Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has made it his life’s mission to delay growing older and demise. Credit score: Netflix
“Who wants to live forever?” Freddie Mercury mournfully asks in Queen’s 1986 track of the identical title.
The reply: Fairly just a few folks—a lot in order that life extension has lengthy been a cottage trade.
As a doctor and scholar within the medical humanities, I’ve discovered the search to develop the human lifespan each fascinating and fraught with ethical peril.
In the course of the Seventies and 80s, for instance, The Merv Griffin Present featured one visitor 32 occasions—life extension skilled Durk Pearson, who generated extra fan mail than any visitor besides Elizabeth Taylor. In 1982, he and his associate, Sandy Shaw, printed the guide “Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach,” which turned a No. 1 New York Occasions bestseller and bought over 2 million copies. One particular suggestion concerned taking choline and vitamin B5 with a view to cut back cognitive decline, fight hypertension and cut back the buildup of poisonous metabolic byproducts.
Final yr, Pearson died at 82, and Shaw died in 2022 at 79.
Nobody can say for positive whether or not these life extension consultants died ultimately than they might have had they eschewed many of those dietary supplements and as an alternative merely exercised and ate a balanced food regimen. However I can say that they didn’t live longer than many equally well-off folks of their cohort.
Nonetheless, their dream of staying endlessly younger is alive and effectively.
Contemplate tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s “Project Blueprint,” a life-extension effort that impressed the 2025 Netflix documentary “Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.” His program has included constructing a house laboratory, taking greater than 100 tablets every day and present process blood plasma transfusions, at the very least one in all which got here from his son.
And Johnson is just not alone. Among the many large names investing large bucks to lengthen their lives are Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Web page, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. One strategy includes taking senolytics—medicine that focus on cells which will drive the growing older course of, although extra analysis is required to find out their security and efficacy. One other is human progress hormone, which has lengthy been touted as an anti-aging mechanism in advert campaigns that function remarkably match older folks. (“How does this 69-year-old doctor have the body of a 30-year-old?” reads one internet advert).
These billionaires might motive that, due to their wealth, they’ve extra to reside for than extraordinary of us. They could additionally share extra prosaic motivations, reminiscent of a concern of rising outdated and dying.
However underlying such wishes is an equally essential moral—and, for some, non secular—actuality.
High quality versus amount
Is it an excellent factor, morally talking, to want to reside endlessly? May there be features of growing older and even demise which might be each good for the world and good for people?
Cicero’s “On Aging” provides some insights. In actual fact, the traditional Roman statesman and thinker famous that writing about it helped him to seek out peace with the vexations of rising outdated.
Within the textual content, Cicero outlines and responds to 4 widespread complaints about growing older: It takes us away from managing our affairs, impairs bodily vigor, deprives us of sensual gratifications and brings us to the verge of demise.
To the cost that growing older takes us away from managing our affairs, Cicero asks us to think about a ship. Solely the younger climb the masts, run from side to side on the gangways, and bail the maintain. However it’s among the many older and extra skilled members of the crew that we discover the captain who instructions the ship. Rome’s supreme council was referred to as the Senate, from the Latin for “elder,” and it’s to these wealthy in years that we glance most frequently for knowledge.
As as to if growing older impairs bodily vigor, Cicero claimed that power and pace are much less associated to age than self-discipline. Many older individuals who care for themselves are in higher form than the younger, and he provides examples of people that maintained their vigor effectively into their later years. He argued that those that stay bodily match do an important deal to maintain their psychological powers, a notion supported by trendy science.
Cicero reminds readers that these identical pleasures of consuming and ingesting usually lead folks astray. As an alternative, folks, as they age, can higher admire the pleasures of thoughts and character. An awesome dinner turns into characterised much less by what’s on the plate or the attractiveness of a eating associate than the standard of dialog and fellowship.
Whereas demise stays an inevitable consequence of growing older, Cicero distinguishes between high quality and amount of life. He writes that it’s higher to reside effectively than to reside lengthy, and for many who reside effectively, demise seems as pure as start. Those that need to reside endlessly have forgotten their place within the cosmos, which doesn’t revolve round any single particular person and even species.
These of a extra non secular bent would possibly discover themselves drawn to the Scottish poet George MacDonald, who wrote: “Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.”
Embracing the circle of life
What if the goals of the life extension gurus have been realized? Would the world be a greater place?
Would the additional good {that a} longer-lived Einstein might have completed be balanced and even exceeded by the hurt of a Stalin who remained wholesome and vigorous for many years past his demise?
Sooner or later, preserving indefinitely the lives of these now residing would imply much less room for many who don’t but exist.
Pearson and Shaw appeared on many different tv packages within the Seventies and Eighties. Throughout one such section on “The Mike Douglas Show,” Pearson declared: “By the time you are 60, your immune function is perhaps one-fifth what it was when you were younger. Yet you can achieve a remarkable restoration simply by taking nutrients that you can get at a pharmacy or health food store.”
For Pearson, life extension was a biomedical problem, an effort extra centered on engineering the self fairly than the world.
But I might argue that the actual problem in human life is to not reside longer, however to assist others; including further years needs to be seen not because the aim however a byproduct of the pursuit of goodness.
Within the phrases of Susan B. Anthony: “The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball—the further I am rolled, the more I gain.”
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