Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  Brown-Séquard boasted in peer-reviewed publications of having cured impotence. His brand of organotherapy—la méthode Séquardienne—became a hit with consumers. He constructed a fantastic machine “with a belt pulley, tubes, alembic, aeration bladders, instrument dials: into it he fed bull testes pulped, filtered through sand, ascepticized with boric acid, drawn off as a liquor.” Hundreds of elderly men started shooting up testicles. Their deafness diminished, they claimed, hair thickened and darkened, energy levels rose. Penises hardened. Unfortunately, as it turned out, they were only getting hits of the placebo effect.

  Critics railed against Brown-Séquard’s “senile aberrations.” His contemporaries repeated the experiments, checking them against controls of plain-water injections. The results were conclusive: testicle-pulp inoculation had no noticeable effects. In fact, the saline serum Brown-Séquard had patented contained barely any hormones. It was just a turbid mélange of mashed bollocks in salt water. He was widely denounced. The pretty bride abandoned him. Prestigious journals no longer accepted his papers for publication. He fled to the seaside and died soon after.

  * * *

  After the Harvard symposium, Mark Collins invited me to stay for dinner in a circular ballroom on the fourth floor of the New Research Building. I was seated at a round table with Paul F. Glenn, Dean Jeffrey Flier and his wife, and sandwiched between Collins and Glenn’s lawyer. David Sinclair and Leonard Guarente, whom everyone called Lenny, were hovering around, as were waiters, who informed us that the choice of entrée was steak, chicken, or salmon. Everyone at the table seemed to have smirks of wealth, their faces padded with the knowledge that they’d amassed massive amounts of money.

  Once our orders were in, Glenn apologized for having fallen asleep during the lectures. “It seems I had a nap.” He grinned. “Who did I miss?”

  “A bit of each, Paul, a bit of each,” said Collins, and we all laughed.

  The discussion turned to which of the various synthetic molecules would best isolate and enhance sirtuin activators. I asked whether sirtuin drugs would ever be approved as antiaging medications by the FDA.

  “There are no known biomarkers for aging, so how can you test it?” Collins explained. “There are putative markers, but you can’t do a phase three for any drug on aging. But of course it doesn’t need to be granted regulatory approval as an antiaging drug to be an antiaging drug, if you know what I mean.”

  Moving to the podium, David Sinclair picked up the microphone and said he just wanted to thank Paul Glenn for what he was doing for humanity. Sinclair admitted that the future of sirtuins was uncertain, but that it undoubtedly carried immense promise. Even if they failed at extending people’s lives, they might cure diabetes in the process.

  Glenn stood up and took the microphone for another speech. “We see through the glass darkly at the Glenn Foundation,” he announced. “We aren’t scientists. We’re just a living checkbook. Your job is to explain what you’re working on so that we understand whatever the hell it is you are talking about. . . . If you are a researcher who hasn’t been paid yet, come and beat on Mark Collins over here. I believe he has learned to live with pain. He’s rather masochistic. If you hit him hard, you might have a fast friend.”

  “So you’re a masochist?” the dean asked Collins.

  Mark shot us both a wry look. “I prefer romantic.”

  At the end of Glenn’s speech, which went on way too long, he said, “If I don’t recognize you next year, remind me who you are—and who I am.” This got a laugh. “So stay in touch, beat on Collins, and hope to see you here again.” Glenn then suggested someone design a new poster for the event, adding that the same worm had been on the symposium flyer for the past four years. He called it “Andy’s worm.”

  Whoever Andy was, he piped up from somewhere in the room and said, “Hey! Let’s not talk about my worm.” A number of people groaned audibly. The dean’s wife grimaced. Collins assuaged the situation by joking that the worm has a grin because it’s immortal.

  “I thought people here were into longevity, not immortality,” I whispered to him.

  “They are.” He frowned. “This is a serious place—this isn’t Dave Kekich’s pad in Huntington Beach.”

  I turned to Glenn’s lawyer and asked whether he wanted to live forever. “No, not at all,” he said calmly. “People at this event want to stay healthy longer and then fall asleep and die peacefully, rather than die in drawn-out suffering and incoherency.”

  He drew a little graph on a napkin of how he wanted to die. The drawing consisted of a straight horizontal line and then a ninety-degree plunge downward. A lifeline of health punctuated by an instant downturn of painless demise. He then illustrated how most people die, his ink forming a slow, descending curve into the final, pain-glazed years of age-related illness.

  * * *

  1. Many drugs today are actually prescribed for off-label uses, regardless of evidence of effectiveness. Well-known examples include antihistamines for insomnia, propranolol (a blood-pressure medicine) for performance anxiety, and antipsychotics such as risperidone for eating disorders. According to the Archives of Internal Medicine, 20 percent of prescriptions in the United States are for non-FDA-approved uses.

  2. Gerontology, from geron, meaning “old man” in Greek, is the systematic study of aging.

  Conclusion: If _______ Is Possible

  We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be such a goal?

  —Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

  Paradoxically, the best arguments produced by any believing community, including perhaps the scientific community, have always led to mystery rather than demystification, expanding our sense of awe and wonder instead of explaining it away.

