Is immortality just a pipe dream?
by Michael Cook | 8 Oct 2016 | 2 comments
Jeanne Calment, our oldest The paper, which was based on two international lists of the world’s oldest people, has created a controversy. On statistical grounds, it was dismissed as “a travesty” by German demographer James Vaupel. And gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who has been working for years on rejuvenation biotechnologies, told Nataure News: “The result in this paper is absolutely correct, but it says nothing about the potential of future medicine, only the performance of today’s and yesterday’s medicine.”
De Grey believes that it is possible for people to be effectively immortal – or at least to live long enough so that they will be killed by a lightning bolt rather than by old age. He envisages lifespans of over 1000 years. Other scientists are lobbying to have ageing classified as a disease rather than as a life event. In other words, death would be treated as a medical failure than as something natural and expected.
Immortality is an obsession in Silicon Valley. Russian businessman Dmitry Itskov, is determined to celebrate his 10,000th birthday; Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, says that a passive acceptance of mortality is “incomprehensible,” and Google has launched a venture to “cure death” called Callico.
British actress Sally Phillips has made a magnificent documentary about Down Syndrome for the BBC. (You can watch it here on a dodgy YouTube link.) Her own son Ollie has Down Syndrome and Ms Phillips is convinced that Ollie has been a jolly good thing for her and her family. It grieves her to see that most mothers treat a diagnosis of Down Syndrome as a catastrophe. In the UK about 90% of women abort their Down Syndrome child after screening; in Iceland 100% of mothers do. That's 100%.
Ms Phillips tells the camera, as she chokes back tears, “The type of characteristics that these people share are so benign. It’s like when the Western explorers encountered the dodo. This nice, curious bird comes up and gets … wiped out. Through not being suspicious enough. Or violent enough.” This makes her concerned about what the Brits call NIPT (non-invasive pre-natal testing) which is being rolled out across the country.
The documentary is unashamedly emotional. That’s the way it should be. Thank God somebody has the courage to feel emotional about Down Syndrome people. I started to get angry when I read a scathing review in the New Statesman dismissing the doco as “profoundly anti-choice”. But there’s no point in being angry with someone whose attachment to an ideology blinds them to the splendour of being human.
Michael Cook
Editor
BioEdge
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