The Immortality Hustle

Dreams of immortality – or at least delayed senescence – never die. This past summer I joined the crowd by signing up for the Ponce de León 48-and-over baseball league near my home in suburban Washington. This hardball league provides the Boys of Autumn with an opportunity to relive past glories on the diamond. Given that 38 years had passed between starts, my sepia-toned memories of a mediocre high school baseball career had morphed into a few standout moments. I entertained notions of becoming a star.

I quickly got my chance. Down by a run in the late innings of our first game, I led off by slapping a fastball into center field (full disclosure: batting practice machines are 15 mph faster than high hard ones in “Ponce” ball). The next hitter blooped a single to right. Obeying ancient instincts, I took off at the crack of the bat and promptly pulled my left hamstring. Limping gamely into second, I waived off medical assistance and took a short lead. Our best hitter lined meekly into left center. As I shuffled around third, my soft spikes caught on the turf. Pitched forward, I jammed both thumbs into the ground. After brushing off my acute embarrassment, I hobbled home where the ball had mercifully arrived in sufficient time to prevent further harm from sliding.

With the lead platoons of the 75-million-member Baby Boom generation nearing retirement, it is inevitable that some portion of the Me-generation will, like me, get seduced by the Ponce de León myth. And there are plenty of enablers. A small sea of academic entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, government funders, credulous science reporters and think tank gurus are touting prospective biomedical interventions that will lead to a never-ending promised land. Have you heard about the genetically-altered nematode worm that doubled its life span? The magic elixir is just around the corner. And, if you buy now, you can get in on the ground floor.

Science writer Stephen S. Hall helped unleash the longevity bubble in January 2000 with a cover story in the New York Times Magazine that was illustrated by geezers in convertibles living well into their 100s. Though his ostensible subject was the emerging field of stem cell research, he succeeded in publicizing the speculative musings of scientist-entrepreneurs like Michael West of Advanced Cell Therapeutics and William Haseltine of Human Genome Sciences, who predicted the new cellular therapies “may keep us young and healthy forever. The fountain of youth is likely to be found within our own genes.” By the time Hall finished his 2003 book on the subject, which he called “Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension,” potential treatments for serious diseases had taken a back seat to longevity research. He knew what sells.

Bioethicists have also been having a field day with this new “field.” Leon R. Kass and his colleagues on the President’s Council on Bioethics took a break from their embryo protection labors to ponder what it all means to have “ageless bodies.” To be fair, their 2003 report “Beyond Therapy” also grappled with the medicalization of childhood hyperactivity, sports doping and mood-altering drugs. But alongside these serious ethical concerns, they included a long section that confounded still undiscovered treatments for the symptoms of aging like memory loss with extending the maximum human lifespan. “The anti-aging medicine of the not-so-distant future would treat what we have usually thought of as the whole, the healthy, human life as a condition to be healed,” the report lamented.

This not-too-distant future became the jumping off point for Charles C. Mann’s Atlantic Magazine article this past May that was headlined “The Coming Death Shortage.” If the optimists are right, Mann worried, we’re headed for a world where grandparents have grandparents, the young wander aimlessly through an endless adolescence waiting for the old to retire, and the miracle of compound interest creates a class of 100-year-old investors who will make today’s wealth divide seem like the golden age of equality. “Instead of helping their juniors begin careers and families, tomorrow’s rich oldsters will be expending their disposable income to enhance their memories, senses and immune systems.”

Mann fretted that these miracle potions will only be available to the rich. Quoting a Centers for Disease Control official, he extrapolated from the $15,000 annual cost of keeping an AIDS patient alive to estimate that paying for anti-aging medicine for the Boomer generation will cost the health care system $1.2 trillion a year. He cited implantable defibrillators as one example of these life-saving technologies that we’ll never be able to afford. Note the sleight of hand. This device allows some people with heart disease to live to their allotted lifespan. But it doesn’t alter its potential length by a single day.

What’s absent from all the talk about longevity is any discussion about what it might take to translate a few elegant science experiments that retard senescence at the cellular level into anything approaching a drug or therapy that might one day be used in humans, not to mention pass regulatory muster at the Food and Drug Administration. Mann’s article predicts the future will be an unequal society where “the very old and very rich (are) on top, beta-testing each new treatment on themselves” while the less well off elderly go without.

During the 1990s, the U.S. government spent billions of dollars researching cures for rare diseases using gene therapy, only to see the field largely collapse after 19-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died in a clinical trial where the researcher failed to disclose his financial stake in the experiment. Memo to future longevity researchers: good luck in getting rich old people to substitute for Jesse.

Before long, the inherent implausibility of this line of research will send its boosters to greener pastures. Already Geron Inc., whose hourglass logo denotes its initial fascination with telomerase, the protein that programs cell death, has switched to pursuing cancer cures. West’s Advanced Cell Therapeutics has moved on to using stem cells to treat disease. But judging from the latest entry in the field, Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau’s “Radical Evolution: the Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What it Means to be Human,” the speculative bubble still has a ways to run.

Perhaps recognizing that immortality is a thin reed on which to hinge his consulting practice (besides penning an occasion article for the Post, Garreau is a member of the Global Business Network, a scenario-planning organization that lists a number of Fortune 500 companies as clients), “Radical Evolution” reports on a transhumanist movement that seeks to link a high-tech smorgasbord of genetic germ-line manipulation, robotics, infomatics and nanotechnology (he calls them the GRIN technologies) to arrive at a whole new race of beings, which Garreau dubs The Enhanced.

