Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body (31 page)

Today’s visionaries aren’t satisfied with extending life by a little bit. They want to extend it by a lot. And they believe they are on the verge of having the scientific tools to do it. Their approach is no longer one of eking out a year here and a year there based on what they can extract, intellectually or surgically, from exceptionally long-lived humans or animals. Their thinking is altogether bolder, and arguably hostile to the traditional philosophy of biology. In short, they regard death as a technical failure. Their project is to identify the causes of this failure, and then to devise the means to eliminate those causes one by one. For this, they have earned the label of transhumanists or, more specifically, immortalists.

The most colourful and controversial of this new breed of thinker is Aubrey de Grey, who is the co-founder of the SENS Foundation. SENS stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. De Grey formerly worked at Cambridge University’s department of genetics, something that has lent his project an appearance of credibility that isn’t entirely its due. He is in fact a computer scientist, and he worked at the department in that capacity, only becoming interested in genetics when he married a geneticist there.

We meet in a riverside pub well away from the academic centre of Cambridge. Apart from the pint of beer in his hand, Aubrey has all the appearances of a guru, complete with a beard down to his navel, which he strokes thoughtfully as he launches into a well-rehearsed sketch of his rise to celebrity. His first theoretical papers, published in specialist gerontology journals, gave thought to the free-radical theory of ageing, which holds that ageing can be attributed to progressive damage to the body’s cells inflicted by oxidants and other free radicals (molecules with unpaired electrons). De Grey proposed an intricate mechanism by which mutant mitochondrial DNA – the DNA located within what is effectively the engine-room of each cell – hampers the cells’ ability to deal with free-radical attack. He expanded his thesis into a book, and was awarded a doctorate on the strength of it in 2000. He recognized then, though, that mitochondrial DNA was only one likely factor involved in ageing, not its single cause. His speculations became broader in scope and more polemical. He began to publish papers with provocative titles like ‘An Engineer’s Approach to the Development of Real Anti-Aging Medicine’ and ‘Is Human Aging Still Mysterious Enough to Be Left Only to Scientists?’ He dared to discuss not only the arrest of ageing, but actually reversing it, and doing so ‘within a matter of decades’. This bold promise launched him on the international conference circuit, where he thrived. His subsequent claim that we might soon expect to live to 1,000 years old was widely repeated in the media; he quickly tweaked it to suggest, excitingly, that the first person destined to live to 1,000 might be alive already.

And yet, Aubrey tells me, ‘predictions about longevity are the least controversial things I am saying.’ What really got him into hot water was that he itemized the breakthroughs that need to be made in order that we might live for another couple of decades, after which, he blithely claims, prolonging life still further becomes a whole lot easier. There are seven causes of death on the list, mostly to do with the body’s replacement or not of cells and their contamination or damage by external factors, each and all of which will have to be successfully tackled if human life is to be significantly prolonged. The wish list made de Grey’s project appear practical, and that worried orthodox biological researchers, who began to look as if they might be doing rather little about improving our life chances. ‘I put people in a very conflicted position. They can’t see a gap in my argument. They are terribly afraid I might be right,’ Aubrey tells me.

The structures that de Grey has assembled around him further suggest a seriousness of purpose. He helped to set up the SENS Foundation – based in optimistic California, not in Cambridge – to pay for research into the prevention of ageing using charitable donations, and instituted the Methuselah Mouse Prize, an award for scientists who manage to extend the longevity of laboratory mice. Donors range from engineers to science fiction readers to fitness fanatics as well as those who give money in memory of lost loved ones.

Mainstream scientific research may have been lax. But I find Aubrey equally scornful of popular culture. Science fiction devoted to the idea of extended human lifespan draws surprising ire. ‘It’s clear that their speculation is for entertainment only,’ he says. This sends the implicit message that death is acceptable. ‘I find this absolutely tragic and appalling. Now that biotechnology has put us within serious striking distance, this whole issue of denial matters more. The origin of denial is pure terror. It’s culturally universal. Only people who work in biogerontology themselves don’t share this. They have other reasons for disliking me,’ Aubrey adds teasingly.

De Grey saw the ugly side of the scientific establishment in 2005 when
Technology Review
, a respected magazine of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, commissioned a profile of de Grey from Sherwin Nuland, who, as we have seen already, sides with what de Grey dismissively calls the ‘supporters of ageing’. Opposing de Grey’s visionary idealism, Nuland’s tone was sage, magisterial – and fatalist; he was happy to see human lifespan level off at a ‘biologically probable maximum’ of 120 years. The article was prefaced by an ill-judged editorial that amounted to an abusive ad hominem attack on de Grey. Yet such attacks merely play to de Grey’s self-image of an embattled but righteous maverick. ‘I’m at least at Gandhi stage three-and-a-half right now,’ he says.

