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  Long for This World

  The Strange Science of Immortality

  Jonathan Weiner

  For my father

  If heaven too had passions

  even heaven would grow old.

  —LI HO,

  “A BRONZE IMMORTAL TAKES LEAVE OF HAN”

  Contents

  Epigraph

  I

  The Phoenix

  One Immortal Longings

  Two The Problem of Mortality

  Three Life and Death of a Cell

  Four Into the Nest of the Phoenix

  II

  The Hydra

  Five The Evolution of Aging

  Six The Garbage Catastrophe

  Seven The Seven Deadly Things

  Eight The Methuselah Wars

  Nine The Weakest Link

  III

  The Good Life

  Ten Long for This World

  Eleven The Trouble with Immortality

  Twelve The Everlasting Yes and No

  Notes on Sources and Further Reading

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Jonathan Weiner

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  THE PHOENIX

  I have

  Immortal longings in me.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  ANTON Y AND CLEOPATRA

  Chapter 1

  IMMORTAL LONGINGS

  Late August, late afternoon, cloudy-bright.

  We’d taken a corner table at the Eagle, just inside the red door on Benet Street. From there, the tavern’s windows looked across to the tower of St. Benet’s Parish Church, the oldest tower in the town of Cambridge and the county of Cambridgeshire. The church’s foundation stones were laid almost a thousand years ago, when England was ruled by King Canute, son of the Viking King Sweyn Forkbeard, distant descendant of Gorm the Old.

  A tavern stood across from that church tower in the year 1353, with beer for three gallons a penny—with shops and markets up and down the street, then as now, and around the corner the spires of the University of Cambridge, pointing at the same cloudy English sky. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, the tavern was called the Eagle and Child. Elizabethan scholars would have stared up at its gently swaying signboard and (gently swaying themselves) remembered the myth of Zeus, who swooped from the clouds in the shape of an eagle, caught a child named Ganymede, and flew him off to Mount Olympus to serve as the gods’ cupbearer, one of the immortals.

  We’d been talking for an hour or two. The Eagle had been almost empty when we sat down. Now from the courtyard and the barrooms beyond we could hear more and more voices rising, glasses clinking. In the year 1940, in one of those barrooms, young pilots of the Royal Air Force who could not be sure they would come back placed chairs on tables, stood on the chairs, raised their cigarette lighters, and wrote their names on the ceiling with the soot of the flames. In another barroom, in the year 1953, two young biologists at the university used to meet over ale when they finished work at the Cavendish Laboratories, a few minutes’ stroll down the lane past the church. James Watson and Francis Crick were trying to solve the structure of DNA, and hoping (they were not yet quite sure) that they’d figured it out. “So,” Watson confesses in his memoir The Double Helix, “I felt a bit queasy when Francis went winging into the Eagle to shout that we had found the secret of life.”

  The Eagle remembers the pilots, and Churchill’s praise: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” And in the DNA barroom, the present management has engraved a line from Watson’s memoir on the panes of the glass door: “I enjoyed Francis Crick’s words, even though they lacked the casual sense of understatement known to be the correct way to behave in Cambridge.”

  Before the year 1500, when the College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is the nearest college of the university, built a chapel of its own, many of the school’s dons and scholars would have begun their days in the parish church and ended their days in the tavern.

  In the church, the prayers of the ages: For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

  In the tavern, the toasts of the ages: May you enter heaven late! May you live a hundred years! May you always drink from a full glass!

  They prayed for long life in the pews and they proposed long life in the pub, being the same mortals from morning to night.

  “When you start talkin’ about five-hundred-year humans”—said Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey—“five-hundred-year humans, or one-thousan’-year humans, most members of the general public get a li’l bit nervous.”

  Aubrey was enjoying his fourth pint of ale at the Eagle, with dinnertime still some distance away.

  This was our farewell drink. I’d spent most of the summer in London, and quite a few hours in Cambridge, listening to Aubrey over pints of ale. I’d heard him predict five hundred years for us, I’d heard him give us a thousand years, he’d hinted about a million years. He’d foreseen the coming of this new age of man in fifty years, or even as swiftly as fifteen. Now, because this was goodbye, Aubrey was trying to summarize his views, and to convert me once and for all, and I couldn’t turn the pages of my notebook fast enough to keep up with him. I kept raising my hand to stop him while I scribbled, and while I scribbled he drank.

  Tap, tap, tap went Aubrey’s glass against the table, according to the sober testimony of my voice recorder. I’d placed it on his side of the table, by the cascades of his enormously long brown beard. From there it picked up every word, slurred or not—along with each groan and mortal screech of chairlegs and barstools against floorboards, and the frequent moments when Aubrey refreshed his voice and set down his pint.

  “I mean, you have to appreciate the scale of this,” Aubrey said.

