age. As a newborn, Benjamin looks seventy, the biblical three score years and ten, and his father calls him Methuselah. By the time he dies, Benjamin is a baby at last, as lost to the world as the very oldest old, sans everything.

  Roth’s house is built right on the edge of the Pacific. You walk out the back and down the stairs, and then you have to take off your shoes. After our bagels and coffee, I borrowed a pair of swimming trunks and went wading out alone into the ocean. Roth was already upstairs on the second floor tapping away at his computer keyboard, surfing the Web, fishing for his next project; but I had to go into the water.

  The bottom dropped away in just a few steps. Almost instantly I was over my head.

  “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” Fitzgerald wrote in one of his notebooks. By that standard, mortality itself is beyond us. We still can’t hold it in our heads, although we never get tired of trying. All our lives, we’re astonished to find ourselves growing older.

  Even as a civilization we are simpleminded. The dream of utopian science, the cure-all of cure-alls: that is one idea we hold in our heads. In Francis Bacon’s fantasy of the New Atlantis, one of the first science-fiction stories, he describes a new foundation, “the noblest foundation that ever was upon the earth,” a company of brilliant minds exploring and discovering the way things are. “The end of our foundation,” its spokesman declares, in Bacon’s fantasy, “is the knowledge of causes and the secret motion of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” Bacon hoped the brilliant sun of that New Atlantis would rise in the New World, and bring on the dawn of everlasting youth. We live by the light of that hope everywhere today, from East to West—as John Updike once put it, “our craven hope that science will save us.”