According to new research, humans may regularly live to 120 within the next 60 years. Leading experts have found ways to chemically slow down your biological ageing process. That means pills that interact with your DNA to maintain your bodily functions for decades after the current life expectancy of 81 years old.

At first read it seems too good to be true. A giant leap closer to eternal life. But when you begin to consider the quality of those extra years – your healthspan, not just your lifespan – questions undoubtedly arise. Here we investigate the possiblility of eternal life and whether we as men really want it.

For some people, it’s easy to dismiss the concept of immortality as fantasy. Or to believe that, even if it were a possibility, they wouldn’t want it. Call it arrogance. Or anxiety, maybe.

Recent biomedical advancements in the research spheres of stem cells, molecular repair, cloning, synthetic organs and cybernetics are already improving people’s life expectancy. Now scientists are daring to believe those developments could soon stop ageing decisively. Life extension. The end of death, bar fatal trauma.

The initial therapies are the hard bit: tissue engineering (creating organs in a lab and transplanting them), stem cell therapy (injecting ‘repair’ cells into the patient) and molecular regenerative medicine (repairing cells within the body). Current thinking is that there’s a 50% chance of getting it all done within 25 years.

Those therapies would be applied to middle-aged people, whose bodies haven’t suffered any serious damage. It would grant another 30 years of healthy life. Then when the patient comes back after 30 years the new therapies would have improved. The patient would be rejuvenated for longer. Therapies would improve again. The patient would not age. In the business of beating death, this is known as ‘longevity escape velocity’.

Even if you don’t escape and fatal trauma shuts the gate before we’ve all bolted, it’s not the end. You can come back. In the past two years, improved availability of cryonic techniques have sparked a price-war between clinics all over the world. From those in the US offering eternal-life insurance for $30 (£20) a month, all the way to a centre outside Moscow where they’ll preserve your head for as little as £6,000, coming back from the beyond is suddenly far less far-fetched. However much or little you pay, the promise is the same – suspension of your being until a time when death isn’t death any more.

We’re used to death, though. It’s ‘just a part of life’. Death has a psychological stranglehold over us; we’ve convinced ourselves it’s good because we think we can’t do anything about it. We’re afraid of immortality because it’s unfamiliar. We come up with ‘crazy’ reasons why it would be bad. We say we’d be bored; there’d be too many of us; dictators would terrorise forever. We want death instead.

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But immortality is too important to sweep under the exisistential carpet. After all, billions of lives are at stake. Your life is at stake. Mine is too. For me – stocky, a history of early strokes in the family, atheist – death is increasingly real and terrifying. The scientists are claiming that it needn’t be the former; the philosophers say the latter shouldn’t worry you. Who should you believe? If the scientists are right, why don’t we embrace them as the saviours of a world’s worth of existences? Are we more scared of their eternal life than our own death? It’s immortalists vs deathists. Whose side are you on?

Life as we know it

Imagine if it worked. Life becomes a cruise instead of a race. No panic over ageing (300 is the new 30) and no need to stress with an eternity of tomorrows. It would be glorious, but we don’t want it.

To find out why, I decided to start as close to my home in the North East of England as possible: Ian Ground, senior philosophy lecturer at Sunderland University’s Centre for Lifelong Learning. We sit down in his office. He says he just gave a lecture on immortality and the arguments are fresh in his mind. Perfect. He says the world would become a worse place. The population would rise dramatically and basic resources would be scarce. Inequalities would increase. Dictators would live indefinitely (the Church of England’s medical ethics advisor also uses the same argument, saying mortality is good because it limits “the amount of evil” a person can do). And, of course, we’d be old.

“Typically people get more conservative as they get older,” says Ground. “They could become resistant to change, so what’s going to happen to innovation? There are questions about society stagnating. Most of us wouldn’t want the world to be run by our grandfathers.”

Then come problems for the individual. Things don’t get any perkier.

“Scientists think we can go on discovering things about the universe forever,” he continues. “Maybe we can, but what we aren’t envisaging is just becoming knowledge-acquiring machines for the rest of our lives. We need feelings and relationships, not just work.

