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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Mr. Natural (Cont.)

THIS, OF COURSE, is the great boomer bummer. Most of us alive today can reasonably expect to live to 75, while at the turn of the last century the average American dropped dead at 47. But that great leap in life expectancy won't repeat itself in this millennium—it came with revolutions in sanitation and antibiotics. Even if we wiped out cancer, we'd add only a couple of years to the average lifespan. But that doesn't mean we're going quietly into the good night. Not us—we're entitled; we've got technology. Never mind Viagra. It gets way, way weirder than that.

A confluence of new technological developments has suddenly led some from this generation to imagine that there might be an escape clause, a way out of mortality altogether. It doesn't take much poking around the techie Web sites to find people dreaming hard about physical immortality. And their dreams sound increasingly more like science fiction than science.

Consider, for example, Dr. Michael West, the head of a Massachusetts company called Advanced Cell Technology, which in 2001 (a year before the Raelian UFO cult's Clonaid claimed to have done so) cloned a human embryo. West didn't grow it into a baby, partly because he has other things in mind. Some of those things involve curing diseases—he'd like to harvest stem cells from cloned embryos to see if they're of use in the fight against, say, Parkinson's disease. But right about there, West parts company with what we normally consider medicine. He has told one interviewer after another that what he's really interested in is keeping humans alive—and young—forever. A team of biologists who worked for him at another corporation managed to synthesize telomerase, the enzyme that keeps cells from dying off after so many divisions. Now he's imagining "making body components one by one," each of them "made young by cloning. Then our body would be made young again segmentally, like an antique car is restored by exchanging failed components."

Such sentiments are not uncommon. At a conference on advanced technology in 1999, University of California at San Francisco molecular geneticist Cynthia Kenyon explained how she had dramatically extended the lives of a class of worms. It was, she told her fellow researchers, as if a nonagenarian suddenly looked forty-something. "Just imagine it: I'm 90," said the 45-year-old scientist. And if genes won't do the whole trick, researchers are ready with a wide array of other plans. Nanotechnologists—who manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular levels—believe that their tiny machines will soon be able to patrol the bloodstream, constantly repairing damage and eventually replacing all the functions of the circulatory system. When a nanotechnologist was asked in a recent New York Times article if he would miss the beat of the unneeded heart, he said no: "The noise in my ears keeps me up when I try to go to sleep."

A few years ago, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the Scottsdale, ArizonaÐbased cryonics company that is reportedly storing Red Sox legend Ted Williams's frozen carcass, was investigated for freezing the head of an 83-year-old woman before she was declared legally dead. Alcor's attorney called in depositions from top scientists; Eric Drexler, the father of nanotechnology, asserted that "future medicine will one day be able to build cells, tissues, and organs to repair damaged tissues." Hans Moravec, head of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, in Pittsburgh, took the idea further. "It requires only a moderately liberal extrapolation of present technical trends," he said, "to admit the future possibility of reversing the effects of particular diseases, of aging, and of death, as currently defined."

It is at least possible, in other words, that we stand somewhere near the dawn of that great human dream, life eternal. So why does it sound a little...nasty?

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