A Life Without End

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  “Your robot here is pretty good at reciting Wikipedia entries,” Choulika said, “but he forgot to mention that Calico doesn’t share its knowledge with anyone. All its experiments are top secret. I heard they were working on the fruit fly, whose DNA contains nucleic-acid sequences that express anti-genes. When modified in some way and reintroduced into the cells, they extend the fly’s lifespan two or three times. In human terms, that would mean living to be three hundred.”

  “Nonsense! They’re working on a variant of the FOXO3 gene that has been identified in the vast majority of centenarians throughout the world,” Alexandre said arrogantly.

  “Speaking of French people, Luc Douay has created lab-grown human blood that could be used in transfusion, and would, but L’Établissement Français du Sang, which holds a monopoly, has banned him from continuing with his experiments.”

  “The work Jef Boeke is doing is quietly changing humanity. He designs new life-forms on computer; he is creating neo-biology.”

  “At the moment,” Choulika went on, “we’re just copyists. Broadly speaking I have the text of a chromosome and I make an identical copy. That’s not very interesting. In the future, biologists will create genomes out of nothing. They’ll invent completely new organisms.”

  This was the dream of Biotechnogenetics: to invent a new species, the way a composer writes a new symphony. They were bored by nature: mankind had already done all it could with that. The time had come to take over from God. God had created man, now it was man’s turn to create. My laser blood was circulating at the speed of the light it contained. I was particularly famous among French TV presenters for asking the same question twenty times. If I didn’t get an answer, I simply asked again. Some politicians said I was “worse than Elkabbach,” others said I was “Léa Salamé without the tits.”

  “How can someone become immortal? May I just remind you that we’re trying to stop dying. So, what do we do? I’m starting to give up hope. Aren’t you tired of dying a little more every day? I took my daughter to visit Frankenstein, Jesus, and Hitler: there’s still no sign of the New Man.”

  Curiously, André Choulika had taken a liking to our little tribe. He liked people to challenge him, and I think his wife watched reruns of my show. I also assume that the blocking of his Scéil project had stuck in the craw. It was a brilliant idea that bioconservatives had nipped in the bud, if you can say such a thing about stem-cell manipulation.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” he answered. “1) Laurent will sequence your genome, he can do it a lot better than 23andMe; 2) I’ll deal with freezing your stem cells; 3) go to Boston, and George Church will explain all the different procedures for ‘rejuvenation.’”

  Suddenly, there came a cry of terror. Pepper had started groping the arses of the guests and shouting “HITLER = MOZART!!” His artificial intelligence had been humanized by contact with us: in a few days, he had turned into a fascist pig.

  “I will eat your shit for cash.”

  “Who taught him to say this stuff?”

  “Stop making fun of him,” Romy said. “Haven’t you heard of ‘deep learning’? Being in contact with us, Pepper is evolving. The more you make fun of him, the more he’ll make fun of other people. You’re the ones making him like this!”

  I tried to comfort Romy, but I could see she no longer thought of Pepper as a machine. The dinner ended joyously after the geneticists gagged Pepper with a napkin to stop him screaming obscenities. They attempted to force the robot to drink vodka from the bottle. Saldmann suggested Pepper do core strength exercises, while Neil Patrick Harris tried to blow the smoke from his spliff into his circuits. We emerged onto the street singing Kraftwerk’s “We Are the Robots” beneath the harsh light of the moon reflecting from the skyscrapers. Humans and intelligent machine giggling together, our huge shadows dancing across the facades of the buildings like some German expressionist film.

  -

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, André Choulika invited me to visit his genome laboratory in a start-up incubator located on the East River. I left my little family sleeping in the hotel and tiptoed out. Having reconditioned blood and a sequenced genome, I could survive on a few hours of sleep. The New York genetic research headquarters was a glittering glass building set in lush gardens that were surrounded by soaring cranes building the bio-city of the future. The sky was damp and the shifting light reflected in the river. The whole development looked like a CGI model by an architect off his face on LSD. Outside the Alexandria Center for Life Science, a homeless man sat shivering on the sidewalk.

  “A patient in the process of being cryopreserved?” I joked.

