21 February 2022
Pulse
In November 2021, The Straits Times published an interesting article on the transhumanist quest to defeat aging and conquer death entitled ‘Would You Want to Live Beyond 150?’ which reports that:
Biologists have found ways of reprogramming old cells to make them young again, using … techniques to help restore sight to ageing mice; one company is chasing longevity by rejuvenating the immune system, and intervention designed to fend off diseases such as Covid-19 that prey on older, weakened bodies.
The quest for ‘immortality’ in our day is no doubt spurred by the recent reclassification of aging as a disease in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). ICD developed certain criteria to ascertain if aging can be properly classified as a disease. As Daria Khaltourina et al report in their paper published in the journal Mechanisms of Ageing and Development:
Biological aging can be diagnosed with frailty indices, functional, blood-based biomarkers. A number of major causal mechanisms of human aging involved in various organs have been described, such as inflammation, replicative cellular senescence, immune senescence, proteostasis failures, mitochondrial dysfunctions, fibrotic propensity, hormonal aging, body composition changes, etc. We identified a number of clinically proven interventions, as well as genetic and environmental factors of aging. Therefore, aging fits the ICD-11 criteria and can be considered a disease. Our proposal was submitted to the ICD-11 Joint Task force, and this led to the inclusion of the extension code for “Ageing-related” (XT9T) into the “Causality” section of the ICD-11. This might lead to greater focus on biological aging in global health policy and might provide for more opportunities for the new therapy developers.
Informal polls conducted on the general population show that people are generally in favour of super-longevity. In their book Religion and the Technological Future, Calvin Mercer and Tracy Trothen report a study which asks participants a simple question: ‘If there is a “live-just-forever” pill, would you take it?’
The majority of the males who participated in the poll said they would take the pill, while the majority of the females said they would not. Upon further investigation, the researchers discovered that the reason why the females refused to take the pill was because they did not want to live in a world without their friends and family members. But when the researchers qualified that their friends and family members would also take the pill, the positive female response matched that of their male counterparts.
How should Christians respond to this quest for super-longevity? What are some of the theological and ethical concerns that we have to consider?
LONGEVITY THERAPIES
Before we attempt to answer these questions, let us take a brief look at some proposed strategies to extend human life.
For some decades now, scientists have been trying to find ways to arrest the aging process and radically extend human life-spans while ensuring a certain quality of life (healthspan). To do this, they have tried to take full advantage of all available cutting-edge technologies including nanotechnology to rejuvenate body tissue regeneration, cybogization, telomere extension, genetic modification technologies and mind uploading.
Some of these approaches, for example, Aubrey de Grey’s life extension project, envision super-longevity as an extension of the current biological life of the human being, which includes a continued experience of embodiment. Others, such as cybogization and mind uploading, envision the continued life of the ‘person’ that is housed in artificial bodies (robots, machines or computers).
In this section, I discuss very briefly two interesting strategies to extend human lives. The first has to do with preventing or mitigating the shortening of the telomere, which some scientists believe is the cause of aging. The second is to arrest the process of aging by employing what has been dubbed as ‘Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence’ (SENS).
In his book entitled The Telomerase Revolution (1997), physician Michael Fossel argues that our understanding of telomere shortening can be used to overcome the deteriorations caused by aging and enable people to live longer.
A telomere is like a cap at the tip of a chromosome, designed to prevent the ends of the chromosome from fraying or sticking together. The telomere is shortened with each cell division, until it becomes so short that the cell is unable to divide any further. Scientists maintain that when this happens, cells are unable to repair themselves and replace their damaged components. This results in the accrual of cellular damage which in turn drives the aging process.
The shortening of the telomere can be prevented or even reversed by introducing a protein enzyme called telomerase. Cells that possess telomerase activity – such as cancer cells – are said to be ‘immortal’ because they do not age. Fossel believes that telomerase holds the key to slowing down the aging process in human beings.
Fossel’s theory is not entirely baseless.