“We’re used to the idea of birth, growth and development, a period of maturity, gradual tailing off, and hopefully a dignified retirement and death. We don’t know what happens if we plateau. We have no idea whether the human mind can survive that. It may be that we just get profoundly bored.”







Never-ending story

Boredom is a frequent fear with deathists. But would you get bored? Surely life would become infinitely more interesting? Every decade you could have a gap year.

You’d have a list of ex-girlfriends like the Domesday Book. And if it got that bad, you could just throw in the towel. But journalist Bryan Appleyard, author of How to Live Forever or Die Trying, says ennui would set in.

“Some gerontologists say ‘If you’re bored why don’t you learn quantum mechanics or learn to speak Arabic?’” he tells me. “Well I don’t want to learn Arabic. Just because I’m 200 years old won’t make me more keen on doing those things.

“I think there’s a point that the immortalists don’t understand, and it’s that one exhausts one’s own personality over a certain period. It’s a weird idea that you would go on and on, still being interested in being yourself. I don’t think anyone would. I think you’d get excruciatingly bored of being yourself.”

If you want to know what living forever would be like, you talk to gerontologist Aubrey De Grey. He was the subject of a previous MH profile, detailing his first acts as the frontman of immortalism. Since then, De Grey has continued on in his self-propelled race towards reaching the ‘longevity escape velocity’.

He suggests we meet over a beer but our schedules clash, so we arrange to speak on the phone. From internet videos I know he looks like a slacker Druid: long beard, jeans, trainers and crystal eyes.

De Grey has an answer for Appleyard: “Wouldn’t it be boring? Wouldn’t dictators live forever? I’m not saying the reasons they give are stupid. I’m just saying it’s unbelievably absurd to raise them as objections to solving a rather major problem that we have today, namely the ill-health of old age.

“I don’t want to be the sort of person who condemns humanity to an unnecessarily early death, just because I thought I knew what life would be like in the future.”

De Grey has a phenomenal brain. He studied computing science at Cambridge University and taught himself the science of ageing. Now he’s researching regenerative medicines. He believes he will discover biological immortality before the white coats of the traditional scientific establishment. People believe him, enough to fund his laboratory in California.

He tells me about the laboratory; about the mice; the cells and molecules; the rich backers (including Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal). He talks about his belief that someone alive today may live to be 1,000. You can laugh, but he’s cleverer than you are.

The disposable body

“Aubrey is a... very skilled showman.” Tom Kirkwood runs the Institute for Ageing and Health in the western suburbs of Newcastle upon Tyne – the biggest facility of its kind in Europe. Outside it’s leafy and peaceful. Inside it’s hard science. It’s a pretty far cry from De Grey’s sunny California base.

Kirkwood is the dean of ageing. In 2001 he gave the Reith Lectures – a renowned BBC radio series assessing the most vital contemporary issues of our time. In his lectures Kirkwood described how our (humanity’s) life expectancy doubled over the past two centuries. We (scientists) did it mainly by defeating acute infectious diseases. Now ageing is our bête noire, bringing with it cancer, stroke and heart disease. If you live long enough, your chances of being struck down with any, or even all, of the above increase exponentially. Kirkwood teaches me about ageing as we drink tea.

We are not programmed to age, he says. It’s just a build-up of damage. Kirkwood published a famous theory around this: our bodies are able to repair themselves and avoid ageing, but they divert the energy towards reproduction. Historically we were likely to be eaten by badgers or crushed by a menhir long before ageing became relevant. Repair was pointless.

He calls this the ‘disposable soma’ theory. It was published in 1977, after he thought of it while having a bath (take note all those who hurry in the shower). Now he’s spending his life learning how to stop the damage of ageing. It’s a growing field and a complicated field. It’s noteworthy that cancer gets a lot more investment and we (again, the scientists) haven’t fixed that yet. Kirkwood is a lot less optimistic than De Grey.

