"Certainly Man Will Not Become Immortal"
by Julia M. Klein
AUGUST 1, 2008 TAGS:
Has the story of Methuselah, the Biblical patriarch who survived until age 969, led us astray? Or does the possibility of prolonged life – perhaps even bodily immortality – lie just over the next scientific rainbow?
These questions undergird David Boyd Haycock’s Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer (Yale University Press), whose cast of characters ranges from the 17th-century thinker Francis Bacon to the contemporary biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey.
We are obsessive seekers after eternal youth. The familiar tale of Ponce de Léon is part of a long intellectual tradition, suggests.jpg)
Haycock, who is curator of 17th-century imperial and maritime studies at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. In fluid prose, dense with quotation, Mortal Coil traces Western philosophical and biological inquiry into the problem of extending the human lifespan.
Haycock’s subtitle, it gradually becomes clear, is something of a misnomer. It is true that, with better public health and the conquest of many infectious diseases, life expectancies have been rising, particularly during the last century in the West. The oldest documented human being, the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, died in 1997 at the age of 122. (Earlier accounts of men who lived to age 150 or more were widely believed and cited, but almost certainly fraudulent.)
But Haycock has not really written “a history of living longer.” Neither, as he stresses, does he wish to engage the notion of the soul’s immortality – the meat and drink of religious faith. Instead, Mortal Coil chronicles attempts, mostly spectacularly failed, to invent a formula to defy or at least postpone the ravages of age and mortality.
Life extension efforts, Haycock makes clear, have not so far been among medicine’s triumphs. The history of such efforts overlaps, in fact, with the history of charlatanism. Haycock’s hokum-filled roll call of nearly four centuries’ worth of anti-aging remedies includes “chemical elixirs, the power of the mind over matter, the control of bacteria, eugenics, hormone injections, gland grafts.” Summarizing their effects, he writes: “Some of these may have added a little to human life expectancy at birth; but none has ever done more than that.”
Each chapter in Mortal Coil begins with an anecdote, starting with Sir Francis Bacon and his penchant for freezing flesh. In 1626, at age 66, Bacon decided to stuff an eviscerated chicken with snow, to see how well it would be preserved. The exercise, ironically, gave him his death of a cold.
Like others of his time, Bacon relied on the Bible for its vision of eternal life and of the fall that cost Adam and Eve their innocence and their immortality. In looking to restore to humankind its forfeited heritage, Bacon was no heretic. He “did not consider impious the search for the prolongation of life,” writes Haycock. “Rather, it reflected a growing confidence that man could regain his lost control over nature.”
But Bacon was hardly the first to speculate about prolonging life. The physicians of classical Greece described “six non-naturals” whose control would ensure long life: “air; diet; exercise; sleep; passions of the mind; and bodily excretions.” As Haycock reminds us, many contemporary physicians prescribe similar measures.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Irish-born chemist Robert Boyle pondered the divide between life and death. He experimented with reviving drowned wasps and bees, killed live animals by extracting air from a glass chamber, and pioneered the vacuum pump and blood transfusions.
In the Romantic Era, the Marquis de Condorcet, a gifted French mathematician, predicted that advancing medical knowledge would keep death at bay. “Certainly man will not become immortal,” he wrote, “but will not the interval between the first breath he draws and the time when in the natural course of events, without disease or accident, he expires, increase indefinitely?”
In the 1870s, England’s Richard Jefferies wondered why more such progress wasn’t occurring. He wrote that a human being is “shaped for a species of physical immortality” – and died himself of a slow, wasting disease that was likely tuberculosis, at age 38.
According to Haycock, the Victorian Era’s questioning of religious faith threw into sharp relief life’s apparent purposelessness.
Meanwhile, he writes, “the science of studying human mortality was undoubtedly improving.”
Dubious remedies to retard ageing flourished alongside the new disciplines of immunology and cell biology. Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard (1817-94) injected himself with supposedly rejuvenating animal semen. Targeting intestinal bacteria, the Russian biologist Ilya Ilyich Metchnikoff (1845-1915) promoted the drinking of sour milk as the first step in a health regimen he called “orthobiosis.” Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) grafted chimpanzee testicles onto men without the benefit of controlled scientific studies.
Given the dismal track record of these approaches, it’s small wonder that contemporary claims about life extension excite skepticism. And no one has attracted more skepticism than the exuberantly bearded, Cambridge-educated researcher Aubrey de Grey, whose program is called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS).
De Grey’s strategies target the cell damage and gradual waste accumulation that lead to human degeneration. His Methuselah Foundation is offering big prize money for the extension of life in laboratory mice, a necessary prelude to human rejuvenation. Haycock interviewed de Grey and was charmed.
Steeped in Malthusian anxiety about overpopulation, Haycock entertains two distinct questions: Is de Grey’s vision – of life spans as long as 1,000 years – realizable? And is this brave new world of millennial human beings even desirable?
In the end, he allows himself to be seduced, at least for a moment, by the siren song of immortality. “Science and medicine seem finally to be catching up with our dreams – in ways we could barely have imagined even twenty years ago,” he concludes. “I am still only in my thirties; I must have a chance.”