  —Eugene Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality

  A YEAR LATER, I checked in on Mark Collins, who’d moved into a new Santa Barbara home with an “age-appropriate” (as he put it) forty-seven-year-old graphic designer named Lily. Sirtuin research was mired in contradictory results. Had the Glenn Foundation’s researchers found anything of note not yet reported in the media? “Just a few more peptides in the haystack,” he said. “Not enough to hang your hat on.”

  I asked him again why he thought the incremental scientific advances being made in the study of aging were being construed by some as leading to immortality. “Because it just happens to dovetail nicely with those people’s anxiety,” he answered, shrugging.

  “But what’s your position on it?”

  “The lines have always been blurred between extending lives and making death an elective. That’s why we have an unassailable mission statement: alleviate suffering; lose the slope; help public treasuries.”

  We spoke of how Aubrey de Grey seemed to have clued into that idea as well. He’d started saying he no longer wants to use the word immortality when describing his aims. “I work on health,” de Grey clarified. “I am interested in ensuring that people will stay completely youthful, like young adults, for as long as they live.”

  As Mark and I chatted, Lily joined us for tea in the kitchen. He told her that I’d been writing about people who want to never die, an idea she found abhorrent. “Imagine being eternally imprisoned in your body?” She shuddered. “Life without parole.”

  “I’ve always wanted to know where that sweet spot is that makes people want to keep doing that special something forever,” Collins said, nodding. “Is it when they’re in the Jacuzzi looking at the stars? Is it at breakfast? Is it when they’re having incredible sex? Even if they had the ideal day—the best poached eggs ever, the best OJ ever, the most robust bowel movement ever—it would still involve all those daily human activities. Every day—forever!”

  “The whole thing comes down to ‘Why?’” Lily lifted her hands.

  “The pursuit of health is understandable, the pursuit of a long, fun, productive life is understandable,”
Collins continued. “But immortality would be like insomnia—forever! How cool would that be? Imagine an eternity of insomnia? I would not want to feel what I’m feeling for the next twenty badjillion years.”

  “Whoever those people may be, they are denying our condition,” Lily replied. “There is a circle of life.”

  I nodded, but her conclusion made Collins bristle. “Just because things have been a certain way doesn’t mean that they always will be.”

  “So you think you can change nature?” she charged.

  Before Collins could reply, I jumped in. “Well, that’s what these people think, the immortalists that we’re speaking about.”

  “It’s just crazy.” She shook her head. “No cell lives forever.”

  “Nature gives you the default position,” Collins said, growing serious. “Humans have the imagination and the ability to tamper with the natural order. I think it’s fine to tamper with nature. And I don’t fault immortalists for trying to see what’ll happen.”

  “I don’t have a problem with tampering with nature,” Lily explained. “What I have a problem with is saying anything can live forever. That’s crazy.”

  “It may be crazy, but if people felt that way about flying, they never would have gotten off the ground,” Collins countered. “Are immortalists that different from Lindbergh? Where’s the line of immutability? I’m not in a position to say they’re wrong.”

  “Flying a plane isn’t ending aging,” she said, levelly.

  “Nobody knows,” he responded.

  The mood had grown a bit tense. Lily pursed her lips and started doodling circles on a pad of paper in front of her.

  “You’ve fallen into a trap of drawing a metaphor that works for you,” he went on. “‘The circle of life.’ ‘The balance of nature.’ They’re nice phrases, and there’s probably some truth to them—”

  “Probably?” she snapped.

  “Yes, probably.” He smiled, as though reminding her they were simply debating, not arguing.

  “Well, there’s probably some truth to everything which leaves us stuck,” she conceded. “I love the world of absolutes, though.”

  “There’s no such thing, though,” he said, putting his arms around her shoulders.

  * * *

  Before Charles Lindbergh set off across the Atlantic Ocean, newspapers described the flight as a guaranteed “rendez-vous with death.” While the Spirit of St. Louis hummed toward France, human-formed phantoms and vaporlike spirits materialized before Lindbergh’s eyes. These “inhabitants of a universe closed to mortal men” spoke to him, reassuring him and helping him find his way. This inner experience, he wrote, seemed to penetrate beyond the finite. It was an epiphany that guided the rest of his life.

  After his flight, he received millions of letters, thousands of poems, countless accolades. Three hundred thousand people attended a single parade in his honor. Wing-walking skywriters spelled HAIL LINDY high in the air. Former secretary of state and later US Supreme Court chief justice Charles Evans Hughes gave a speech in New York heralding “science victorious.”

  In the euphoria’s wake, having managed one impossibility, Lindbergh wondered if he mightn’t help solve another. Working alongside Nobel Prize–winning cell biologist Alexis Carrel (who claimed, erroneously, that cells divide endlessly and are therefore naturally immortal), Lindbergh came to question whether death is “an inevitable portion of life’s cycle,” musing that perhaps scientific methods could hasten the arrival of bodily immortality.