“What Aubrey has done,” he says, “is to look at this from an engineering perspective. He’s got a list of things he feels need to be fixed and he says, ‘Right, we’ll fix them and we’ll all live for a thousand years.’

“Well, in principle, who can argue with that? The reason I criticise him really very strongly, is he grossly distorts the scale of the scientific challenge and raises completely false expectations about what is likely to happen. And people get excited by it. I think that’s wrong.”

Kirkwood is one of 28 genterologists who co-authored a paper critical of this approach in 2005. It claimed De Grey was in the “realm of fantasy”. They said ageing research is only just emerging from a reputation of quackery and beginning to be taken seriously. Put simply, they don’t want De Grey’s “empty fantasies” cocking things up.

De Grey’s retort was to quote Lord Kelvin from 1895: “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”. He went on to say that life extension is a form of engineering and its goals, methods and skills are different to those of science. He ended by saying, “lives, lots of them, are at stake”. Kirkwood still hasn’t been persuaded.

“I work in mainstream biomedical research,” he says, “and these kinds of arguments discourage mainstream science from taking ageing as seriously as it needs to be taken. It’s damaging to the interests of older people, so I feel very strongly that what he is doing is wrong.”

De Grey stands by his predictions. Kirkwood by his proof. But if immortality is just around the corner, who would want to miss it when it does come around? Stick it out long enough, and you could decide whether living forever is what you want with all the facts of immortality in front of you. There is already a way you can.

Frozen in time

In 1948, an American wrier named Robert Ettinger wrote a short story for a magazine. It was about a man who was revived after centuries of being frozen. In 1964 he wrote a book called The Prospect of Immortality. It's about freezing real people in the hope that future science will resurrect them. He writes about repair and rejuvenation, transplants and prostheses, organ culture and regeneration (De Grey is a great admirer). Three years after publishing the book, a retired psychology professor became the first cryonics patient. In 1976 Ettinger opened the Cryonics Institute in Michigan.

When Ettinger died, aged 92, he became the 106th person to be frozen at the institute. Currently there are about 200 people frozen in various cryonics facilities around the world, mostly in America. De Grey is registered to be frozen at Alcor in Arizona. Adherents believe cold storage is preferable to the grave. It gives them hope of a wonderful afterlife: the future.

I call Dr Brendan McCarthy, the medical ethics advisor for the Church of England, to ask if he has any objections to this ‘afterlife’. Would he want it? He says Christians have a better offer: life with God. I ask if he understands why some of us want immortality.

“I think some people believe that when their body stops functioning as a physical organism that’s it, that’s simply the end,” he says. “They have a desire to keep on living and do better things, but they believe there is nothing. And they fear that.”

Your second coming

In the end, the entire subject of immortality is one of fear. We’re scared both of terminal death and of endless life. Professor Nick Zangwill, a philosopher at Durham University, has the final word on why some of us are now increasingly desperate to live on. He’s working late and scribbles some thoughts down on an email. What he says strikes to the very heart of the eternal question: “One might feel disappointed with the life one’s led, but clinging on to more isn’t necessarily going to right that. I suppose one might have a chance to live the life one would like to have lived. But what you’re really wanting is to live your life again but better. And that’s impossible.”

The 101st patient at the Cryonics Institute was an 18-year-old boy. He suffered from depression and committed suicide in late 2010. After he died his parents signed him up for freezing. His body was packed in dried ice, put on a plane and taken to Michigan. Upon arrival he was stored in a cryostat, an 18-year-old-boy-sized thermos bottle full of liquid nitrogen.

You can see why his parents did it. If you think immortality is impossible it’s easy to dismiss. But if you believe? That’s when you want it. That’s when you hope. In a world where the logic of science is more quantifiable, more acceptable to our mindset than the promises of religion, hope is the new afterlife. The boy’s parents hoped badly. They wanted him to have another chance, even if he didn’t. They wanted another chance. Whether you believe an end to death is something you truly want or not, it’s the same reason any of us want immortality: please, one more chance. Just give me more time.



Illustrations: Noma Bar; Words: Andrew Hankinson

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