If he can dream, why not the rest of us?
These questions undergird David Boyd Haycock’s Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer (Yale University Press), whose cast of characters ranges from the 17th-century thinker Francis Bacon to the contemporary biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey.
We are obsessive seekers after eternal youth. The familiar tale of Ponce de Léon is part of a long intellectual tradition, suggests
Haycock, who is curator of 17th-century imperial and maritime studies at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. In fluid prose, dense with quotation, Mortal Coil traces Western philosophical and biological inquiry into the problem of extending the human lifespan.Haycock’s subtitle, it gradually becomes clear, is something of a misnomer. It is true that, with better public health and the conquest of many infectious diseases, life expectancies have been rising, particularly during the last century in the West. The oldest documented human being, the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, died in 1997 at the age of 122. (Earlier accounts of men who lived to age 150 or more were widely believed and cited, but almost certainly fraudulent.)
But Haycock has not really written “a history of living longer.” Neither, as he stresses, does he wish to engage the notion of the soul’s immortality – the meat and drink of religious faith. Instead, Mortal Coil chronicles attempts, mostly spectacularly failed, to invent a formula to defy or at least postpone the ravages of age and mortality.
Life extension efforts, Haycock makes clear, have not so far been among medicine’s triumphs. The history of such efforts overlaps, in fact, with the history of charlatanism. Haycock’s hokum-filled roll call of nearly four centuries’ worth of anti-aging remedies includes “chemical elixirs, the power of the mind over matter, the control of bacteria, eugenics, hormone injections, gland grafts.” Summarizing their effects, he writes: “Some of these may have added a little to human life expectancy at birth; but none has ever done more than that.”
Each chapter in Mortal Coil begins with an anecdote, starting with Sir Francis Bacon and his penchant for freezing flesh. In 1626, at age 66, Bacon decided to stuff an eviscerated chicken with snow, to see how well it would be preserved. The exercise, ironically, gave him his death of a cold.
Like others of his time, Bacon relied on the Bible for its vision of eternal life and of the fall that cost Adam and Eve their innocence and their immortality. In looking to restore to humankind its forfeited heritage, Bacon was no heretic. He “did not consider impious the search for the prolongation of life,” writes Haycock. “Rather, it reflected a growing confidence that man could regain his lost control over nature.”
But Bacon was hardly the first to speculate about prolonging life. The physicians of classical Greece described “six non-naturals” whose control would ensure long life: “air; diet; exercise; sleep; passions of the mind; and bodily excretions.” As Haycock reminds us, many contemporary physicians prescribe similar measures.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Irish-born chemist Robert Boyle pondered the divide between life and death. He experimented with reviving drowned wasps and bees, killed live animals by extracting air from a glass chamber, and pioneered the vacuum pump and blood transfusions.
In the Romantic Era, the Marquis de Condorcet, a gifted French mathematician, predicted that advancing medical knowledge would keep death at bay. “Certainly man will not become immortal,” he wrote, “but will not the interval between the first breath he draws and the time when in the natural course of events, without disease or accident, he expires, increase indefinitely?”
In the 1870s, England’s Richard Jefferies wondered why more such progress wasn’t occurring. He wrote that a human being is “shaped for a species of physical immortality” – and died himself of a slow, wasting disease that was likely tuberculosis, at age 38.
According to Haycock, the Victorian Era’s questioning of religious faith threw into sharp relief life’s apparent purposelessness.
Meanwhile, he writes, “the science of studying human mortality was undoubtedly improving.”
Dubious remedies to retard ageing flourished alongside the new disciplines of immunology and cell biology. Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard (1817-94) injected himself with supposedly rejuvenating animal semen. Targeting intestinal bacteria, the Russian biologist Ilya Ilyich Metchnikoff (1845-1915) promoted the drinking of sour milk as the first step in a health regimen he called “orthobiosis.” Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) grafted chimpanzee testicles onto men without the benefit of controlled scientific studies.
Given the dismal track record of these approaches, it’s small wonder that contemporary claims about life extension excite skepticism. And no one has attracted more skepticism than the exuberantly bearded, Cambridge-educated researcher Aubrey de Grey, whose program is called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS).
De Grey’s strategies target the cell damage and gradual waste accumulation that lead to human degeneration. His Methuselah Foundation is offering big prize money for the extension of life in laboratory mice, a necessary prelude to human rejuvenation. Haycock interviewed de Grey and was charmed.
Steeped in Malthusian anxiety about overpopulation, Haycock entertains two distinct questions: Is de Grey’s vision – of life spans as long as 1,000 years – realizable? And is this brave new world of millennial human beings even desirable?
In the end, he allows himself to be seduced, at least for a moment, by the siren song of immortality. “Science and medicine seem finally to be catching up with our dreams – in ways we could barely have imagined even twenty years ago,” he concludes. “I am still only in my thirties; I must have a chance.”
If he can dream, why not the rest of us?
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