In 2011, a team of researchers from the Geron Corporation and T.A. Sciences did a clinical study in which test subjects took dietary supplements that included a telomerase activator extracted from a plant. After one year, the researchers found that the percentage of senescent immune cells of the subjects had declined significantly and that the biochemical profiles of the cells appeared ‘youthful’. Even their metabolic markers (glucose, cholesterol, LDL, insulin) reverted to a more ‘youthful’ profile.
Aubrey de Grey proposed a slightly different strategy from that of Michael Fossel. In his book Ending Ageing, the biogerontologist suggested a strategy for addressing aging that does not try to cure senescence but by using available biotechnologies to repair the damages caused by aging.
De Grey maintains that this is a more comprehensive approach – which he dubs SENS – that aims to repair several damages caused by the aging process through the use of existing (and future) biotechnologies. In his book, Humans 2.0 Fazale R. Rana provides the following list of these damages the de Grey hopes to repair:
• Oxidative damage caused by free radicals from the mitochondria,
• Atherosclerotic plaques caused by cholesterol,
• Beta-amyloid plaques in the brains,
• Glycation of proteins by glucose and other sugars,
• Shortening of telomeres,
• Mutations to DNA, and
• Cell loss from injury or disease.
While de Grey’s ambitious vision and ideas have attracted interest and even praise among some biogerontologists, they also have also generated considerable controversy.
ETHICAL AND SOCIAL CONSIDERATIONS
The quest for super-longevity has brought to the surface serious ethical and social concerns that simply should not be ignored. In this section, I will discuss two of these concerns, namely, the problem of over population and the question of social disparity and injustice.
If in the future longevity therapies prove to be successful and highly popular, extending the human life-span to, say, 500 years, there is the very real prospect that the earth will become overpopulated. Our planet, which is already straining to support the current population, will not be able to provide sufficient resource if the number of its inhabitants were to double because of extended life-spans.
Proponents of super-longevity have proposed two possible solutions to this problem.
The first is to introduce a law which prohibits those who wish to partake in longevity technology from having children. The proposers of this solution to the problem of overpopulation argue that such mandates are already implemented in countries such as China to manage the sizes of their population.
This ‘solution’, however, raises another important ethical issue. Do we have the right to prevent the future generation from coming into being just because we wish to fulfil our desire for longevity? To put the question slightly differently, do we have the responsibility to bring the future generation into being? From the Judeo-Christian standpoint, the answer to this question is clear (Genesis 1:28).
The second ‘solution’ to the problem of overcrowding that some – especially transhumanists and space futurists – are partial to is the colonisation of outer space. Those who envisioned this solution are aware that the colonisation of exoplanets for human habitation is still a very long way off – if it is even feasible at all. But if it were to materialise, then settlements in space can possibly solve the problem of overcrowding.
Perhaps the more immediate ethical and social concern that longevity therapies bring to the fore is that of social inequality and injustice.
Longevity therapies, such as the one envisioned by de Grey, will be extremely expensive and well beyond the reach of the majority of the population even in affluent countries. This means, as Mercer and Trothen point out, that ‘Radical life extension … could very well further concentrate the world’s wealth in the hands of the rich, since they would be the first to live indefinitely’.
According to Daniel Ives, the founder of Shift Bioscience, a UK start-up that uses machine learning to explore cellular aging, the super-rich are currently funding research because they ‘don’t have anywhere else left to go’.
‘The funders have got everything – the high life and more profit than they can dream of’, he adds. ‘The only thing left to do is to change reality. This really feels like a new frontier because we’ve never been able to stand on the precipice of resetting our biology and having a second life’.
The social disparity that super-longevity therapies will introduce is staggering. As Mercer and Trothen put it, ‘Given the positive correlation between race and class, super-longevity in this scenario yields greater social disparity in many categories.’
Super-longevity therapies will also result in even greater differences in life expectancies among populations.