What unites de Grey with Voronoff and any other scientist who seeks to extend life is the fact that, at the level of cells, there is indeed immortality. Not all cells die. In particular, the germ cells exhibit what is known as ‘biological immortality’. Why this should be so while other cells perish remains the focus of much research. Aware of this, the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert – a man hardly shy of controversy in the defence of scientific rationalism – turns out to be surprisingly tolerant in his judgement of the immortalists. He does not believe they will succeed, but he does not, unlike the editors of
Technology Review
, who used the word on their front cover, dismiss them as ‘nuts’. The germ cells – the egg and the sperm – do not age, and it is only the cells created thereafter in the developing embryo that are mortal. ‘Potentially, then,’ Wolpert conceded on BBC Radio in 2011, ‘all causes of death are unnatural ones.’

Nothing irritates Aubrey de Grey more, I get the impression, than this recurrent rejoinder: yes, but what will we do with all the extra time? ‘Erudite people become just embarrassing on this,’ he says. Yet it’s hardly a trivial issue. Human extension is pointless unless it is directed towards a goal. We use our technological extensions to go faster, to jump higher, to see the world in a different way. So why prolong life? What would it give us that we do not have already? I press the question. What about you personally? Aubrey struggles to think imaginatively about what he might do. ‘It’s completely crazy to be making decisions,’ he splutters. ‘More time to do what? I’ve absolutely no idea. And that’s the point. My life has been relatively unpredictable so far, and that’s great. It
is
extra time. But extra time is a side benefit. The whole thing is about
health
. My motives are humanitarian.

‘If you’re still biologically thirty at the age of eighty-five, golf will be losing its novelty,’ he continues with a smile. ‘So it’s a chance to try other things. Serial careers and relationships are now much more the norm, so this simply extends a pattern.’ Then he tries to spell it out with a joke: ‘So many women, so much time.’ It is clearly a catchphrase that pleases him, as I discover later that he has been using it for years. Yet it lays bare the big point he is missing. We live for ever by having children.

They may not reach conclusions that please de Grey, but I find that many of our stories explore extended longevity with considerable subtlety. Greatly aged characters have always been stock characters. In the Bible, Methuselah lived 969 years. I think this is an understandable exaggeration. In former times when most people were dead by the age of thirty, quite a few would nevertheless have survived to double or treble that age. It is not like that today, when we mostly die around the same age, and there is among us no equivalent representation of persons aged 150 or 200. Indeed, this statistical difference might be taken as a clue that there is less scope to extend human life than de Grey thinks.

Methuselah’s age is given in Genesis more or less as a matter of record. In more recent stories, however, superannuated characters are used to dramatize the moral dilemmas of ageing and mortality. They anticipate some of the social and economic issues that confront modern gerontologists. For instance, the Struldbrugs in
Gulliver’s Travels
grow aged even though they do not die, and must therefore be declared legally dead to prevent them from hoarding the wealth that could be enjoyed by younger generations.

But the story that most exactly captures the scenario envisioned by de Grey and his confreres of greatly – but perhaps not infinitely – extended lifespan, and extended prime of life rather than extended old age, is
The Makropulos Secret
, Karel
Čapek
’s 1922 play later adapted as an opera by Leos Jan
áč
ek. The titular secret is a formula developed in 1601 by one Hieronymus Makropulos for his patron, Emperor Rudolf II, which can prolong life by 300 years. Afraid that he might be poisoned, Rudolf demands that Makropulos try it out first on his sixteen-year-old daughter, Elina. The action of the play begins, however, in 1922 in Prague, where a complex legal case has been dragging on for nearly a century. The glamorous singer Emilia Marty is a key witness, and turns out to have a strange familiarity with long-ago aspects of the case, in particular to do with a string of women, all with the initials E. M. Finally, Emilia tells her story – she is Elina, born in 1585, and has lived down the centuries since, periodically changing her name to avoid suspicion regarding her age, and leaving a trail of lovelorn admirers in her wake. Now, as the cynical Emilia Marta, tired of life, but afraid of death, she is the only one who knows where the formula is hidden, and she herself is in need of a top-up if she is to survive much longer. In the end, though, she chooses to forgo the chance to renew her life, and surrenders the formula. The protagonists and lawyers in the case all refuse it, and it is passed at last to the legal assistant’s young daughter, who is an aspiring singer the same age as Elina was when she swallowed the potion. Without hesitation, she burns the formula, and Emilia / Elina finally expires at the splendid age of 337.