Unless I missed it, he never once uses the word eugenics to describe this movement, freighted as it is with Hitlerian connections. But he does say that “the ability to tinker with our genes offers the astounding promise – and peril – of immortality, which mythically has been the defining difference between gods and mortals. It also offers the possibility of an even greater variety of breeds of humans that there is of dogs.”

Typical of the genre, Garreau sees the emergence of this uber-race as a foregone conclusion. He relies heavily on the work of Gregory Stock, who heads the program on medicine, technology and society at the University of California at Los Angeles’ School of Medicine. Stock, whose 2002 book, “Redesigning Humans” was subtitled “Our Inevitable Genetic Future,” tells Garreau that future parents’ ability to order designer babies with extra chromosomes “does not hinge on some cadre of demonic researchers hidden away in a lab in Argentina trying to pick up where Hitler left off. The coming possibilities will be the inadvertent spin-off of mainstream research that virtually everyone supports.”

Laying aside for a moment the morality of such fantasies, one hungers for some admission that it would take a lot of society’s resources to engineer such a trick. The U.S. government has spent in excess of $60 billion since President Nixon declared war on cancer. The private sector has spent billions more. Yet physicians are still attacking these mutant cells with knives, flame-throwers and poison. Decades of intensive research has recently allowed scientists to add targeted therapies to the mix. So far, it’s added months, not years, to some patients’ lives.

Garreau sweeps away any discussion of scientific difficulties by alluding to Moore’s Law, the famous dictum from the former chief of Intel that the circuitry that can be etched on a single computer chip doubles every 18 months (a law, by the way, that is only a few years away from reaching its physical limits). Technology is advancing so fast that what scientists learned in the past 20 years will be equaled in the next 8 and so on. By 2030 at the latest we’ll reach a point where supercomputers have greater-than-human intelligence; the Internet will have so much power it is a “superorganism”; and biologists will have re-engineered the human genome to produce super-smart people.

Garreau calls this endless scientific speed-up The Curve and its crossover point in the not-too-distant future The Singularity. Consultants must need such titles for their Powerpoint slides. At The Singularity, we will suddenly have living among us (most Boomers, don’t forget, will still be alive) “an ultra-intelligent critter.”

Besides having major implications for how we administer the SATs, these ultra-intelligent critters are going to have a host of technological enhancements at their command. They will be able to stay up for days; live off their fat; rapidly heal wounds; and use thoughts to communicate with similarly equipped people or robots (if I live long enough to get one of these devices, I sure hope no one gives my number out to telemarketers). To bolster these claims, Garreau takes readers on a whirlwind tour of some of the more outlandish projects being pursued by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where the government is seeking to produce the super-soldiers of the future.

DARPA has come up with some amazing things over the years – the Internet, for one. But most of its projects, like any other form of way-out research, never see the light of day because they fail. “The civilian implications of this technology have not escaped us,” especially the fat-burning pill, the researchers tell Garreau. Is there any reason to think they’ll do any better than the billions spent by the pharmaceutical industry on a similar quest?

Assuming the inevitable, Garreau uses the last two-thirds of his book to explore the possible ways mankind might react to this “turning point in history.” His heaven scenario comes from techno-touts like Stock and Ray Kurzweil (who has his own new book out, The Singularity). Kurzweil gobbles 250 pills a day so that he can live long enough to embrace the arrival of the super-intelligent computer

His hell scenario comes largely from Bill Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems, who, after reading Ted Kaczynski’s “Unabomber Manifesto,” spent six months at his Aspen hideaway penning a long article for Wired magazine entitled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Joy believes everything predicted for the GRIN technologies will come to pass, and will either enslave or destroy mankind. Biotechnology will eventually allow crazed individuals like the Unabomber to unleash incurable plagues and nanotechnology will eventually turn into unstoppable gray goo. In a post-9/11 world, this is not an irrational fear.

Garreau stirs environmentalists like Bill McKibben and politicians like Tom Hayden into his hell scenario stew. The former is understandably concerned that rapid technological advance is undermining our fragile ecology. His solution is to encourage mankind to say enough is enough and live a simpler life. Hayden fears we’re opening the door to morally repugnant technologies like human cloning and organ farming. Garreau dismisses those arguments by trotting out the neo-liberal faith that advancing technology will feed the earth’s hungry millions and cure the sick.

How germ-line bioengineering a race of 200-year-old uber-humans will lead to these laudable goals is left to the reader’s imagination. Garreau embraces his prevail scenario. “I elect to light out for the Territory,” he concludes. “I choose to examine the possibility that human nature might continue to evolve and be improvable, and to consider what transformation might actually look like and what it might mean.”

If there is any political philosophy linked to the technology-driven musings of futurists like Joel Garreau, it is libertarianism. Many scientists and technologists fall into this category. It has often been said that scientists want nothing more than to be ignored by the governments that fund them and left alone by the regulators that might one day be called upon to pass judgment on their work products.

In that sense, scientists and futurists are somewhat like the Bubble-era acolytes that gathered around Ken Lay of Enron, whose own technological imperative was that the free market could be imposed on any and every economic activity. California’s ratepayers and Enron’s stockholders paid a heavy price for that hubris before regulators stepped in to clean up the mess.

There’s still plenty of time for us lesser mortals to exert control over what may one day emerge from the billions of dollars our government and capital markets are pouring into the emerging GRIN technologies. That is unless we buy into their promise of everlasting life, always smart and beautiful children and hamstrings that won’t pull. Then, of course, anything goes.

Posted by gooznews at November 28, 2005 09:30 PM