  Lindbergh had been raised to believe that “the key to all mystery is science.” The idea that science will allow men to become gods was instilled in him by his grandfather, a well-known surgical dentist. For postflight Lindbergh, solving the basic mystery of death seemed only as challenging as flying across the sea. It just meant doing what people said couldn’t be done. Yet as he aged, and as his experiments didn’t yield the hoped-for results, he began questioning his desire for immortality. He became an environmentalist, spending time in the wilderness, where his observations of nature made him start gravitating toward cycles of life and death rather than the linearity of unremitting progress toward eternal life.

  In his later years, he characterized himself as a former disciple of science, someone who’d mistakenly enthroned knowledge as his idol. “I felt the godlike power man derives from [it],” he wrote. “I worshipped science.” He publicly acknowledged how mistaken he had been, adding that “physical immortality would be undesirable even if it could be achieved.” In his final years, he became convinced of the necessity of dying. In death, he concluded, “is the eternal life which men have sought so blindly for centuries not realizing they had it as a birthright . . . Only by dying can we continue living.”

  * * *

  When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, we felt sure immortality was next. After all, if we were able to reach other worlds, how could we not live forever? “Transcendence is no longer a metaphysical concept,” trumpeted sociologist F. M. Esfandiary. “It has become reality.” His book Up-Wingers argued that our ability to send rockets into space meant we would soon never die. By the end of the twentieth century, he predicted, we’d be ageless, interstellar denizens of orbital communities, easily space-hopping in and out of planets and moons. Robot servants would take care of our every need, armies of clones would fight alien enemies, teenagers would soar over clogged urban centers in winged cars. We’d also be able to alter our bodies’ genetic scripture at will.

  “Nobody in this generation has to die, unless they want to,” Timothy Leary assured disciples in the 1970s. “They can become immortal and go to the stars.” He himself did end up going to the stars—when he died. He didn’t become immortal (or get cryonicized), but seven grams of his cremated ashes ended up in orbit aboard a Pegasus rocket. A different end from the endlessness he’d envisioned, but a fine one nonetheless.

  The idea that scientific breakthroughs will help us escape the human condition is a common delusion. Whenever technology attains a new feat, we start imagining we’ll live forever as a result. When Craig Venter created the first synthetic genome in 2010, newspapers claimed science had “officially replaced God.” After CERN’s particle accelerator apparently established the existence of the Higgs boson in 2012, journalists announced that we’d soon be traveling around the galaxy at light speed.

  We’ve always been like this. As soon as frozen food became standard in grocery stores, cryonicists began staging demonstrations in front of funeral parlors, carrying placards saying DEATH IS A DISEASE AND CAN BE CURED and WHY DIE? YOU CAN BE IMMORTAL. Our ability to program computers filled us with more of the same overblown fantasias. “If we can make computers,” we assured ourselves, “why, surely we can program ourselves to attain immortality!” It’s a hallowed narrative. We found telomeres; we can live forever! We discovered a jellyfish that regenerates itself; we can live forever! We located sirtuins; we can live forever! Thanks to science, we can do more now than ever before. We may even become cyborgs one day. But we’ll never be gods.

  * * *

  In 1974, Charles Lindbergh succumbed to lymphoma. As he lay on his deathbed, more and more claims emerged promising eternal youth. In February 1973, Michigan State University announced that they were close to releasing a pill that would extend life by two hundred years. That same year, others said an immortality pill would be available by the year “2000 or so.” By that point, newswire outlets reported, aging would be fully reversible. Polls showed that the majority of Americans believed that there would be artificial eyesight for the blind, drugs to permanently increase intelligence, and chemical control of aging within three decades. Forty years have passed.

  Cyberneticists of that time spoke of coding personality so that it could be filed into electronic circuits and reanimated at will. Knowing that DNA was simply an information system, we’d soon find a way to program and reprogram it. “The ultimate reason that immortality is possible is that we are not the stuff we’re made of,” th
ey informed awestruck reporters. “You might say that the formula for Immortality is Cybernetics + DNA.” We might have developed motherboards, but we still can’t download eternal life.

  A 1970s organization called the Abolish Death Committee issued press releases explaining that the end’s end was nigh. “Because more than one science is hard at work on this problem, an early solution is forecast.” It would take only “15 years maximum” before we’d succeeded in extending human life to an average of four hundred to five hundred years. Computer whizzes went on to change our lives, but as Steve Jobs’s death proves, they haven’t yet succeeded in trashing mortality. “We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die,” Jobs said. “Technology is not changing it much—if at all.” Understanding computers—just like understanding how to fly, how to land on the moon, how the structure of DNA works—doesn’t mean we can understand death. “I don’t understand how someone can be here, then not be here,” admits Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle software and immortality financier. “It’s incomprehensible.”

  * * *

  Death is something we cannot rationally comprehend. The only way to contend with it is by attaching ourselves to stories. Some religions assure followers that reaching the hereafter is the way we understand what life was all about. Physical immortalists, on the other hand, believe that the inevitability of dying is itself just a belief. For them, what was once extramundane has become very much of this world. The symbolic notion of rising from the dead and being reborn has been transposed onto Internet-age computing systems.