“You are only as old as your glands” became Brinkley’s promotional catchphrase. A testicular overhaul, he claimed, could keep even the crustiest old-timer eternally young. In no time, he was performing as many as fifty goat-to-man operations each week. Brinkley amassed homes, automobiles, airplanes, yachts manned by full-time crews. Glandemonium broke out. Medical journals overflowed with gonad experiments. “Your Glands Wear Out,” headlines trumpeted. If we could only prevent testicular deterioration, pitchmen insisted, old men would look and feel like twenty-five-year-olds again, forever.
Treatments were sold with taglines like “Why Grow Old?” The Vital-O-Gland Company, based in Denver, issued pamphlets announcing their discovery of “the secret of staying young”—eating dried animal testicles. Ad copy from Illinois’s Youth Gland Chemical Laboratories swore that science had unlocked the secret to healthsome longevity: “It is based entirely on the principle of Feeding Actual Gland Substance Direct to the Glands, thereby renewing and rejuvenating them.”
Transplants of ape testicles directly onto human testicles became widespread in the 1920s. The primary architect of monkey-gland transfers was Serge Voronoff, a tall, magnetic, dark-browed Russian émigré living in France. Voronoff got his start as the royal surgeon to Egypt’s khedive Abbas II, where he often dealt with ailing eunuchs from the harem. He believed an absence of testicular hormones caused their frailty. Independently wealthy, careful and meticulous in his work, Voronoff wasn’t a quack—he was a bona fide scientist who simply managed to convince himself of a hypothesis he couldn’t prove. When it comes to immortality, we’re all so willing to deceive ourselves.
Despite the ridicule he later endured, at the outset most scientists agreed with Voronoff. At the 1923 International Congress of Surgeons in London, reported Time, “700 of the world’s leading surgeons applauded the success of his work in the ‘rejuvenation’ of old men.” Voronoff provided medical journals with technical instructions for grafting slices of primate testicle onto patients’ testes. The New York Times stated that monkey glands successfully correct “the defects of old age.” Everyone agreed that aging would soon be relegated to the past. If we didn’t grow old, why, we’d just stay young forever. Registered testicle-graft doctors sprouted up everywhere from Turin to Rio de Janeiro.
By 1927, over a thousand customers had been Voronoffed. His clinic on the Riviera used chimpanzee and baboon glands. Each ape testicle was cut into six narrow segments, then sutured with silk onto the exposed human testicles, where new blood vessels would ostensibly grow in to nourish the graft. (A number of patients contracted syphilis from the transfusion. There is also speculation that AIDS came about as a direct result of Voronoff’s interventions.) While many scientists lauded his experiments, some cautioned against overoptimism. No one then knew how challenging it actually is to transplant animal tissue into human beings. Such procedures are almost always insuperably difficult and require medication to help them take. In reality, Voronoff’s approach resulted primarily in activating the placebo effect.
His experiments were repeated by other scientists, yielding unfavorable results. Within a few years, commentators pointed out that the method didn’t actually bestow any prolongation of lives, as “none of those on whom the transplants have been done seem to live beyond the normal period.” Critics started fuming that a grafted monkey testicle was “nothing more or less than a piece of dead meat put in the wrong place.” Public opinion turned. Animal glands fell from fashion. Disgraced, mocked, Voronoff died in obscurity, forgotten alongside the time when testicles were the fountain of youth.
We no longer have gland fever, but have we really changed all that much? Time will tell. Unlike singularitarians, most of us wouldn’t claim to know what the future holds in store. But most people also don’t realize how often we’ve been down this road before.
* * *
Ray Kurzweil’s Bible-size books explore the intricacies of mind-uploading with almost messianic fervor. There’s a passage in one of his books where he and Bill Gates speak about the world’s need for a new religion. Gates is quoted as saying, “We need to get away from the ornate and strange stories in contemporary religions and concentrate on some simple messages.” The book insinuates that Gates wants Kurzweil to lead this religion, but Kurzweil demurs: “A charismatic leader is part of the old model.”
The rest of their conversation concerns the implications of physical immortality. Despite some nitpicking (will an intelligent universe be silicon intelligence or more like carbon nanotubes?), they seem to agree with each other on most points, at least until Gates makes an insightful remark about how everything of value is fleeting. This truism invalidates Kurzweil’s central premise. For if our lives continued forever, how could they still be of value?
In immortalist thinking, paradoxes and rationalizations accumulate rapidly. Is eternity something more than an idea? The only way to find out is to achieve immortality. Even if we could live for only a hundred trillion bajillion years, we’d eventually have to contend with the sun’s extinguishing or proton decay. If people stopped dying, wouldn’t overpopulation become an insurmountable problem? Not at all, counters Max More, extropian and member of the Immortality Institute. He brandishes figures suggesting that populations have maxed out and are on the decline. “We can expect population growth to continue slowing until it reaches a stable size,” he adds, by which time aging will no longer be an issue.
