Immortality Quest: Living for
a Thousand Years
November 14, 2009
Three American scientists were awarded 2009's Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of the "immortality gene". Their research on the chemical caps that protect the tips of chromosomes, telomeres, helps us understand why some people age more rapidly than others. Elizabeth Blackburn, one of the Nobel Laureates, compares telomeres to the plastic tips that prevent shoelaces from fraying. Because the enzyme that creates telomeres, telomerase, is more active in some people and less so in others, some of us will have an easier time beating the odds. We'll age less; we'll remain free of disease; we'll live longer. Photo Credit: David Iliff Diliff
The discovery has revved up therapeutic remedies that target disease and aging. Everything from anti-aging face creams to pharmaceutical drugs can be resynthesized and perfected pushing us closer to the end goal of immortality.
Immortality — biologically speaking.
While doctors and scientists preoccupy themselves with the quest to slow down or even reverse the aging process, lay people are assigned the gnawing task of considering all the philosophical and practical questions of living "forever". Let's say forever is one thousand years. What would we do with all that time?
Yes, the jellyfish Turritopsis nutricula has captured the flag through natural selection. With their ability to revert to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature, they are uniquely immortal creatures on the golden path to eternal life. And they probably don't do much thinking about it. But what about us?
Dr. Aubrey de Grey, who led the Cambridge University Genetics Department, has written several papers supporting his theory that "average life spans would be in the region of 1,000 years". His theory, "Engineered Negligible Senescence", suggests that science will soon have the tools to help us grow old but without all the aging. Perhaps the continued study of telomeres, for example, will make his theory a reality.
While scientists figure out a way to keep our hearts young and our skin soft and tender so that we look like we're 30 by the time we hit 300, let's ponder the more practical side of the scenario by considering a few key issues.
Population explosion: if we are already concerned about the collective carbon footprint of today's 6.7 billion, how would living forever tilt the equation?
What would happen to the Botox industry? Without wrinkles and creases, scores of companies would go out of business. Ditto for many cosmetic, skin and hair care lines.
How would marriage work? Forget about 1,000 years. If we could all live for a mere 500 years, would the phrase "Till death do us part" add to our sense of security or fuel our sense of feeling forever trapped?
Would twelve years of schooling be enough to sustain 1,000 years of life?
How would self-identity change or evolve? If we're living forever, how many mid-life crises could we withstand?
The thought of living that long underscores the fact that social contracts like marriage and years of schooling not only ground and educate us but they help organize our time here on earth. Social security and life insurance policies bind us to time and lots of terms. With an average life span of 77 or so, we've neatly broken up our mortal lives into manageable chunks -- the early childhood years, the school years, the exploratory years, the settling down years, the midlife years, the retirement years, the getting ready to die years. And within these compartments, we start to adopt concepts without question, largely because they make sense given our 77 years of time. We soon believe that school should take up X number of years. Marriage will happen between Y and Z points. Babies better come during the A, B, C period. But with one thousand years to play around with and bodies that could be as stellar as a 25-year-old athlete's, conventional coordinates get reduced to the manufactured characteristics that they actually are.
Imagine being a hairdresser for 979 years, assuming you'd chosen your profession when you turned 21. But given the mortal life, we are encouraged to stick to one trade or talent until we master it and become experts in our respective fields.
As mortals we've tucked the immortality timeframe neatly underneath our pillows. It comes out at night when we sleep. Time goes away and events get jumbled, scrambled and rearranged. Mortality and time return not simply because we awake but because we wake up and remember all the man-made constructs; we embrace them for the next waking 16-hour period.
Even if immortality is ultimately unattainable or simply unappealing, what can be liberating is the simple idea of immortality. It can free us, if only for a moment, from all the boxes. Then again, we may realize that achieving freedom of the mind and learning to think outside the box is not the hardest challenge after all. That seems doable. The real challenge is knowing what to do with that freedom once we have it. NewsSip
Photo Credits: Old woman by Sukanto Debnath; Venus Williams uncredited from NIH.