  “It never leaves my mind.” Think of it, he said: one hundred thousand human beings die of the infirmities of old age every single day. “One hundred thousand lives! I’m at the spearhead of the most important endeavor humanity is engaged in. Not easy to do, even though I don’t often show it,” he said, looking off. His face was struck by the late cloudy light from the windows of the Eagle, like a gibbous moon, three parts bright and one part in shadow.

  Tap.

  At a table near ours, a few people from the university explained to a guest, “Cheers! It means, Here’s to your health.” Their guest returned with his own toast in a language that sounded Central European. It meant, To life! In 1940, the airmen of the RAF defended London and bombed Berlin. Now a sign on the wall warned “No Smoking” in English, French, Spanish, Japanese, and German.

  “I should probably expand on that. You know, cuz people occasionally ask me about it, you know, how I cope with the—the responsibility, if you like,” Aubrey said, with a small, apologetic chuckle.

  “Basically I just feel that I’ve got to put things out of my mind and get on with it. I just don’t think about it. This is my fourth beer, you may have noticed.”

  Pause. Tap.

  “And that helps, quite honestly. I do not like to think about it.”

  Tap.

  Gravely he looked off again into the distance, toward the windows on Benet Street, stroking his beard. I had the feeling of watching a stage performance that I’d seen before. Aubrey had to be forgiven if he lost track of the speeches that he’d already made to me. He was talking with so many people around the world that he could hardly be expected to keep track of which speech he made when. But I felt sure he’d made this particular speech to me in another tavern with exactly the same lonely haunted stare into the
distance. Was it here at the Eagle, over Abbot Ale? At the Tabard Inn, in Washington, over Foggy Bottom Ale? The Live & Let Live, in Cambridge, over Nethergate Umbel? My memory was getting a bit hazy. Somewhere before, he’d shown me this same look of agony, his secret anguish presented for my private viewing, with just the same half-turned head, looking aside and one-quarter down, the same phase of the moon. And watching him stare out the window, I felt sure that he had made the same speech in the same way with that same tilt of the head to many others by now. I had a sense of the crowd gathering around him.

  Aubrey had stepped into the role that seems to open up again and again, the role of the prophet or sage who declares that we do not have to die, that we can be among the saved if we will follow him to safety. The same character in every age—an immortal character who is reborn endlessly, who has probably appeared more than once right there in that very tavern, given its own longevity, and the power of our longings.

  Friends of mine, distinguished biologists, were a bit shocked to hear that I was talking with Aubrey de Grey. One of them warned me that if I listened to Aubrey I would be making “a martyr out of a molehill.” But I didn’t see Aubrey as either of those things; and I didn’t think he was mad, either. Of course, he did drink. He admitted that himself. He had a long beard—but if you were charitable, you could say he wore that as a badge of office, the way an old-fashioned doctor would wear a white coat and a stethoscope. He really was highly intelligent, and he knew his field. He published papers with good people. He organized conferences, and respectable biologists came, and afterward some of them sat with him in the Eagle, too, listening and arguing. All in all, Aubrey was a remarkable phenomenon, a complicated mix of old and new, preposterous and plausible, practical and paradoxical, neither fish nor fowl. You could dismiss him with a laugh, but you would be wrong. In all these ways he was not unlike the field itself.

  “This is lives we’re talking about! It’s people’s lives,” cried Aubrey now. “We’re talking about one hundred thousand people a day. I’m driven by everybody. I used to be driven by myself. Now I don’t think about myself, except that I’m making so much difference that it’s important I don’t get assassinated or fall under a truck.”

  Tap.

  “Ultimately the sheer numbers are what drive me now. I just have so much disgust for any excuses. The idea one could postulate utterly vapid sociological concerns as genuine challenges to saving thirty World Trade Centers a day—I just don’t have any words to describe…”

  I held up my hand and scribbled.

  “I don’t do this anymore to extend my life span,” Aubrey said again. “Small sliver of my motivation. My motivation is: it’s going to be sooner, based on what I’m doing now. And I don’t give a damn whose lives. I don’t give a flying fuck whose. One way or another, someone’s going to benefit.”

  Through the windows of the Eagle, I watched the clouds part again above the tower of St. Benet’s. The sun flared against the pub’s windowpanes with the tawny light of late August. Caught in those light shafts, Aubrey’s pale face and his long brown beard were lit from one side once more, now one half bright, the other half in shadow, the moon rushing through its phases.

  He said, “I mean, I think it’s inconceivable that people born even ten years ago will die of old age, in spite of our pitiful reluctance to hurry—because serendipity will get us there in the end. It’s just a matter of what we can do to accelerate things.”

  Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire what is old, as Shakespeare observes in one of his death-defying sonnets. We are brief, and therefore we admire a stone tower, a storied tavern, a Greek myth, an antique rippled windowpane, almost anything that seems to have more time than we do.

