Postponing death: Can sciencemake it work?

IN PERSPECTIVE

All things must die, according to the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, but Amazon founder and multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos seems to have developed a distaste for mortality. He has put his money where his mouth is -- by donating to an American anti-ageing company pursuing biological reprogramming for cellular rejuvenation. Scientists believe that biological reprogramming could be extended to revitalise entire animal bodies, and ultimately lead to infinite life.

Bezos’ intentions are clear: He hopes to conquer eternal life. He is somewhat optimistic that extended youth could someday be a reality. In fact, these days, a growing number of biotech companies and billionaires, like Yuri Milner, Peter Thiel, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are busy investing in research that could effectively prevent and reverse the ageing process in humans. The primary objective of Altos Labs is to postpone death by rejuvenating the entire human body on a cellular level and thus extend the human lifespan. The creme de la crème of the scientific community has been hired with lucrative salaries to reverse ageing.

In a letter to Amazon shareholders before departing as the company’s CEO, Bezos quoted the biologist Richard Dawkins, writing, “Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at…If living things don’t actively work to prevent it, they would eventually merge with their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

We are all eager to know whether the likes of Bezos and Milner, who have revolutionised everything from retail to transport, will really accomplish the seemingly impossible in their inexorable battle with nature. Agreed, breathtaking advances in health sciences continue to save millions of lives every year, which has served to delay the inevitable for them. Life expectancy has gone up exponentially in the last few decades. The speed at which scientists developed the vaccines to take the Covid-19 pandemic head-on is proof enough that it is now somewhat possible to evade death’s icy tentacles by taking precautions.

Now the question is, will increased lifespans cause overpopulation and lead to catastrophic consequences, as envisaged by the 18th century economist Thomas Malthus? He spoke about how nature has its own way of keeping a positive check on the increasing population with natural and man-made disasters like famines, earthquakes and epidemics, to name just a few. Malthus believed that humans should consume less and reproduce less to balance the population growth and food supply. Isn’t anti-ageing just the opposite of such preventive checks?

In tech-circles, concepts like biohacking and transhumanism have gained currency for the simple reason that they provide hope for increased lifespans. Biohacking, popularly known as human augmentation, lays emphasis on meditation and intermittent fasting to enhance brain function. Transhumanism derives its significance from making widely available technologies able to greatly enhance longevity, mood, and cognitive abilities.

While the likes of Bezos are gung-ho about the intoxicating idea of space travel and now immortality, they remain blissfully oblivious of some urgent issues playing out in the world. In their quest for eternal youth, aren’t these super-rich glossing over the important fact that more than a scientific solution to the issue of longevity, a strong network of social conviviality is what one requires to ensure longer and healthier lives? Isn’t loneliness during old age a major factor in creating mental health issues, depriving human beings of happiness and, often, bringing in its wake disastrous consequences? Can science manage to cut the gordian knot? The effort should be more on improving the quality of life on the planet, and not on prolonging it.

Notwithstanding the devastating effects of the pandemic in the last two years, the age-frontier of the planet’s population is already advancing fast. According to WHO estimates, by 2030, 1.4 billion – or one in six – people in the world will be aged 60 or over, and the number of people aged 80 or older is expected to triple between 2020 and 2050, to 426 million.

But the fact is that for the likes of Bezos and other billionaires, such niche technologies will become their next golden goose, earning them trillions in the future. Michael West, gerontologist and CEO of AgeX Therapeutics, has said, “Whenever you meet a fundamental human need, there’s a market. And in this case, the market for age-related diseases and ageing is a trillion-dollar market.’’

Perhaps Bezos and his ilk know that taming nature for commercial gain is worth dying for after all, given the massive and rather subversive potential of science at times to achieve tantalising breakthroughs; in this case, by tapping into a sub-conscious human desire to live longer, beyond one hundred and more.

(The writer is a Delhi-based freelance journalist)