Long for this World: The Strange Science of Immortality

"Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author , and he decided he wanted to do a book on longevity. This is a book that really puts the entire field into a very interesting perspective. He starts out with the first gene that was discovered that changes longevity. Before about 1980, it was thought that a species’ longevity was essentially fixed by the number of brain cells or something. People thought you could modify it within certain narrow limits through proper healthy habits, but really couldn’t do anything fundamental about it. Then, in the 1980s, came a few discoveries where people purposely doubled or tripled or more, the longevity of certain experimental animals. They did this by altering their genes. In fact, one of the earliest studies showed that if you change just one gene, you could double the lifespan of an animal. Weiner covers that discovery, but he focuses a lot on personalities, and the personality that he finds most intriguing is Aubrey de Grey. De Grey’s not really a biologist. He’s really a computer scientist, but he’s become famous for the outlandish claims that he makes about the future of human longevity. He’s one of these people who has said, ‘Oh, if you’re less than 60, now you can expect to live 1,000 years.’ That’s the kind of thing that he will say, and Weiner spent a lot of time in the pub with Aubrey listening to him talk, not blindly accepting what he says but finding it intriguing. Then he would go back and talk to scientists. “The longest-lived mammal is a bowhead whale, which probably lives 250 years” So, whereas Sinclair’s book is really linear in that it says, ‘we discovered this, and then we discovered that’—avoiding a lot of controversy in the field—Weiner covers it very well. He finds people who say, ‘Oh, Aubrey is out of his mind and this is why we think that.’ Another he does that’s really great is he puts the whole idea of immortality into a cultural context. What did different people at different times think about the prospect of immortality? What did the poets say about it? That’s something that none of the other books really do—trying to think of mortality in the larger human context. I really enjoyed that part of the book because he’s a very learned man. He is one of the few journalists that I would go out of my way to read, whatever he might come up with, because he did such a fabulous job of writing this book. He was at a meeting that I was at just a few years ago, on bat longevity. Bats are the longest-lived animal, if you account for body size. The longest-lived bat lives 10 times as long as an average mammal, twice as long as a human, if they were the same size. He was really interested by this, so he showed up for all these highly technical talks. The thing that he was so good at was chatting with the scientists afterwards. This is just a wonderful book. If I were going to say read one book that will encompass the entire field, I’d say read this one, even though it’s 10 years old. We don’t really know. They don’t have a particularly large cortex, the thinking part of the brain. They really are far off the scale. It may be because they fly. There’s a big pattern with vertebrates that fly. Bats and birds are particularly long-lived. We don’t exactly know why. Some people think it’s their immune system, because they’re so good at living with these hundreds and hundreds of viruses that they graciously gift to us from time to time. With other animals that live a long time in the wild, we know how long they live from having captive colonies. But we have very few captive colonies of bats because they don’t do so well in captivity. So their longevity is exceptional, and it’s in the wild. Bats have to stay healthy, pretty much, to the bitter end. They have to be able to hear well, because insect-eating bats hunt with their high-frequency hearing, they yell and then they hear the echo. Our high-frequency hearing is the first thing that goes in humans. So bats are interesting on many levels—and Weiner is interested in all of these issues. It’s just a great book. I’d say it’s 80/20. 80% think he’s a bit out there. 20% think that he’s got something useful to say."