nanotechnology

"With nanotechnology we could someday be rebuilding our own bodies, regenerating organs, slowing down aging," a bullish Samuel Stupp, professor of materials science and medicine at Northwestern University, predicted at a National Science Foundation conference earlier this year.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers are already building new drugs -- atom by atom, essentially -- to treat diseases. Merkle believes that it will be another 20 to 30 years before the visionary technologies he foresees will be available. In the medical arena, nanotechnology and biotechnology may well be destined to meld together.








Nanotechnology also plays a role in what some consider the second best alternative to living forever: cryonics. Cryonicists freeze people in liquid nitrogen with the idea that future technologies will be sufficiently advanced that the patients can be thawed out, revived, and cured of whatever ailments, including old age, afflicted them before they entered the deep freeze.






One problem facing cryonics enthusiasts is that no animal larger than a microscopic human embryo or a tiny tardigrade -- an insect that measures only a couple hundred microns across -- has yet been frozen and successfully revived. Freezing causes water in cells to expand, which disrupts them. But some researchers have developed a preservation technique called vitrification, essentially glassifying cells. This approach, it is claimed, causes far less disruption to cellular organization and destruction of cell walls. Scores of people have chosen to have either their full bodies or just their heads cryonically "suspended."






When it comes time to revive patients, the plan goes, nanotech machines will race through the patients' bodies, repairing the damage they have suffered from disease and freezing. Will it work?


Who knows? Cryonicists put it this way: "The clinical trials are in progress. Come back in a century and we'll give you a reliable answer." Cryonicists divide the world into two groups, those who are experimenting with cryonics by being frozen vs. those who just die and are buried. Which would you rather be in, they ask: the control group or the experimental group?






The defining political conflict of the 21st century will be the battle over life and death. On one side stand the partisans of mortality, who counsel humanity to quietly accept our morbid fate and go gentle into that good night. On the other is the party of life, who rage against the dying of the light and yearn to extend the enjoyment of healthy life to as many as possible for as long as possible.






The most moderate critics of longevity simply worry that immortality would cause massive overpopulation. Worry not, says demographer Olshansky. If everyone on the planet were made immortal tomorrow, while maintaining the current projected trends in human fertility, world population would rise to around 13 billion by 2100. That, he notes, is the same number that alarmists like Paul Ehrlich used to predict for the middle of this century. Olshansky thinks that 100 years will give human society plenty of time to adjust to longer, healthier lives.

Death to Radical Mortalists!

Then there are the more radical mortalists, such as Fukuyama, Callahan, and Kass. Writing in the aforementioned issue of First Things, Leon Kass asserts that "to argue that human life would be better without death is, I submit, to argue that human life would be better being something other than human." Without the sound of time's winged chariot rushing at our backs, Kass claims, humanity would become frivolous, frittering away eternity with meaningless pastimes. Apparently, if we live longer, we'll just watch more Baywatch reruns and revisit Disney World.






For Kass, the sting of death makes for stronger friendships, greater loves, more ardent learning, and nobler deeds. But the fact of human mortality has also led people to commit all manner of villainy, cowardice, and crime. If one man nobly sacrifices his life to save his family and friends from invaders, it is because those invaders have themselves overcome their fear of death to seek glory, goods, and dominion. Gilgamesh wanted to avoid the oblivion of eternity, so he built a city, fought wars, and sought glory so that his name would ring down the ages.






Meanwhile, the names of all those thousands crushed under his tyranny -- those who labored to build the walls and temples of his city -- are lost for all time. The certainty of death may cause us to aspire, but not necessarily to the fulfillment offered by the gentler virtues.






Kass also points to the "undesired consequences of medical success in sustaining life, as more and more people are kept alive by artificial means in greatly debilitated and degraded conditions." Here he is engaged in what might be called Struldbruggism, after an episode in Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver visits the land of the Luggnuggians, among whom are occasionally born immortals called Struldbruggs. This is no blessing, since the immortals still grow older, weaker, and sicker.




But the goal of research on aging is not to turn us into a race of miserable Struldbruggs. As Olshansky puts it, "We don't want to make ourselves older longer, we want to make ourselves younger longer." Characteristically, Kass ignores the real goals of anti-aging research, misleading readers with a gruesome scenario in hopes of frightening them into embracing his pro-death dogma.




Future generations will look back at the beginning of the 21st century and marvel that intelligent people actually tried to stop biomedical progress just to protect their cramped and limited vision of human nature. But the chances that the Kassians will actually hold back longevity seem small. "It's too alluring," says Olshansky. "It's been the dream of humanity forever. How can we not?" Austad agrees. "People want this so badly, it's going to happen no matter what the government does," he predicts. "The government can help or it can hinder this research, but it will happen."




"A dramatic increase in lifespan is inevitable," Aubrey de Grey said in the British Sunday Times two years ago. "We understand aging at the molecular level sufficiently to not just imagine interventions to retard aging, but enough that we can describe them. It's an engineering project now, not a scientific one. We just don't know how long it will take."




To which I say: Hurry up! The 22nd century looks too interesting to miss.