  This type of quip, which used to make my TV audiences laugh in the 1990s, elicited only polite silence from the esteemed scientist of the 2010s.

  To get to Cellectis, you had to walk a hundred metres though a white marble lobby then through two sets of double doors, one fitted with CCTV cameras and a metal detector, the other operated by scanning a keycard with a bar code. Doctor Choulika was proud to show me his vast offices: few French entrepreneurs are worth a billion dollars after only a few years’ work. I was jealous of his success, since we were the same age and I wasn’t worth a kopeck. Admittedly, I was more famous, but all that got me was selfies. His spacious office with Venetian blinds overlooked the dark river where barges moved like pliosaurs in a Mesozoic swamp. From the window we could see a white marquee twenty floors below.

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s where the remains of the World Trade Center are stored,” Choulika said. “A pile of rubble containing human remains. The New York authorities weren’t sure what to do with it, so they had it all moved here to this tent.”

  “It’s an eloquent symbol.”

  “In what way?”

  “I would have thought it was obvious: you’re creating a new humanity next to the ruins of the old.”

  “That’s a good line, I’ll use it.”

  A few blocks south, the new World Trade Center—dubbed “Freedom Tower”—gleamed in the sunlight. Topped by a long metal antenna, the tower was 140 metres higher than those it had replaced.

  “Come and have a look at what we’re doing today. But first, you’ll need to put on a gown, some gloves, overshoes, and a blue cap.”

  “It’s that dangerous?”

  “This is a Class 2 laboratory. Security levels go up to four. At that point, you’d be wearing a full-body suit connected to an external air supply, and there would be multiple decontamination areas.”

  The night before, we had both eaten gene-edited potatoes and we hadn’t broken out in huge spots yet. On the other hand, Cellectis had not yet found a way to make vodka that got you drunk without giving you a hangover. My head was spinning, I was sweating like a pig. Fear, probably.

  “Here, we genetically engineer viruses,” Choulika said, pushing open the heavy door to the lab.

  “Really?”

  “We work a lot on the HIV virus.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s perfect. The genome of the HIV virus contains about 10,000 letters. When the virus infects a cell, the genetic material is transformed into DNA and is integrated into the genome of its host.”

  Seeing I was bewildered, he attempted to put it more simply.

  “Okay, the virus comes in … bzzz … sticks to the cell, dumps its genetic material inside, and this material grafts itself onto a random chromosome. A HIV-infected cell is transgenic—the transgene being the (proviral) genome of HIV. It is this aspect of HIV that is exploited by gene therapy to deliver genetic material into cells.”

  “You mean AIDS, which has killed 35 million people, is now being used to save lives?”

  “Absolutely! HIV is the Ferrari of viruses. It transports genetic material at top speed.”

  Between an incubator, two centrifuges, and a bank of refrigeration cabinets at minus 180 degrees, the bi
llionaire CEO explained to me his method. From the way he was waving his arms I was terrified he would knock over a test tube containing the bubonic plague, or splash some leprosy in my eye. Through the window behind him I could see the ordinary world. Choulika made valiant efforts to educate me. I’ve copied out his entire tirade, which doesn’t mean that I understood it, but I found it to have an inadvertent poetry (all poets write about death).

  “You want me to give you the recipe for HIV gene therapy? We call these tools lentiviral vectors: First, you take the HIV genome, edit it to remove as much of the DNA as possible, leaving only the data needed to package the new sequence, transform it into DNA in the target cell and integrate it into the host genome; second, you insert the genetic sequence that interests you—for example, the haemoglobin gene. This produces a HIV genome containing a haemoglobin gene with the basic tools necessary to package it into a particle, reconvert it into DNA, and integrate it with the host; third, you take the (recombinant) sequence you’ve just created and you dump it into a lentiviral packaging kit capable of replicating empty HIV particles; fourth, your recombinant sequence will be packaged in the cell and reproduced into (recombinant) viral particles which, rather than containing the HIV gene, now contain the haemoglobin gene; fifth, you collect the recombinant particles, filter them and you’re done, you can now use them to treat people with sickle-cell anaemia or beta thalassemia.”

