Living Forever, or Die Trying…Could the First Immortal Person Have Already Been Born?
For some, the concept of immortality is too absurd and dismissed as fantasy. For others, they relish the idea of living forever. However, some claim this will be possible…and sooner than you think.
In the field of biomedical technology, advancements relating to stem cells, molecular repair, and synthetic organs occur constantly. As a result, life expectancy is noticeably improving. These improvements are leading some scientists to seriously consider the possibility that aging will cease. In effect, this life extension would herald the end of death, apart from fatal trauma.
The initial therapies are most problematic: tissue engineering, which is the creation of organs in a laboratory and transporting them into bodies, stem cell therapy, which is the injection of repair cells into patients, and molecular regenerative therapy, which relates to repairing cells within the body. Scientists such as Aubrey de Grey believe that there is a 50% chance that these techniques will be perfected within the next 25 years.
The ideal hypothetical scenario is that the therapies would applied to middle-aged people, whose bodies have avoided any serious damage. Successful application of the therapies would result in another 30 years of healthy life. By the time the patient reaches the end of the 30 extra years, they would utilise new, improved techniques to grant them another 30 years. The patient would be rejuvenated for longer this time due to the advanced techniques. Over time therapies would improve again, meaning the patient would effectively not ever age, and immortality becomes a possibility.
A life(or species) long fixation
The fascination with living forever is by no means a recent phenomenon. The notion of escaping mortality has tantalised humanity for thousands of years. However, from the 1960s, due to the development of cryonics, some believed so strongly in evading death that they paid thousands to be cryogenically frozen, the irony being you had to die first to have a chance at immortality.
The possibility that the techniques to grant everlasting life are within touching distance is hard to comprehend. Life would transform into a leisurely cruise as opposed to a frenetic race. There would be no agonising over aging, as 300 would become the new 30. An eternity of tomorrows would be an alluring prospect.
However, advocates of such an ageless utopia are often too fixated on their mortality, or more appropriately, immortality. They fail to acknowledge that immortality would see the world population rise dramatically. Not only due to the advent of immortality but if people are living longer, then likely they would reproduce for longer than they usually would, raising the global population further without it ever noticeably decreasing.
As a result, basic resources would become extremely scarce, and inequalities would reach unprecedented levels. On an individual level, it is not entirely certain that everyone would adapt to immortality. It is naturally engrained in us that we are born to grow, develop, mature, gradually tail off peaking and hopefully retire and die with dignity. With immortality however, people would effectively plateau. It could be that the human mind could not survive such a fate. Or that after a few hundred or even thousand years we would get profoundly bored, having done all there is to do and exhausted every avenue of life.
The anti-aging Advocate
Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is a staunch advocate of prolonging life to unfathomable ages. Until August 2021 he was the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) in California and most famous for his claims that the first person to live to 1000 could already be alive today. Regarded as the representative of immortality, he proposes that living forever is within touching distance.
”It’s the details of the science. We know what we need to do to keep people truly healthy (just like young adults), so it’s all about the technicalities of getting there from where we are now. We have a 50% chance of it occurring within the next few decades “he said.
He describes aging as “the accumulation of eventually intolerable molecular and cellular damage as side-effects of the body’s normal operation. There are many types of damage, and SENS classifies them into seven major categories. Each category has a particular approach to repair: for example, cell loss is repaired by stem cell therapies. Most of the relevant therapies will be delivered using injections, just like stem cell or gene therapies of today. Some surgery may also be required if we need to replace whole organs using tissue engineering.
Stem cell therapies are a big part, and so is gene therapy. Most of the work SENS Foundation does involves developing the genes we need to deliver, which are often from other species, or modified versions of our existing genes.”
He stressed further the importance of stem cell therapies “It’s crucial. Stem cell therapy is all about replacing cells that have died and that the body is not replacing automatically by the division of other cells. In aging, there are quite a few cases of that; Parkinson’s disease is the most obvious example”.
