Immortality, Inc.
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While Kurzweil pondered Moore’s law, he began to suspect it was part of a much larger trend that began not with the invention of the silicon chip, but with the big bang itself. The universe, he argued, had been accelerating its own organization from its first milliseconds right up to the present. First there was the formation of galaxies and stars, and then planets. Next, with the emergence of life on Earth, self-organization took another leap in the form of biological evolution and the natural selection that drove the diversification of the world’s life-forms from the first single cells to elephants. Another surge came with the advance of intelligence, human consciousness, and the technologies that a symbol-creating, self-aware creature could conjure: words, language, writing, art, mathematics, and eventually software code, computers, robots, even genetic engineering—each gathering speed as they built on the foundations and developments before them. The more organized it all became, the more quickly it continued to organize. This made Moore’s law a subset of a much larger evolutionary vision: the Law of Accelerating Returns—LOAR.
Kurzweil enthusiastically shared all of this thinking with the world. On stages or in conference rooms, he would reveal on great graphs how LOAR played out across the cosmos. It was an adult version of the same thinking he shared as the junk-collecting kid from Jackson Heights: I’m going to change the world! He would reveal the benchmark moments of history, and illustrate the way they took the shape of a hockey stick, where advances rose in a perfect exponential curve from the flat surface of the stick’s blade to a sudden rocketing up the nearly vertical slope of its shaft.
That’s what exponential growth did: It started out slowly and looked almost flat until it reached what he called “the knee of the curve,” an inflection point that suddenly shot upward. The human race was now approaching that inflection point, Kurzweil would say, and events that had so long looked level and slow over the incomprehensible epochs were now poised to stagger upward almost vertically. What had been accomplished in 20 years during the 20th century would soon be accomplished in the first 14 years of the 21st, and within 7 years more after that, and 3 and a half after that and so on. By the end of the 21st century, human technology would advance the current equivalent of 20,000 years! It was all writ large in everything from the chemical and molecular interactions that shaped the early universe right up through the advent of DNA, genes, language, and mathematics. And it was gathering speed with the absolute reliability of a Swiss watch.
As proof, Kurzweil still likes to show pictures of Martin Cooper walking around holding the world’s first cell phone back in 1973. The thing was huge—like a giant loaf of bread with an antenna on it—and hardly worked at all. But the next thing you know, flip phones are everywhere looking just like the Star Trek communicator. Then Apple invents the smartphone, which quickly becomes much more than a phone. Suddenly everyone is carrying around a handheld computer linked to the Cloud with all of its untold knowledge and information right there at their fingertips. Early on, the idea of lugging around some big clunking phone would have seemed like the world’s stupidest idea. Kurzweil would often smile wryly at this. Because soon, people found they couldn’t imagine life without these things. And then they would say, “Ahh, that’s not really a big deal; it’s been around for years.” They feel that way because of something called recency bias, the sense that a new thing is quickly perceived as old hat because it’s become so indispensable. Think of fax machines, microwaves, streaming television, and car doors that open with a gesture.
The race for immortality will behave very much the same way, Kurzweil says. Costs will start high, and the idea of living radically long will look as cockamamy as mobile phones, or self-driving cars. But then costs will plummet. And when they do, that is when they will actually work—because history shows that the only people who pay through the nose for technology that doesn’t work are the wealthy. They are the early adopters because they can afford to be. But they are also the only ones who lower the costs of new technology enough that the rest of us can afford them.
Thus, in March 2000, there in the East Room, Kurzweil could see that the world was glimpsing an indestructible fact: Human biology was going binary, and that would create a new world. And that, in turn, would lead, one step at a time, to life everlasting.
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PART OF RAY KURZWEIL’S BELIEF in his vision of a supremely long life began one year before his visit to the White House. He was in the lunch line at a nanotechnology conference at K. Eric Drexler’s Foresight Institute and struck up a conversation with Terry Grossman, a slim, hardy-looking doctor who ran the Grossman Wellness Center in Golden, Colorado. Grossman had recently written a book of his own, The Baby Boomers’ Guide to Living Forever, and the two men immediately connected. Grossman’s Wellness Center was all about youth and health, and he had developed a variety of prescriptions for a longer life, including supernutrients, wellness diets, exercise, and chelation therapy to remove toxic metals from the body.
Kurzweil was fascinated with Grossman’s work for the simple reason he agreed with it. In the early 1980s, he had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, mainly because of his poor diet. During one of his early entrepreneurial meetings right out of college, he needed to put on a suit. But when he pulled one out of the closet and tried it on, he was forced to leave it buckled but unbuttoned; he had gained that much weight. When drug treatments for the diabetes only seemed to make matters worse, Kurzweil researched and then attacked the problem on his own. He radically changed his eating habits, reduced all sugar, lost weight, consumed large quantities of selected supplements, and published his second book in 1993, The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life: How to Reduce Fat in Your Diet and Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart Disease.