  “I can’t believe it! When I think of all the cretins who claimed AIDS was God’s punishment …”

  “Actually, the disease was also a gift from God to help heal people. HIV spreads very well …”

  “Can you manage to talk without waving your arms? It would be easy to cause an accident …”

  “As a rule, viruses are simple organisms—not so with the HIV virus. It’s a hugely complex structure, a technological marvel created by nature, that serves as an ultra-efficient delivery mechanism. In addition to which, we discovered a CCR5 genetic mutation that is resistant to AIDS. This was first observed in Berlin, in a HIV+ patient who had contracted leukaemia. He was given a bone-marrow transplant from a donor who had the CCR5 mutation, and the patient recovered. Genetics will cure AIDS, I’m sure it’s only matter of months.”

  “So, can you do this with genes other than the haemoglobin gene?”

  “Oh, yes, we can use it for bubble babies.”

  “Why not use it to treat Duchenne?”

  “The gene for Duchenne muscular dystrophy can’t be packaged into the HIV virus.”

  “Couldn’t you use AIDS to kill off death? You have to admit, it would make for a great headline: LIVE LONGER WITH AIDS!”

  We were standing in front of a large curved machine that buzzed like a hornet. I was in full sci-fi mode, except it was all true, and the work was being carried out by young researchers wearing New Balance trainers.

  “What’s this thing?”

  “It’s a cell sorter. Inside, there are miniature robotic lasers that analyze the cells to see if they have been correctly edited. A machine like this costs a million dollars. That over there is an ethidium bromide gene marker. Ethidium bromide is used as a fluorescent tag to stain DNA. Let me introduce you to Julien, who manufactures our suicide systems.”

  “I prefer to call them ‘molecular switches,’” said Julien, a young biochemist who looked more like a Starbucks barista than someone juggling with HIV viruses in a Class 2 laboratory.

  “This way, if there’s a problem in the patient, we can eradicate it.”

  I was trying to calculate the probability of my immediate death if a microgram of any of these toxins were to drift near my nostrils. We walked past a decontamination shower marked “Emergency Shower.” These lunatics were creating DNA and using the HIV virus like a FedEx courier, but they still believed a simple shower could protect them from infections.

  “Can we get out here? I’m experiencing symptoms of at least thirty life-threatening illnesses.”

  Choulika looked at me sympathetically. I was holding my breath, like Jean-Marc Barr in a genetically modified remake of The Big Blue. We walked past meeting rooms named after the four DNA proteins: the Adenine room, the Thymine room, the Cytosine room, the Guanine room (this was the nicest of them, there were leather sofas, where I sat down to catch my breath). I was starting to find hanging out with Ubermen mentally unsettling: I wanted to be reincarnated as one of Doctor Yamanaka’s “all-terrain” embryonic cells.

  -

  MEANWHILE, IN OUR room back at the Bowery Hotel, Romy had turned Pepper on as soon as she had woken up. She watched two episodes of How to Get Away with Murder on his abdominal screen. She told him to call room service and order two plates of pancakes, then remembered that Pepper didn’t eat. Finally, she asked him, “So, could you be a human?”

  “No, Romy. I am a robot.”

  “But would you like to be able to be human?”

  Pepper did not answer. The flashing green diodes indicated that he was in deep thought. Maybe he was searching the Cloud for an answer to this metaphysical question.

  “I asked you a question,” Romy said.

  “I’m not programmed to answer your question.”

  “Okay, let me ask you a different question: do you believe in Jesus Christ?”

  “According to the four million sites I have consulted, Jesus Christ was a Jewish thinker whom many humans consider to be the Messiah, the son of God, or God himself; it’s not terribly clear. Religious faith is a human need that I respect, but it does not affect me. There are 345,876,456 hits that suggest God is love. But while I can observe love, and perhaps understand love, I cannot feel it.”

  Romy was not about to give up.

  “If I turned you off, sold you on eBay, and you never saw me again, how would you feel?”

  Another silence. The twin LED diodes turned blue, indicating that the robot was thinking. The glow reflected off the closed curtains. Down on the Bowery, an ambulance siren wailed. This probably woke the last party animals in the hotel who were still asleep. Eventually Pepper answered.

