In his new book,“Long for This World,” Weiner makes similar use of another brilliant theoretical scientist, the English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a tireless proselytizer for radical life extension. But unlike the Grants, de Grey emerges on the page as someone who can be taken only in small doses.“Medievally thin and pale,” as Weiner puts it, with a luxuriant beard that recalls“Father Time before his hair turned gray” or“Timothy Leary unbound,” he is given to provocative statements that can turn into sermons. Nevertheless, with de Grey as his main character, Weiner explores the fractured, fuzzy science and pseudoscience of immortality.
“This is a good time to be a mortal,” Weiner writes, noting that life expectancy in the developed world is about 80 years, and improving. Yet evolution has equipped us with bodies and instincts designed only to get us to a reproductive age and not beyond.“We get old because our ancestors died young,” Weiner writes.“We get old because old age had so little weight in the scales of evolution; because there were never enough Old Ones around to count for much in the scales.” The first half of life is orderly, a miracle of“detailed harmonious unfolding” beginning with the embryo. What comes after our reproductive years is“more like the random crumpling of what had been neatly folded origami, or the erosion of stone. The withering of the roses in the bowl is as drunken and disorderly as their blossoming was regular and precise.”
De Grey, in the vernacular of science, is a“skin out” person, someone who studies life whole. Naturalists, ecologists, field biologists and evolutionary biologists are in this category, whereas“skin in” people pursue cellular phenomena,“gadgets and widgets that are too small to see through a microscope,” Weiner writes. The dichotomy is captured inFrancis Crick’s scolding ofStephen Jay Gould:“The trouble with you evolutionary biologists is that you are always asking‘why’ before you understand‘how.’” As Weiner describes it, the inspiration for de Grey’s scientific quest for immortality came in a flash one sleepless night:“The evolutionary theory of aging predicts chaos. And chaos is just what you see at the cellular and molecular level, and what you will always see. But what these troubles all have in common is that they fill the aging body with junk. Maybe we can just clean up all the scree and rubble that gathers in our aging bodies.” The beauty of this view is that“curing” aging requires no special knowledge of design, or any understanding of just how the cellular junk got there in the first place. It only requires that we get rid of it.
As de Grey sees it, there are seven types of cellular junk, the gerontological equivalent of the seven deadly sins. They include“cross links” that gum up the machinery and glue cells to one another and mitochondria that fail with age. Then there is junk within cells and junk in the spaces between cells, along with cells that no longer work but hang around and cells that die and poison cells around them. And then there are old cells that acquire dangerous mutations and give rise tocancer. Weiner’s strength as a writer is his ability to flesh out these complex theories without losing the reader. De Grey’s dream of conquering death may seem far-fetched and unreal, but Big Pharma is already at work on some of these ideas— the first cream that overcomes cross-links, which cause our skin to stiffen and wrinkle, will be a blockbuster.
Fortunately,“Long for This World” is not all about Aubrey de Grey. Weiner writes engagingly about other researchers and their work in the field: on so-called Methuselah mutants, creatures that live much longer than the rest of their species; genes like Sir2 (Silent Information Regulator 2), which may be responsible for some of the life-extending effects of extremely calorie-restricted diets; and related proteins, known as sirtuins. That work led to the discovery ofresveratrol, a compound in the skin of grapes that can activate sirtuins and prolong a lab animal’s life.
But as Weiner points out, there is a big problem with immortality. Traditionally, we have viewed our lives as unfolding in stages: Shakespeare’s seven ages of man capture our progression from infant to schoolboy to lover to soldier to justice to clown, ending finally in“second childishness and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Immortality could wind up being a terrible stasis.“A huge part of the action and the drama in the seven ages comes from the sense of an ending, the knowledge that all these ages must have an end,” Weiner writes. We might live forever in a state of unending boredom. And the technology might benefit the wrong people:“If biologists could have done for the dictators of the 20th century what they can now do for roundworms and flies— double their life span— thenMao Zedongmight still be alive.”
As a young physician caught up in the early years of theH.I.V.epidemic, I was struck by my patients’ will to live, even as their quality of life became miserable and when loved ones and caregivers would urge the patient to let go. I thought it remarkable that patients never asked me to help end their lives (and found it strange that Dr. Kevorkian managed to encounter so many who did). My patients were dying young and felt cheated out of their best years. They did not want immortality, just the chance to live the life span that their peers could expect. What de Grey and other immortalists seem to have lost sight of is that simply living a full life span is a laudable goal. Partial success in extending life might simply extend the years of infirmity and suffering— something that to some degree is already happening in the West.
Weiner brings his insightful book to a close with this thought:“The trouble with immortality is endless. The thought of it brings us into contact with problems of time itself— with shapeless problems we have never grasped and may never put into words. Our ability to exist in time may require our being mortal, although we can’t understand that any more than the fish can understand water. What we call the stream of consciousness may depend upon mortality in ways that we can hardly glimpse.”
Even if writers become immortal, books must end, and it is by reaching the end that the reader can sit back and find meaning in the journey.“Long for This World” is a great trip.
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