Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality by Jonathan Weiner

Author:Jonathan Weiner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780060765392
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-02-15T06:47:05+00:00

After half a day of talking with Aubrey, I wasn’t sure what to make of him. He did seem enormously well-informed. And he had credentials. He’d hosted an international meeting of gerontologists in Cambridge under the banner of SENS. “They gave me a standing ovation at the end of the meeting,” Aubrey told me. “And I’ll have to do it again, which suits me fine.” And he’d arranged special, smaller meetings of experts to talk about some of his ideas for fixing the Seven Deadly Things.

On the other hand, it all did sound a little crazy. Darwin’s mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell, advised him to avoid controversy it’s a terrible waste of time. When you follow the edges and frontiers of science, you try to watch where you step. It’s only too easy to waste years in controversy, or step right over the edge. A man with a bottomless bottle of beer, and a beard halfway down to the floor, who claims we can live a thousand years, presents a picture that more or less defines the realms beyond the edge of science, like those sea serpents in the old maps with the legend “Here be dragons.”

From my bookshelf, I took down my copy of Bacon’s History of Life and Death. I read aloud the passage where Bacon explains why we should in theory be able to live forever: “for all things in living creatures are in their youth repaired entirely; nay, they are for a time increased in quantity, bettered in quality.” So much so that “the matter of reparation might be eternal, if the manner of reparation did not fail.”

I thought Aubrey would agree with Bacon, but he shook his head. “That can no longer be sustained,” he said. “It is true if you don’t get down into too much microscopic detail. We see no decline in function of tissues until middle age. But the things that cause decline started in conception—or even before, you could argue, in the unfertilized egg. Certainly in prenatal life.” Even in the tissues in an embryo, or the cells in a single tissue, slight errors are being made from one reproductive cycle to the next. When cells divide, the changes get passed down. That is one reason that identical twins are never really identical. You could say that junk is already building up in the first moments of the life of the fertilized egg.

“What’s going on during early life is a gradual laying down of damage,” Aubrey said. “All the same things I’ve been talking about happen all through life. I’ll try to say it concisely,” he said, rapping his palms on his thighs. “A forty-year-old is different in composition from a twenty-year-old. In what way is that person different? There are no easy answers. The differences are very subtle, very slight. But you know they’re significant because the forty-year-old has a life expectancy that’s twenty years shorter than the twenty-year-old.” Whatever your age, and wherever on Earth you live, your mortality rate doubles every eight years or so, from birth to death.

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