In 2016, Zoltan Istvan ran for president of the United States on the ambitious platform of promising to conquer death. He drove a coffin-shaped “immortality bus” canvassing for transhumanism, the movement dedicated to extending human lifespans using technologies such as cryopreservation, mind uploading, body augmentation and genetic manipulation. Though Istvan didn’t make it onto the ballot in a single state, he remained sanguine: his real aim, he said, was for the Transhumanist Party to “change the culture of America.”
Attitudes to death really have changed over the past two decades. The movement to extend life is most popular by far in the US, where nearly a million Covid deaths—the highest toll in the world—led life expectancy to fall by two years during the pandemic.
Deferring death is now a multi-billion-dollar industry. Scientists are experimenting with reprogramming old cells to make them young again and rejuvenating the immune system to protect the elderly from diseases. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has invested millions of dollars in longevity companies, was rumoured to be interested in parabiosis, the practice of injecting old people with young people’s blood. (Currently, “young blood transfusions” company Ambrosia sells a litre of blood for $5,500.) When Thiel was directly asked whether he had himself received a transfusion, he replied simply, “I’m not a vampire.” Calico, a research unit set up by Google co-founder Larry Page, is aimed at combating neurodegenerative diseases and cancer to get us closer to lifespans of 140 or 150 years. Altos Labs, a Silicon Valley start-up backed by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner, a tech investor, is seeking to extend life even further—well into the hundreds—using biological reprogramming technology.
Even death does not always mean the end of the struggle for immortality. Around 500 cryopreserved corpses are stored in vats around the world at minus 196C, frozen in the hope that science will one day allow them to be resurrected. Another option is mind uploading, where a digital copy of the brain is stored so that one day new technologies will re-animate the dead person’s personality in avatar form.
These projects might just be the mad dreams of rich men who can buy anything except eternal life. UK life expectancy is currently 81, and most people would be pretty satisfied to reach that age. But it is, after all, an arbitrary time to kick the bucket. For most of human history, an 81st birthday would have been almost unimaginable. In the Paleolithic period, however, many hunter-gatherers who survived childhood did make it to old age. When we switched to farming about 10,000 years ago, new diseases and carb-heavy diets wrecked our health—it took millennia of advances in medicine and living standards for our lifespans to recover. From the Neolithic period until about 250 years ago, life expectancy was around 30, mostly because of high child mortality rates.
Biochemistry professor Andrew Doig’s This Mortal Coil entertainingly tracks the various ways that people have met their ends. The book is divided into four sections for each cause of death: infectious disease; eating too little or too much; genetic problems; and “bad behaviour” ranging from smoking to murder. Parts are predictably gruesome, especially Doig’s detailed accounts of how cholera, typhus and the Black Death would take over and destroy their victims’ bodies.
“How we live has changed in innumerable ways, reflected in how we die,” Doig writes. He makes you wonder how different life would be if we constantly saw young peoplestruck down by poor health. Describing the case of Edward I, who had 19 children, only half of whom lived to the age of six, Doig observes: “deep grief must have been a normal condition.” We often respond to mass death by turning to God. After the Black Death, people “gave all their money to the Church, stopped their sinful behaviour, flogged themselves in public and murdered Jews.” The plague’s continuation in spite of these efforts was seen as a blow to Christianity’s credibility.
Doctors appear as both heroes and villains of the book. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as many as half a million women in England died from “childbed fever,” caught from doctors’ dirty hands that had just touched corpses. Although the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis deduced the cause of the disease by the middle of the 19th century, his findings were rejected by blinkered doctors until the beginning of the 20th.
Many methods used to determine the root of illnesses involved enormous danger. In 1881, Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay infected hundreds of volunteers with diseased mosquitoes in an attempt to discover how yellow fever was transmitted. French physician Paul-Louis Simond risked getting the plague in India, when he caught an infected rat from the house of a plague victim to test whether fleas spread the disease to humans. He placed the dying rat in a glass bottle below a cage containing a healthy rat, which quickly sickened and died once the fleas moved on from the first rat’s corpse. Simond wrote of his joy at the result: “That day, 2 June 1898, I felt an emotion that was inexpressible in the face of the thought that I had uncovered a secret that had tortured man since the appearance of plague in the world.”
It is becoming possible for geneticists to optimise human DNA and minimise risks from cancer and other diseases before a baby is born. But should we?