Already there are huge differences in life expectancies among the different populations of the world today. For example, the life expectancies of the people living in Sierra Leone and Somalia are 54.70 years and 57.40 years respectively. Compare this to Germany and Singapore where life expectancies are at 80.94 years and 83.50 years respectively. Imagine a future where people in some countries live up to 300 years of age while people in other countries will not live to celebrate their 56th birthdays.
Super-longevity therapies will also exacerbate the already dire problem of distributive justice. It will create a scenario where some countries have access to the latest state-of-the art enhancement technologies while others are still without the most basic health care such as vaccines for childhood diseases.
THE COMPLETE LIFE
Perhaps the real issue behind the quest for super-longevity has to do not so much with how aging and the frailties that accompany it can and must be surmounted. Perhaps it has to do with something more fundamental, with our understanding of our humanity and the significance and purpose or telos of human life itself.
Taking its cue from Aristotle, Western culture tends to think of the life of a human being divided into three successive stages: youth, prime of life and old age. The young are marked by passion and ambition which are realised in the prime of life, while old age is characterised by decline.
In addition, modern societies have pegged these stages of life to the concept of the career. As Lutheran theologian and ethicist Gilbert Meilaender puts it in his insightful book, Should We Live Forever? The Ethical Ambiguities of Aging:
In the early modern period of Western history, the idea of a life divided in several stages or ages took on greater specificity in the concept of career. Childhood and youth were a time of preparation for one’s career, and old age became the time when one was ‘past one’s peak’ or ‘over the hill’.
Thus conceived, the life of an individual must proceed according to a well-laid plan such that even the significance of his life is largely determined by it. For example, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor could go so far as to say that we would have failed as persons if our ‘lives as a whole do not sustain a meaningful narrative’.
The problem with this perspective, as philosopher Margaret Urban Walker clearly saw, is the illusion that the trajectory of our lives is within our control. This idea of ‘an individual’s life as a self-consciously controlled career’, writes Walker:
binds a whole life or lifetime together in a unified way for which the individual is accountable. The individual’s ability to account for this life – to bring forward its plan, project, or narrative plot – testifies to the individual’s self-control.
Perhaps the quest for super-longevity is motivated by this profound need to be in control, a manifestation of the desire for self-determination. For, as Meilaender has perceptively pointed out, if human life is understood as a career, then ‘retirement becomes an obvious problem, since it seems to bring one’s career to a close and is simply a period of decline’.
Consequently, Meilaender adds, ‘we have come to look for ways to incorporate conscious and continued growth and accomplishment into old age – a transposition, but also a continuation, of the active life.’
The Christian perspective – typified by the great fifth century theologian, Augustine – provides us a with a radically different way of viewing our life and its significance. It points to important truth – lost to our secular culture – that our lives are in the hands of God who knows their beginnings, their courses and their ends better than we do.
While not eschewing our responsibility to be active stewards of our lives, this perspective acknowledges that our lives are in the end a mystery to us. It acknowledges further that our lives are in the hands of a sovereign and loving God who brought us into being for a purpose.
Put differently, this perspective confronts us with our own finitude and our need to put our trust in a higher Power (to borrow an expression of Alexander Solzhenitsyn). Perhaps the quest for super-longevity is at heart the refusal to acknowledge our finitude, a rebellion against our own creatureliness.
The Christian perspective will enable us to live what Meilaender and others have called the complete life, a life lived Coram Deo – in the presence of God – in faith and gratefulness. The great Swiss German theologian Karl Barth helps us to understand what this means when he writes:
The particular seriousness of every age does not consist, therefore, in a special attitude which one has to assume to life in youth, maturity or old age, but in the seriousness with which at every age one has to go from the Lord of life to meet the Lord of life and therefore to try to live as though for the first time or as though this were the only age.
While the various stages in life still in some ways matter, the demands they impose are no longer as onerous as they once were.
One of the most poignant and beautiful evening prayers in the Protestant tradition is found in the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978). It brings this brief reflection on the modern quest for super-longevity to a fitting end.
Lord God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.