After their initial meeting, Grossman and Kurzweil exchanged no fewer than 10,000 emails in the ensuing months. That led to a new book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, which hit bookstores in November 2004. The book’s goal was unabashedly optimistic: Do away with death. Others might be satisfied to grow old and die, but Kurzweil was not among them, and neither was Grossman. If anyone wanted to think their prescriptions were kooky or unrealistic, let them take the Fantastic Voyage and refute their arguments.
At this point, Kurzweil was approaching age 60; the very idea that death was somehow good, that it gave life meaning, rankled the hell out of him. Aging robbed you of your mental agility, whittled your sensory acuity, and burgled your sexual desire. In time, everything was taken from you until there was not a scintilla of life left to give.
Fantastic Voyage revealed to readers how death would be avoided—and one of the truly big breakthroughs was the Human Genome Project. The HGP would unlock the ins and outs of genetics, reveal why we died and how, and lead to new treatments tailored to each of us. Science would even find ways to grow fresh organs or supercharge old ones or reprogram human genes to reverse the ravages that aging had already wrought. Even foods using recombinant DNA might soon be created that could treat diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and AIDS. The possibilities were unlimited!
Kurzweil and Grossman laid out how everyone could live forever using what they called their “three bridges” strategy. Each bridge would be a little like skipping across a creek from one rock to the next. In Bridge One, readers were asked to live a smart, healthy lifestyle to take advantage of Bridge Two, which constituted breakthroughs in biotechnologies largely based on insights from the human genome. This, in turn, led to Bridge Three, Kurzweil’s favorite: nanotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI) that would replace our “suboptimal” biology and make radically long life a reality.
Each bridge in the book was plotted out with the detail of a scientific coda—which, in a sense, it was, from the supplements, exercise, and medical tests readers should take to cross the first bridge to the “programmable blood” that nanotechnology would make possible during the third. The book included chapters on diet (“Food and Water,” “Fat and Pro
tein”), the scourges that kill us (sugar and inflammation), and ways to overcome it all (hormone therapy, genomics, detoxification, and exercise). It was especially important for baby boomers to stay healthy because Bridge Two, the biotech revolution, had not yet arrived in 2004—and if boomers didn’t take good care, they might not survive long enough to take advantage of the biotechnological advances on the horizon.
Did the human race have the tools and technologies in hand to live forever in 2004? No, the authors had to admit. But remember: A defining trait of the human species was that it insisted upon going beyond its limitations. That was one of Kurzweil’s clarion calls. Science was not in the habit of slowing down. LOAR was advancing exponentially, and by that calculation, within 10 years, the average American would be adding a year of life expectancy for every year lived. All one had to do was survive in good health until 2015 (and avoid being hit by the proverbial bus), and immortality would be in the cards; kind of like a living version of an Alcor cryonaut. Except without the wait.9
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THE REACTIONS IN THE SCIENTIFIC WORLD to Fantastic Voyage were polite enough, but less than riveting. At least among his artificial intelligence colleagues, the responses were often more along the lines of Ray is really smart, but these ideas about melding with nanomachines and living forever—well, maybe he’s gone a bit off the rails.
Yet a good deal of evidence supported the general trends Fantastic Voyage foresaw, even if the timing of it all might be in dispute. For years Genentech, with Art Levinson as CEO and chair, had been “pharming” artificial insulin, human growth hormone, and proteins that attacked cancer and kidney disease—even asthma and psoriasis—with increasing speed. And Craig Venter was furiously crunching genes to illuminate genomic mysteries of all kinds. These advances were already emerging.
By the time Fantastic Voyage and its follow-up, Transcend—Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, arrived in 2008, Kurzweil’s ubiquitous prognostications continued to gather interest and credibility, and the titans and cognoscenti of Silicon Valley were taking notice. Why not? After all, Kurzweil’s personal and persistent visions of the future fit into the Silicon Valley vibe as smoothly as a $1,000 pair of Ferragamo loafers. Legendary venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla invested in his companies. Bill Gates called him a visionary thinker, and would invite him over to the manse now and again to have a bit of dinner. Kurzweil had come a long way since his days as the kid determined to build magical machines that saved the world. He had become an oracle in all things technological—which was to say, all things. Kurzweilian concepts that had once seemed so out there began seeping slowly into the public consciousness, becoming sources of insight into the murky future that Silicon Valley wanted so desperately to clarify. Because, as he saw it—and as the Valley was clearly demonstrating—every change in the 21st century was becoming a blazing, exponential bit-stream! And hadn’t he predicted precisely that? Even if there was still an immense amount of work to be done, hadn’t he actually said the words? Life without death was not only possible. It was inevitable.
But, in the early 2000s, Kurzweil was not the only eccentric who was gathering the attention of those riding the bleeding edges of science and radical life extension. A lanky, biblically bearded computer scientist with a prodigious thirst for ale had also emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, from among the musty labs and libraries of the University of Cambridge across the Atlantic. He had even influenced the thinking of Kurzweil himself. This man, too, had a way with words and a penchant for combining science and logic with outrageous pronouncements. And he, too, was hell-bent on redefining the sainted meanings of aging and death. His name was Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, and the world would soon hear of him.