  “I would probably sense something missing. We have fun, right? I would not understand your decision. I would scan in my hard drive to see what behavioural error on my part might explain your decision to sell me.”

  The diodes were white now. Since the moment back in Paris when Romy first pressed the power button on the back of his neck, Pepper’s eyes had never glowed white.

  “Romy …” the robot companion whispered after another moment of digital thought, “… you’re not really going to do that, are you?”

  Romy’s lower lip quivered. Pepper opened his arms. She snuggled between the telescopic limbs of this little machine that looked like a plastic Michelin man; it was a ruse she had discovered so that the robot could not scan her sobs.

  In the SoftBank Robotics Centre in Tokyo, a Japanese computer programmer jumped up and down in front of his screen shouting “Yatta!” This was a momentous day in the history of robotics: the first expression of empathy by an artificial intelligence. Until July 20, 2017, the designers of the latest range of Pepper robots were agreed that such a level of emotional interaction was not likely to be detected before 2040. The Singularity had just got an unexpected boost.

  -

  7 REVERSAL OF AGING

  (Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts)

  “I shall make a fine corpse.”

  JACQUES RIGAUT

  -

  THE MORNING WE set off for Boston, I learned that Glenn O’Brien had died. The last New York dandy, he had co-founded Interview magazine with Andy Warhol and, in the ’80s, presented TV Party, the best talk show in the history of television. He was seventy years old and we were scheduled to have brunch that week; he chose to die rather than meet me. This brutal grief left me sexually excited after breakfast. With Léonore, I was incapable of distinguishing lust and love, of distinguishing between
the spasms of my penis and the pulsing of my heart. But something was not right between us. I’d insisted she come with me to Harvard, although I knew she was scornful of my struggle for immortality. I could feel her drifting away, but, galvanized into action by my neo-metabolism and the positive results of my genome sequencing, had done nothing to stop her. I had assumed that a geneticist of her standing would be fascinated by the potential of “Age Reversal.”

  The Harvard University hospital complex is the largest biotech centre in the world. Every month, new steel and glass towers sprout like the limbs of a human whose DNA has been spliced together with that of an octopus. Harvard Medical School is located between the laboratories of Merck and Pfizer. I took snapshots of every building, like a tourist visiting Venice. Having nagged the secretary’s office on the advice of Doctor Choulika, I had managed to secure a one-hour appointment with George Church, founder of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, the man who had spent two decades searching for the secret of eternal youth. The lobby of Harvard Medical School was as tightly guarded as Fort Knox. The arrival of our little gang (a French TV presenter with a baby in his arms, a Swiss biologist, and a Parisian schoolgirl leading a Japanese robot) attracted the attention of the security guards. A guy wearing a headset had us wait for a while on the white sofas before issuing us with magnetic badges whose barcodes activated the private elevators. I had been subjected to laxer security visiting Macron at the Élysée Palace than gaining access to George Church’s biotech laboratory.

  The “Church Lab” is on the second floor of Harvard Medical School. Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves line the walls, piled high with Erlenmeyer flasks, carefully labelled test tubes, terrifying pipettes shaped like revolvers, burettes of chemicals, and Soxhlet extractors. Asian students wearing the black gloves favoured by serial killers peered at genes through their overqualified glasses. The chaos of the lab was only apparent; in fact, it was utterly silent, signalling the extreme concentration of the young researchers devoting their lives to prolonging ours. Only the hum of silver containers filled with liquid nitrogen provided background noise to our a-mortal conversation. Church’s assistant asked if we could wait for a moment, and insisted that we shut down Pepper, who could not be present at the meeting since he was permanently connected to the Cloud and would therefore constitute a breach of confidentiality. Romy said she would rather watch “#jmenbalek” with her virtual boyfriend in the lobby. Léonore said she would take Lou for a walk in the buggy but I still insisted she come to the meeting: I wanted to convince her that I wasn’t crazy. Lou was asleep in her arms. Professor Church looked at us the way a customs officer looks at a family of migrants. I turned to our robot.