De Grey has identified ‘molecular garbage’ as one of the biggest obstacles in achieving immortality. “Molecular garbage consists of by-products of normal metabolism that the body does not have any machinery either to break down or to excrete. It therefore accumulates, either inside cells or in the spaces between cells. It is detrimental in very much the same way that your house doesn’t work so well if you don’t take the garbage out for a month.
Some examples: cholesterol-derived garbage in white blood cells in the walls of our major arteries causes atherosclerosis and eventually heart attacks and strokes; photoreceptor-derived garbage in the retina causes macular degeneration (the main cause of age-related blindness); amyloid in the heart and the pancreas contributes to heart failure and type 2 diabetes respectively”.
In response to the possible detrimental effect that immortality would have on society, he believes that bringing under control age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s far outweighs any negatives.
De Grey is a unique character, shunning mainstream biomedical science. His assertions and beliefs regarding anti-aging go against the grain of the majority of peers, with his hypothesis dismissed as having no basis in current science, technology, biology, and regenerative medicine. De Grey answers this by claiming that the understanding between these disciplines needs to be closed before unlocking the key to immortality. It will remain to be seen if de Grey will play a hand in achieving the answer to ever-lasting life. In August 2021, he was dismissed from his position at SENS following allegations of sexual harassment by two women, and further allegations he had attempted to tamper with the investigation into the claims.
Elixir vs the disposable soma
Professor Tom Kirkwood CBE headed the Institute for Aging and Health in Newcastle upon Tyne, among the largest in Europe. He is currently a researcher and Associate Dean for Ageing at Newcastle University and is widely regarded as one of the most authoritative voices on aging. In his lectures and published papers, he describes how humanity’s lifespan has doubled over the past two centuries. This was achieved primarily by overcoming acute infectious diseases and reducing the mortality rate resulting from childbirth. Now advancement into old age is bringing with it a whole host of problems such as cancer, stroke, and heart disease.
He proposes that we are not programmed to age and that aging itself is a build-up of damage. Kirkwood published a famous theory regarding this: our bodies are in theory able to repair themselves and avoid aging, but this energy is diverted toward reproduction. This is because historically, humanity was extremely unlikely to live long enough to see old age. We would succumb to diseases or be killed by predators. Age was irrelevant, rendering repair futile.
He called this theory the “disposable soma.” Since conceiving it in 1977, he has spent his career researching how to stop the damage of aging, not halt it. He differs from de Grey in that he does not seek to achieve immortality; he seeks to ease people’s final years from diseases such as cancer.
It can be argued that the entire subject of immortality is one based upon fear. For example, religion and an afterlife can be construed as some peoples’ fear that when they die there is nothing. The concept of an afterlife with God can be a comforting thought. The idea that cryonics was born from a short story penned in the forties speaks volumes for the desperation of some who want to escape death.
Clinging onto a longer life does not necessarily equate to happiness. One of the main reasons for wanting to live longer would be to right disappointments in the way one has lived their life. But you ideally would want to live your life again, but better, something that is impossible, regardless of how long you live.
The concept of living infinitely is flawed on numerous levels. Aside from the biomedical problems, we simply need to be able to die. New generations are what bring eras of change and innovation. They challenge the accepted beliefs and find new ways and new explanations for things we simply cannot comprehend yet.
In the greatest of ironies, death is crucial to human existence as a race. Without death, we would stagnate. Professor Kirkwood provided a fitting conclusion in an article he wrote for Scientific American:
“When the end arrives, each of us — alone — will need to come to terms with our mortality. All the more reason then to focus on living — on making the most of the time of our lives, because no magic elixir will save us.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4003063.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/cambridgeshire/hi/people_and_places/newsid_9330000/9330487.stm
http://www.programmed-aging.org/theories/disposable_soma.html
http://urbantimes.co/2012/07/tom-kirkwood-why-we-age/
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-ethics-of-anti-aging-by-peter-singer
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1371037/
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10522-008-9170-6
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