13 | LIFE EVERLASTING
It was 4 a.m. in Manhattan Beach, California, and Aubrey de Grey was knackered. Still, he couldn’t sleep, partly because his brain was stuck in the British time zone he had departed just yesterday, and partly because he was having a eureka moment. He had flown over from Cambridge and spent June 24, 2000, submerged in roundtable discussions and debates with gerontologists from all over the world. The subject of their discussion was to explore ways to combat aging—and frankly it had been insufferable. Despite all the brainstorming and scientific deliberations, the group had failed to come up with any kind of concrete antiaging plan.
So now he was pacing the room, pulling on his long, brown beard as he habitually did, mystified. How could one open the hood on human biology and tinker intelligently enough to fully stop the aging process? That was the big mystery of the day. This, even though the very next day Francis Collins and Craig Venter would stand with the president of the United States and announce the human genome had, at last, been sequenced. Despite that advance, Craig Venter was still of the opinion that no one knew “shit about biology.” And he was right. Everyone was still a long way from understanding how all the gears and switches of the human genome put every one of us six feet under.
Then came the eureka moment: a solution to aging, and it didn’t require redesigning the whole evolutionary masterworks. Instead, it was only necessary to identify the common damage that aging did to human biology. Once that was done, then one simply had to repair those particular elements in the way one repaired a car: Fix the brakes, replace the alternator, rebuild the transmission, and so on. By debugging the system, you could keep the amazing contraption running in top condition…indefinitely. After all, weren’t we really just these magnificent, if flawed, pieces of organic instrumentation? When you thought about it this way, living forever really was just an engineering problem.
De Grey felt he was a man who could identify these insights better than others. His first degree was in computer science and his second was a Ph.D. in biology. He had only just completed his doctoral thesis on how mitochondria, which power every one of the body’s cells, break down and obliterate our cellular works as they age. For years, while working his job computing at a genetics lab in Cambridge, he had pored over books in Trinity Hall’s biology libraries, absorbing the intricacies of biomedical gerontology, the study of how the body ages.
So now in his Manhattan Beach hotel, he sat down and furiously scribbled out a list of the ways that humans commonly broke down, and how they might be repaired: cells, neurons, mitochondria, the whole shebang. The key was not to look at aging as something natural, but as a disease, and then to cure it.
Before the sun rose, he had written it all out.
First, there was the mutation of chromosomes, which led to cancer. Then came glycation, the warping and disruption of proteins that glucose (sugar) caused. And there were the so-called “extracellular aggregates”—all the junk that accumulated outside the membranes of the body’s trillions of cells that, as we aged, increasingly failed to be properly cleaned up, like a house gone to seed. This included damage like beta-amyloid, which was related to Alzheimer’s. Next, de Grey identified intracellular aggregates, the goo that gummed up the works inside of cells over time: substances like lipofuscin, the so-called “wear and tear” pigments that damaged many major organs, eyes, and brains. Cellular senescence was another big problem. This happened when cells aged but didn’t entirely break down, creating those zombies that sent out misfired chemical signals and damaged their cellular neighbors. And finally, there was the depletion of the stem cells that drove the development of all humans in the womb and during childhood. De Grey knew the body tapped these cell reservoirs throughout life to renew heart or liver or collagen cells, but he also saw that stem cells aged over time, which made them less than the perfect replacements they were in youth. And of course, their supplies were not unlimited. When they were gone, they were gone. These were the six culprits that aged and unhinged us.
Unlike Kurzweil and Grossman, de Grey’s solutions to the problem of mortality imagined science making a series of incremental advancements in drug therapy that would extend the lives of still healthy people who hadn’t yet sh
own symptoms of the cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and other illnesses that so often accompanied aging. He was, in effect, proposing to find ways to do what the body does pretty well when it’s young, but slowly fails to do as we age.
De Grey didn’t pretend that his prescriptions would be perfect; they just had to be good enough to slow and eventually reverse aging so that people who remained healthy at 70 would live youthfully to 150, at which time more advances would allow them to live to 300 until still more came, and so forth. Somewhere along the line, the really Big Breakthroughs would reverse aging altogether. He called this theory “longevity escape velocity.” You would die, of course, eventually, because statistically something was going to get you: a bolt of lightning, abduction by aliens, a spouse who simply couldn’t stomach the idea of celebrating her 950th wedding anniversary with the same person. But for all intents and purposes, life everlasting was possible.
De Grey realized all of this was theoretical, and the remedies were a long way off. But as he sat in the cold dawn light, ransacking all of the research he had done, he was convinced that in the year 2000, scientists working in labs around the world were already making progress. Their efforts just needed to be more properly focused. For now, though, his next step was to work out the details of his insights, and reveal them to others within the biogerontological fold.