Immortalists don’t notice anything unreasonable in the desire to never die. The certainty of their belief is bolstered by its own justifications. Just as biblical literalists are positive that the world began only a few thousand years ago, radical life-extensionists disregard contradictory facts. They are so deeply passionate about technological progress that they are prepared to forsake their humanity, to become half machine, in order to live forever. They view themselves as spearheading the most important endeavor humanity has ever engaged in. Doesn’t everybody else see that preventing death is a biological imperative?
* * *
The Immortality Institute’s book on infinite life spans turned out to be one long pitch for the importance of artificial intelligence, mind uploading, and cryonics. Its contributors often veer into incoherence. Even if the first half of this sentence isn’t something you consider ludicrous, the second half makes no sense at all: “The average age at death of those born in wealthy nations in the year 2100 will exceed 5,000 years, which is perhaps five times the value resulting from a permanent enjoyment of the mortality rate of young teenagers in such nations today.” What sort of calculator can calculate the permanent enjoyment value of rich tweens’ mortality rates? Or perhaps a better question is, what sort of brain comes up with that sort of equation? The answer: Aubrey de Grey. He’s one of the most prolific of theoretical immortalists, so it’s a given that he’d contribute an essay to the institute’s anthology. Aging, he argues, simply shouldn’t be allowed.
His chapter in the book describes, in gory detail, the island colonies of humanlike apes that would be vivisected and experimented upon to keep humans living forever. Apes are perfect not only because they’re genetically similar to us and age even faster than we do, but, as de Grey writes, because “they don’t talk, so if the biomedical imperative is sufficient society feels entitled to do more or less anything to them.”
He may not want to hear any dissenting opinions, but those uncertain about becoming cyborgs deserve to know exactly what the Immortality Institute’s fellows propose. It isn’t simply the colonies of apes, or the vagaries of cloned versions of ourselves, or even that the hybridization of man and machine will result in a new species. “The whole idea of a ‘species’ is a biological concept,” clarifies Kurzweil, another of the institute’s essayists. “What we are doing is transcending biology.”
But aren’t all living organisms by definition biological?
* * *
As an appendix to their book, the Immortality Institute published a list of reasons why living forev
er would be a good thing. To question the desirability of immortality is, in their view, “banal,” but they acknowledge that some people may have trouble comprehending “why anybody would want to live beyond the currently fashionable limit of about four score.” For those with limited imaginations, they offer the following answers:
• to find out what the future will be like
• to have more time to figure out the meaning of life, if there is one
• to have a chance to really grow up and find out what kind of wisdom and maturity might be attainable by a healthy eight-hundred-year-old
• to have more time to help others
• if you live, you can always change your mind about it later; death is irreversible
• to spend more time with friends and loved ones without a time bomb ticking quietly inside you all the while
• to explore exotic mental states
• to live happily ever after
These arguments, torn between the longing to know and a need to escape, are all ways of not dealing with the present reality. The list isn’t likely to convert nonbelievers. Certainly it will appeal to anyone obsessed with the time bomb of death. But by the time most people make it to their twenties, they realize that the meaning of life, “if there is one,” may have something to do with the fact that it ends. Even Bill Gates knows that ephemerality is what makes life precious. Keats, who died at twenty-five, didn’t need eight hundred years to understand that we can’t understand. All we know of life, all we can know and all we need to know, he wrote, is that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
The most striking aspect of the institute’s list is its “living happily ever after” conclusion, which reveals something significant about the fairy-tale nature of immortalism. Adherents seemed to me to be adults afflicted with the sort of aging denial typically found among teenagers. Their essays spoke of never suffering, of living pain-free lives devoid of all “corrosion by irritability, envy and depression.” Some people, myself included, feel that life is made meaningful by struggle, but then again, most of us also consider death a fact—not an immoral and unacceptable “imposition.”
21
It Was the Future
What an absurd creature man is,
Striving to reach divinity,
Yet stuck in his own image till infinity!
—Goethe, Faust
There is nothing more useless than an organ.
—Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgment of God
HUNTINGTON BEACH, in Orange County south of Los Angeles, bills itself as Surf City, USA. On the sun-drenched Sunday afternoon I arrived, the waterfront was crowded with teenagers in Ray-Bans playing volleyball or skateboarding on half-pipes. The pier teemed with athletic young people. Twentysomething street performers bounced around on pogo sticks. A pro-marijuana rally was under way. High-school-aged demonstrators chatted about “dank nuggs” and chanted, “It’s my mind, it’s my decision.”
I struck up a conversation with a busker named Corey who was playing acoustic guitar on the esplanade. With his plaid shirt, Justin Bieber mop-top, and all-American good looks, he seemed to me as if he could have been a member of the Beach Boys—had he been born a half century earlier.
“Huntington Beach is chill,” he told me, tossing his bangs in the wind. “There’s a lot of bros here, guys who race dirt bikes, wear bandannas, and have spiderweb tattoos. You know, dudes who like to rep things.”
“What does repping mean?” I asked.
“It means wearing shirts for a brand or company,” he responded patiently, with a mellow SoCal accent. “Like representing them. Huntington Beach bros also love lifted trucks, like lifting the suspension on their trucks ten inches higher.”
As we were speaking, an older man who resembled The Dude from The Big Lebowski came over to give us a flyer for his show. He was in a Led Zeppelin cover band.
