IF YOU had watched Wim Wenders’ film about angels last week in Nicosia you would have realised that immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: their life was boring, dreary and worryingly monochrome. They looked like dirty old men on park benches with predictable futures ahead. So I was intrigued recently to hear a programme on BBC Radio 4 about life extension. It is not a matter of if but when. The technology is close and the experts tell us it is only decades before it becomes commercially available. Apparently, lots of scientists are desperately trying to keep fit and well so that they live long enough to benefit. Which I suppose will mean that like Wenders’ angels, the world will be increasingly inhabited by old men, except they will be sporting white coats and stethoscopes.
The Immortality Institute, which has Peter Thiel, cofounder and ex CEO of Pay Pal, as a benefactor, says: “Life extension may seem far-fetched to many, but it’s not a fantasy. Driven by a convergence of numerous technological advancements, including Biotechnology, Cryopreservation, Nanotechnology and Artificial Intelligence, progress in life extension has already started.” The brainchild behind much of the research is the romantically named Dr Aubrey de Grey from Cambridge University. He is working on SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). He is also a co-founder of the the Methusalah Mouse Prize, a prize designed to encourage research into life extension programmes by awarding monetary prizes to researchers who extend the lifespan of mice to unprecedented lengths. They are currently offering about $4 million.
Disappointingly, when I went into the Immortality Institute’s Store, where I was hoping for at least some pills to knock off a couple of years (back to 39 would be perfect), they were only offering such delights as baseball caps for $14 and a Frisbee stamped with Immortality Institute. Well, I suppose it would stop the sun affecting my brain and keep me fitter.
But the serious side to all of this is do we really want to extend life and what are the implications? We live in such a weighted world already, where life expectancy for a child born today in the West is ever increasing, close now to a 100 they suggest, but life expectancy in many poor parts of the world is actually decreasing.
And of course, there is the commercial aspect. Living longer won’t come cheap. How much will immortality treatment cost? And wouldn’t you be fed up if Granddad spent all the inheritance on keeping himself alive forever and then got run over on the way home from the clinic. As the site says, it can’t stop accidents.
I can imagine whole gangs of anarchists out to slaughter those rich bastards who’d bought immortality. Would it end up like scenes from the film Code 46 where the haves and the have nots are forcibly kept apart in a divided world. Those who had been genetically modified kept away from those who hadn’t. An exclusive world based on medical advance and money.
The fundamental and ethical debate at the core of all new medical technology is should treatment be based on need or wealth? As with most people, my instinct is to want health advances to be freely available and universal, but I am, of course, a realist and a hypocrite. I know that the world does not operate on such altruistic lines: that if my children needed medical help, and I could buy it, I would.
So if breakthroughs are made in life extension technology, however many ethical committees meet, however many objections are raised, the sad fact is that someone somewhere will market it and someone else will buy it. Maybe Cliff Richard already has. But the last word should go to a mate, who has seen Wenders’ film seven times and is pinning his hopes on becoming an angel. Would he want to live longer? “Only if I could come back as someone else,” he said.