Doig also describes the early days of vaccination, after Edward Jenner discovered that a patient could be inoculated against smallpox by an injection of pus from the milder cowpox. The cowpox vaccine was transported across continents by bringing a group of orphan boys on a ship and injecting one of them with cowpox pus. Once the injected boy had contracted the disease, he would then infect another boy every nine or 10 days to keep the chain of immunisation active duringthe months-long journeys. This ethically murky method of human vaccine storage effectively led to the immunisation of hundreds of thousands of people.
We have only kept reasonably accurate population data for the last 200 years, and over that time the average life in many developed countries has more than doubled in length. In France, life expectancy has increased on average by five hours per day since 1816. Moreover, the poorest countries in the world are healthier than every country in the 19th century. Plague, famine and war were the main threats to a medieval man or woman; now we worry most about heart failure, cancer, strokes and dementia.
At 86.5, Japan has the highest life expectancy, and the oldest living person is a 119-year-old Japanese woman. But what if you want to live really long? Scientific research indicates that eating fewer calories and slowingyour metabolism can delay the ageing of both the body and the mind. DNA editing is “a hot area of research right now,” Doig says. It is becoming possible for geneticists to optimise human DNA and minimise risks from cancer and other diseases before a baby is born. But should we? Doig says that “a host of practical and ethical issues have to be addressed” before we seriously extend lives. Yet in what is a thorough, well-narrated account of death’s history, he doesn’t address these larger questions.
In contrast, philosopher Ingemar Patrick Linden says exactly what he thinks about dying. His polemic, The Case Against Death, argues that death is the ultimate scourge of humanity. “I enjoy watching snow drift on a winter’s day,” he writes. “That’s enough for me to hate death.” If life is good, we should do all we can to resist its end.
Linden rails against what he calls the “wise view”—the commonly accepted opinion that death is a natural part of the process of living and one we should not shrink from. He was surprised by his own students’ “weird” contentment with the natural lifespan. “Death apologism,” he says, has been practised by “ardent activists” throughout history, including Plato, Montaigne and Gautama Buddha, but it’s time we admit that death—even at 100—is a deeply regrettable occurrence.
The book doesn’t dwell on the scientific ways of extending life. It does, however, offer some suggestions for how a society of longer-living people might function. First, Linden points out, overpopulation is much more down to birth rates than increased longevity—which often in fact indirectly causes population stagnation or decline. Even if the world’s population does initially rise in his projected older society, technological advances will make us more efficient at producing and distributing food to cope with it. As more work becomes automated, a smaller workforce should be manageable. And in any case, we can always raise the retirement age or colonise Mars.
The suggestion that everyone should die at a “natural” age is, in Linden’s view, “appalling.” Instead, he approvingly notes the philosopher John K Davies’s recent suggestion to introduce a “forced choice,” where anyone who decides to have more children than the sustainable average could risk losing access to new anti-ageing medicine. The idea is that if we really want to live the way we did before radical life extension was possible, we can.
Linden is not sure whether there is an afterlife, although he hopes for it. Fighting death is not incompatible with believing in heaven: Peter Thiel’s Christianity has not stopped him investing millions in attempting to delay meeting his maker. At Florida’s Church of Perpetual Life, which congregates monthly, seeking immortality on earth has become a quasi-religion. In his fascinating new book The Price of Immortality, Peter Ward meets the church’s pastor, Neal VanDeRee, who describes his mission as “creating heaven on earth and not leaving it.”
But although we can give up smoking, cut calories and go for regular medical check-ups, without Bezos’s billions we can’t hope to seriously increase our lifespans. Accepting death as a process natural to plants, animals and eventually the universe seems to me like a good way to feel at peace when the end comes. Lucretius wrote that we should aim to “retire like a guest sated with the banquet.” Besides, understanding that life is short can encourage us to live better and more fully, making the days count. If we could live forever, we might just drift aimlessly into near-eternity, like the alien cursed with immortality in Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything: “In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55… and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.”
Linden describes himself as an optimist who loves life. He cites Christopher Hitchens: “It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told not just that the party is over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on—but you have to leave.” For Linden and other death abolitionists, living longer would not bore us but rather enhance our current existence. Think of the books we could read, the people we could meet and the careers we could try. Living beyond our 80 years is theonly way to really “have it all.”
But for all his optimism, his book left me feeling less content about my own eventual demise. Linden claims that his impending untimely doom does not make him miserable, because our lives are too short to waste time moping about the end. You wonder, though, if perhaps when Linden (who is in his fifties) gets closer to death, he might find it harder to face. For him, there is no choice but to rage against the mass murder of humanity.
Even if we are not billionaires seeking to buy hundreds of extra years of partying on yachts and flying around space, we could probably still do with a few more decades watching the snow drift.