“I think my parents have been to see you,” Corey said.
The singer coughed uncomfortably. He wasn’t quite sure whether Corey was joking or not. “You know, I’m also in a rap band,” he added, “Terminally Ill Cartel.”
“Sick.” Corey nodded.
“Come check us out sometime.”
“For sure. Can’t wait to grip one of your sets.”
After a few moments of silence, the older guy gave Corey a fist bump and then shuffled along his way.
“It’s kind of pathetic how people try to stay young here,” Corey confided. As he spoke, a couple of nubile forms sashayed by in bikinis. Corey let his tongue hang out and said, “But you can see why: this whole place is like a shoot from Teen Vogue. Swag.”
It was true. Young people were everywhere, and everyone else was trying to look as young as possible. It’s hard to age gracefully in a place such as this. Newport Beach, just down the road from Huntington Beach, is the plastic-surgery capital of Southern California. What a perfect place for immortalist ideas to thrive.
“We have our own commandment here,” Corey said. “‘Thou shalt not grow old.’”
“Do you have any examples of that?”
“That guy from Terminally Ill Cartel.” Corey laughed. “Like, this is a place where girls get Botox when they’re still in high school. And if dudes here are bros, the female version of a bro is called a bro hoe. For their eighteenth birthdays, they get boob jobs. When people excavate Southern California thousands of years from now, they’ll find landscapes full of silicone implants. Their boobs will live forever.”
Corey started playing a song on the theme of immortal injectables. When he was done, we said good-bye, and I headed in the direction of the party, enjoying the fading light and thinking about youth, so fleeting. Having reached my midthirties, I’d learned that a significant percentage of one’s waking hours are spent dealing with challenges—such as aging. Happiness comes in brief, rare bursts. Who would want to prolong the hassles of this life indefinitely?
* * *
Past the Sun and Sand Motel stood a large, four-story home overlooking the beach. I was a little early for the get-together, and my friends Clay and Jenna hadn’t arrived yet with our costumes, but the front door, ajar, beckoned irresistibly.
It opened onto a marble-and-black-leather foyer. Two van Gogh reproductions hung next to the imposing fireplace. The room was empty, except for a lone turtle pacing between some potted plants. Voices drifted down the stairs.
On the second floor, a dozen people were hanging out. One man, standing by himself, had a little sticker on his shirt that said BOB 412. I introduced myself and asked how he’d ended up here. He said that he’d posted on the Immortality Institute forum asking whether there were any longevity fans in Laguna. Nobody had responded. “I have only one friend in Laguna who’s into longevity and immortality—and he’s really strange,” Bob 412 said. “Then I noticed the posting for this party and decided to come check it out. I wanted to know what a roomful of immortalists would be like.”
“Me, too!” I said. “In fact, I don’t know anybody here.”
“You don’t even know Dave Kekich and Kat Cotter?” he said, pointing at a man in a wheelchair and a bubbly woman in her fifties explaining things to a couple of maids.
“Only from the invite.”
In the course of our brief correspondence, I’d also read a profile of the couple in Life Extension magazine, which explained how Kekich had become paralyzed in 1978 when his spine was compacted during a weight-lifting mishap. He met Kat some years later, when she was the director of the Lifespan Anti-aging Center in Los Angeles. “Have you ever wished you could go back in time twenty years and get a second chance?” concluded the magazine profile. “Well, if Dave Kekich and Kat Cotter have anything to do with it, you probably will!”
“I’ve never met them either,” Bob 412 said, “but they’re well-known in the prolongevity community.”
“So, Bob 412, what brought you here to the year 2068?” I asked, invoking the party’s theme.
“Longing,” he answered wi
thout hesitating. “When you get to be my age, you want to believe in 2068 and miracles coming down the line. It’s gonna happen. In your life.”
“What do you mean by it? What’s going to happen?”
“Radically extended life,” he said, deathly serious. “Indefinite life spans. The Singularity. C’mon, man, get into the groove!”
* * *
The year was 2068. On a gold-dust evening toward the end of May, fifty or so guests had gathered in Southern California to celebrate their friend David Kekich’s 125th birthday. Some were standing on the lawn, admiring the ocean sunset and sipping resveratrol-astragaloside shakes. Others milled around the open-concept kitchen, picking at shrimp rings and supplement bowls while debating the merits of various telomerase activators. Blue and silver balloons hovered over the dance floor.
In the living room, a fifty-eight-year-old man with an XLR input port on his neck was talking with a Barbie-blond, middle-aged woman. The name tag on her low-cut black dress read HER MOST SERENE HIGHNESS, THE CELESTIAL EMPRESS. She had enhanced lips and introduced herself as the CEO of a stem-cell company. His sticker said BILL ANDREWS. He researched biological longevity and operated a website called www.cure-aging-or-die-trying.com. The two of them were chatting about an upcoming ultramarathon around the moon that Andrews was organizing. “According to my calculations of the moon’s circumference,” he explained, “if we start at sunrise, finish by dusk, and run six-minute miles the whole time, it’s totally doable.”
Book of Immortality Page 34