When Jan
áč
ek saw the play, he was himself in the fruitful autumn of his career, rejuvenated by his passion for a much younger woman, Kamila Stösslová. He immediately set about adapting
Č
apek’s clever comedy of ideas into a moving personal tragedy. ‘We are happy because we know that our life isn’t long,’ he observed to Kamila. ‘[T]hat woman – the 337-year-old beauty – didn’t have a heart any more.’

Č
apek’s theme is taken up by the philosopher Bernard Williams in an essay ‘on the tedium of immortality’. Williams does not think it at all peculiar that E. M.’s existence had lost all meaning. ‘The more one reflects to any realistic degree on the conditions of E. M.’s unending life, the less it seems a mere contingency that it froze up as it did,’ he writes. For de Grey, this kind of talk is simple defeatism – and it’s interesting to note, by the by, that Williams is careful himself not to be drawn on what might be an appropriate age for the freeze to begin. To go there would expose the weakness in his argument and the strength of the immortalists’ case.

Of course, boredom is a poor response to the opportunities life offers at any age. E. M. has lived as several personas, and tired of each of them. She has tried the serial relationships that de Grey hankers after, and found even these wanting. Yet if we do have a list of things we are planning to do in our next century – make love to beautiful partners, write that novel, win Olympic gold, you can make your own list – we must ask ourselves why we are not doing each of those things now, while we definitely have the chance. The answers are different in each case, and some of them may surprise you.

Epilogue: Coming Home

While writing this book, I have been interrupted from time to time by news of public exhibitions with names like ‘Human+’ and ‘Superhuman’, and even the publication of a book puzzlingly, though I suppose audaciously, entitled
Humanity 2.0
. I have learned that the terms ‘posthuman’ and ‘transhuman’ are certainly not confined to the genre of science fiction. I have read that our very flesh is at stake ‘in our posthuman times’, and that the ‘boundaries between the human and nonhuman have been completely breached’. Another book carries the (optimistic? threatening?) subtitle:
When Humans Transcend Biology
.

But then I’ve read, too, about ‘enhancement’ and ‘optimization’ of the biological human body – if often with little sense of the direction in which improvement lies. I’ve seen how the emerging discipline of synthetic biology – using a set of technologies that enables functional biological devices to be fabricated from artificial starting materials – is encouraging not only life scientists but also engineers and designers to speculate in increasingly practical terms on the kind of changes we might make. ‘The definition of “human” will expand,’ states one not untypical manifesto. ‘Our children’s children will look nothing like us. And that will be by design.’

What I find startling in the rhetoric of both groups – the body transcenders and the body transformers – is their uncritical adoption of the language of consumer culture, with its implication that our own bodies are commodities to be ordered and chosen, bought and sold, and even taken back to the shop if we don’t like them. This language is coloured in particular by the advertising jargon used to sell digital technology. The Cartesian body-as-machine has been reinterpreted in the light both of modern medical science and the development of artificial intelligence to become the body-as-computer. We see raised before us a new body that we are invited to describe not in parts, but, as it were, in bits. The unspoken assumption behind this repositioning is that our species is due for, and deserving of, an upgrade.

Whereas the immortalists merely seek ways to live for longer or for ever in our own bodies, transhumanists disdain corporeal existence altogether, and wish to escape it. Their goal is to be able to ‘upload’ our minds to some grand ethereal network, and no longer to be dependent on flesh at all, or for that matter on the biosphere necessary to sustain it. (So far as I have been able to ascertain, the proponents of these fantasies are entirely men; much of the most thought-provoking philosophy of corporeality, on the other hand, comes from women, who seem more content (or resigned) to carry on living life within the bodies we have been given.)

None of this is new. The thought that the body is the prison of the soul goes back well beyond Descartes to Platonic philosophy. Present excitement about the disembodied mind, then, cannot be attributed solely to the technological moment in which we find ourselves. It speaks more of an acute discomfort and dissatisfaction with the body. Science reflects this discomfort with its relentless narrowing of focus on the smallest components of our biological existence. Artists are alive to it in a different way, exploiting our corporeal anxieties with a new turn to figurative art and hybrid projects to create tissue art and ‘semi-living creatures’. At the same time, any public display of actual human bodies, for whatever purpose, and in whatever state of preparation or decay, arouses controversy.

The inference that the body is a mere nuisance moves us further than ever from any meaningful reconciliation of body and mind. Do we really aspire to escape from the body? If so, to where? To a better place, a place of safety, a place of order and regularity, a place of reliable and predictable performance? This dream is no extension of human life, but a denial of its real nature. It pretends that our minds are machines of our own brilliant devising: so enraptured are we with the computers we have invented that it seems we want to be more like them. It conveniently forgets that our minds are biological, too, and that they reside in, and depend upon, our bodies.

There is no escape. But this does not mean that we should regard as a prison what is in fact our home. It’s quite a place.