  There was a time, not so long ago, when what we wanted to deal with our brevity was grace: grace to accept what we could not avoid, old age and death; courage to accept or to defy in the spirit what we could not change in the flesh. That was our condition from time immemorial. In every generation we worked toward grace. On every island and continent, we hoped for the best.

  Now we live in a new time, with a somewhat different sense of time. Our life expectancies are increasing by about two years per decade, or about five hours per day, according to the standard estimates of scientists who study human life spans. That is to say, for every day we live now, we are given the gift of another five hours to live later on. While time runs out today, time pours in tomorrow. It is almost, but not quite, like the gift of an afterlife.

  We find it hard to appreciate the scale and the suddenness of our success. In the Stone Age, most human babies died before they had reached the age of one or two. Few lived long enough to grow a single gray hair. The average life expectancy of Stone Age babies was probably not much more than twenty, although the evidence is scarce and the estimates are controversial (most of the science of human life span is controversial). When the Roman Empire was at its height, in the first century of the first millennium (a time when legionnaires patrolled Castle Hill, above the River Cam), Roman life expectancy was only a few years better: about twenty-five years. During the Middle Ages, in the first century of the second millennium, the era of the founding of some of the world’s first universities—Bologna, Oxford, and Cambridge—life expectancy was about thirty years. During the Renaissance, it was thirty-three years.

  In our corner of the Eagle that afternoon, the prints that hung on the wall just above Aubrey’s head showed two jolly drinkers with tankards raised. Those gentlemen’s powdered wigs and red coats would place them in the time of King George the First, Second, or Third. Back then, the tavern on this spot was called not the Eagle but the Post House. Horse-drawn coaches came rumbling into the cobbled courtyard every day to deliver the mail. By the Eagle’s courtyard gate, you can still see the markers that guided in the coachmen—the old stone posts. Life expectancy in Georgian days rose toward forty years in England, less in its thirteen colonies. “When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years,” said Samuel Johnson. In reality, men and women were growing older and dying just a bit later each century; but by so little that Johnson was right to laugh.

  By 1900, in the most developed countries of the world, including England and the United States, life expectancy had crept up to forty-seven years. That’s all that a baby born in 1900 could expect. But if those babies survived and thrived and became parents themselves, their own children could expect to live longer; and their children could expect to live longer yet. By the end of the twentieth century, babies could expect about seventy-six years. Throughout the twentieth century, life expectancy changed so fast that for the first time in history, people became aware of it as a phenomenon that was extending their life spans during their own lifetimes. During the twentieth century we gained almost thirty years, or about as much time as our species had gained before in the whole struggle of existence.

  In other words, this is a good time to be a mortal. Life expectancy today is roughly eighty years for anyone in the world’s developed countries. And life expectancy is still improving, which is why each day we live now we are given the gift of more time down the road. It’s as if we’re all driving on a highway that is still being built, and the roadbuilders are adding to it at a good rate. Our bodies haven’t changed. We haven’t evolved. A few generations is too brief a time for our life spans to have gained thirty years through evolution. It’s only that our circumstances have gotten more comfortable. A field mouse in the wild lives about one year. The same mouse in the safety of a cage lives about three years. With our farms and supermarkets and reservoirs and thermostats, we have done for ourselves what we have done for a pet mouse. We have tripled the life expectancy that our ancestors enjoyed or suffered in the wild.

  To be clear: Life expectancy is the average age that babies born in any given generation or any particular year can expect to reach. Maximum life span is the longes
t that any member of a species is known to have attained. It is by the measure of life expectancy that our success has been most spectacular, so far, because we have done so well at helping babies and little children survive the dangers of their first years. But we are also doing better at helping people in their later years. Certainly, there have been fortunate people throughout history—those who were protected by great genes, wealth, power, luck—who have lived to a ripe old age. The ancients also had ancients. Among the pharaohs, Ramses the Second is believed by Egyptologists to have lived beyond the age of ninety, possibly to one hundred. Among the ancient Hebrews, when King David composed his psalms in Jerusalem, about three thousand years ago, our maximum life was thought to be about eighty years. David wrote, “The days of our years are threescore years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

  Those lines from the Psalms were translated for King James the First by a committee of scholars in Cambridge in the first years of the 1600s. Some of the king’s translators probably enjoyed a pint at the Eagle and Child. The longest-lived among them was a mild, cheerful, good-natured man named Laurence Chaderton. Chaderton could still read without spectacles when he was very old—one hundred years old, assuming his own count of the days of his years is reliable. He died on November 13, 1640, at the age of 103.

  So there were happy specimens of old age in ages past. But now that our lives are so comfortable and secure that most of us reach eighty, more and more outliers have the chance to live well beyond eighty, and beyond the ages of Ramses and Chaderton. The world’s record holder to date, Jeanne Calment, of Arles, France, lived to the age of 122 years and four months. The length of her days was 44,724. That is about the age that God promised Adam and Eve after evicting them from the Garden: “My spirit will not contend in man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.”