Perhaps we do so because we know we all must die. But that, say the
immortalists, is no longer true or need not be in the near future. Science
has now advanced to the point where we can begin to imagine solutions.
Indeed, our science has progressed so far that we are morally bound to seek
solutions, just as we would be morally bound to prevent a real tsunami if we
knew how. Some further assert that the Western tradition requires that
absolute value be accorded to every individual life. And it is that very
Western tradition, as expressed through the scientific method, that is now
offering us the opportunity to banish death.
Such arguments provoke opposition from what the immortalists call ‘deathists’,
those who have attacked the pursuit of immortality as wrong-headed, futile
or even dangerous in that it threatens to destroy our human nature, the
evolved basis of our moral perspective. Even the Vatican has stepped in to
attack the transhumanist movement. The immortalists, like all such
groupings, derive yet more energy and conviction from these external
assaults.
So, back at Atlanta, the immortalists were inspired to find they were facing
two further attacks from much closer to home which were to set the
conference alight.
Aubrey de Grey is, perhaps, the most astonishing figure in the entire
immortality movement. He seems to have sprung from the pages of a
Dostoyevsky novel, a saint or a demon but certainly nothing in between. He
has a huge beard and whiskers and hair as long as but straighter than
Goertzel’s which he ties back in a ponytail with a scrunchy. His face is
pale and often drawn. It is that of a driven or even possessed man. It is
also somewhat ageless though he is, in fact, in his early forties. He
dresses in denim and sneakers and speaks with immense assurance in perfect
sentences and paragraphs. His voice is high and penetrating. I had not
allowed for his extreme visual and auditory impact when I met him at the
Groucho Club in London. For two hours he sat on the edge of a sofa and
reduced the London media crowd to stunned silence as he described to me his
‘engineering’ strategy to defeat ageing. At Atlanta, he is hailed by the
immortalists as if he were a rock star. After the conference, he drinks beer
– he loves beer – in the bar and held court until the early hours of the
morning. I had seen him do exactly the same at his own SENS conference a few
months earlier. De Grey’s manner is startling but attractive. Even his
enemies admit he is an immensely likeable man.
His enemies also admit that he is brilliant. But he is a maverick, a figure
not strictly welcome at the medical and biological high table. He is, for a
start, self taught. His original discipline was computer science and the one
actual job he has at Cambridge is as a computer scientist in the Department
of Genetics. He became interested in biology when he married the geneticist
Adelaide Carpenter, who is nineteen years older than him, in 1991. He has
since self-educated his way to a PhD and to global prominence as the leader
of the immortalists. He actually hates the word ‘immortal’ as he merely aims
to conquer ageing and rejuvenate people in such a way that they will cease
to age.
He also creates enemies by his insistence that the problem of ageing cannot be
solved by pure science, but by engineering. Scientists try to learn
everything they can about a problem; engineers limit their research to what
they need to know to fix it. Thus, for example, a scientist may spend a
lifetime investigating the metabolic debris that accumulates in the ageing
human cell; an engineer would simply work out ways of removing the debris
and restoring the cell’s function. Why and how it accumulated in the first
place are not his concern. Scientists, not surprisingly, note with some
rancour the implied suggestion that much of their lives are wasted on the
futile pursuit of total wisdom.
De Grey is also a publicist. He attracts and revels in press coverage,
generating headlines around the world by claiming that life extension,
perhaps even medical immortality, may be possible within thirty years. He
does this for the perfectly valid reason that he believes publicity will
bring funding to anti-ageing research. But such publicity seeking makes
enemies of those more used to a lower profile and more cautious in the
politics of research grants. I know de Grey has been asked to remove links
to a more mainstream website from his own SENS site and he has done so. Some
feel tainted by association.
But, just before the Atlanta conference, polite disdain for his style, his
methods and his manner had exploded into something quite different. De Grey
had been the cover story of the February 2005 issue of Technology Review,
the ‘magazine of innovation’ of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sherwin Nuland had profiled de Grey. Nuland is an important figure in my
story and I shall return to him in another context. He is a very
distinguished doctor – professor of surgery at Yale’s School of Medicine –
and an exceptional writer, author of the formidable How We Die, a book that
forces us to confront the usually appalling physical reality of dying but
also, crucially, argues for an acceptance of that reality. Nuland was, in
short, predisposed to disagree with de Grey’s entire project because, like
Kass, like Fukuyama, he believes that death is a good thing for our species.
The article is, indeed, an elegant hatchet job, suggesting that many of de
Grey’s theoretical solutions may be ‘little more than slogans’.
Philosophically, Nuland questions ‘the ultimate leap of ingenious argument
that would do a sophist proud’ whereby immortalists suggest that by not
pursuing life extension, we are hastening death. Most seriously of all, he
suggests de Grey is a threat to the world – ‘the most likable eccentrics are
sometimes the most dangerous’.
‘With the passion of a single-minded zealot crusading against time,’ Nuland
wrote, ‘he has issued the ultimate challenge, I believe, to our entire
concept of the meaning of humanness. Paradoxically, his clarion call to
action is the message neither of a madman nor a bad man, but of a brilliant,
beneficent man of goodwill, who wants only for civilization to fulfil the
highest hopes . . . It is a good thing that his grand design will almost
certainly not succeed. Were it otherwise, he would surely destroy us in
attempting to preserve us.’
In his editorial, the magazine’s editor, Jason Pontin, used Nuland’s article
as the basis for a crude, personal attack on de Grey:
But what struck me is that he is a troll. For all de Grey’s vaulting
ambitions, what Sherwin Nuland saw from the outside was pathetically
circumscribed. In his waking life, de Grey . . . dresses like a shabby
graduate student and affects Rip Van Winkle’s beard; he has no children; he
has few interests outside the science of biogerontology; he drinks too much
beer. Although he is only forty-one, the signs of decay are strongly marked
on his face. His ideas are trollish, too. . . . Immortality might be okay
for de Grey, but an entire world of the same superagenarians thinking the
same kinds of thoughts forever would be terrible.
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