The Mortal Coil

"This is very much about the first path to immortality, of just staying alive, here in this body, forever and ever. It begins with Francis Bacon – one of the founding figures of science – and the wonderful story of how he died trying to figure out how to preserve life. On a cold night, he went outside in the snow, bought a live chicken, killed it, and stuffed it full of snow in the hope of preserving it, convinced that this was the key to preserving life, or at least organic matter. In the process, he caught pneumonia and died. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That sets the tone perfectly for this book. The Chinese emperor whose elixir of life ended up killing him is another great example of how the quest for immortality often leads to an early grave. Lots of immortality elixirs are useless at best and deadly at worst. Other people have claimed that they found the secret to immortality in ground-up dog testicles, or by sewing monkey balls onto themselves. This makes them seem like charlatans or snake oil salesmen, but they were very serious people who believed in what they were doing. There are a lot of people today, like [gerontology theoretician] Aubrey de Grey, who believe that we are machines, and as such are repairable and can be kept running indefinitely. If you only listen to people like him, you can start nodding your head and thinking maybe it is possible, maybe we are going to crack this. But that’s exactly what people thought 100 years ago, and 400 years ago, and right back to the ancient Egyptians. It can be difficult to refute the arguments of someone who says it’s all stem cells, but before we become too credulous we need to see it in this broader context. We’re doing quite well at freezing organic matter. But no one has yet frozen a rat and re-animated it, though it may well happen soon. There are a lot of obstacles, and much debate in the scientific community over whether these are inherent obstacles – whether defrosting organic matter causes all of the cells in our bodies to explode or something. A lot of people believe these problems can be solved. But of course once you’ve solved the problems of freezing and defrosting, you’ve still got a corpse. Cryonics is like an ambulance into the future. You’ve got to hope that at the end there is this fantastic hospital that can repair whatever it is that killed you. It gets a lot of attention because it’s quite sci-fi, but it’s never going to be enough in itself. Yes. You’re not allowed to freeze someone alive, because that kills them so it would be murder. This is a problem in the cryonics community, and they’re not happy about it. They argue that just as people go to Dignitas if they want to die, people who have a terminal disease should be able to be frozen before it destroys their body completely. But at the moment, you have to be dead to be frozen. Great progress has been made, but the question of whether ageing is pre-programmed in us, and can be turned off or not, is hugely controversial in the scientific community. There are a lot of gerontologists who believe that ageing is a system failure that affects every part of our bodies – so we’re not just talking about telomeres, for example. It is a problem that there is this limit to how often cells can replicate through their telomeres, but we usually die before we reach that limit. So it’s unlikely that there is just one problem, which leads a lot of scientists in this area to believe that we will never crack ageing completely. There’s interesting research that even if we manage to find the cure for cancer, heart disease and stroke – the three biggest killers – we will only live on average an extra decade. Because by the time that we reach the age when we suffer from these diseases, our bodies are already fading. Some people even see cancer as a symptom of this more general disintegration. The fact is, there are no evolutionary pressures for longevity beyond reproductive age. Indeed. We often fail to acknowledge what an enormous revolution we have seen in the last two centuries, when life expectancy has doubled. It was, until a couple of hundred years ago, around 40, and before that around 30. So our great great great great great grandfathers, not that long ago, who lived lives not unlike ours in cities, had life expectancies not that different to cavemen. And now we can all expect to live to 80. This is perhaps the most important revolution in human history – and it is continuing, although not at the same rate. We can expect to live longer than our parents, and our children can expect to live longer again. But this may have a limit. The oldest person to live so far reached 120. Whether we can go beyond that is yet to be seen. People like Aubrey de Grey, who proselytise for life extension research and investment, believe that any acceptance of the inevitability of death – or “deathism” – is a kind of resignation. My position is that all this progress is welcome, but we are still going to die. That’s not resignation or deathism, it’s just a fact. We have to accept that reality, while supporting the research that is going to help us live until 150 – which is a long way from eternity. What is dangerous is death denial, because the way you look at life is very different if you accept that you’re going to die, rather than fantasising about keeping on going indefinitely."