The July 20, 2007 Future Salon meeting was titled, The Science and Ethics of Longevity Research. This is Part 2 of a summary of that presentation as well as commentary and supplemental information regarding the topics and concepts discussed. Commentary, of course, represents my own views and responses to the presenters’ points, not the views of the presenters.
William Hurlburt took the podium following de Grey’s initial statement. As predicted, he expressed his perception that yes, indeed, he had the more difficult job in asserting the “con” side of longevity research to the gathered crowd.
Hurlburt went straight into ethics and philosophy, asking first of all, “Is more always better?” (particularly when it comes to “life itself”), and then invoking notions of balance, wholeness, and coherence as applied to life (and death’s role in shaping it). He brought up the potential social impacts of life extension by lightly pointing out that phrases like “life sentence” and “until death do us part” would take on very different gravity in a society of very long-lived individuals.
He then tried to make a poetic point about life as analogous to a symphony, and asserted that perhaps extending life (any part of life) would disrupt this symphony or somehow make it less meaningful than it would have been otherwise. I tried my best to take this argument seriously and consider it from an ethical and philosophical standpoint, but in all honesty (and no disrespect to Dr. Hurlburt here), all I could think was, “Wow, he’s using the Depressed Buffy Argument!”
(If you haven’t seen the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV series through the sixth season, you might want to skip over the next few paragraphs, if you plant to watch the series and you’re the sort to care about spoilers. Consider this fair warning!)
See, right at the end of Season 5, Buffy (the title character and hero of the series), dies as a result of leaping into a mystical portal while in the process of saving the world from a chaotic dimensional rupture. She is brought back to life at the beginning of Season 6 by her well-meaning friends, who feared that she might have been trapped in a “hell dimension”. However, it turns out that Buffy was not in a terrible place at all, but in a place where she felt “warm, loved, and complete”. Being torn from this place of completeness and certainty sends her into a deep depression. She feels as if her life is now meaningless, that she is simply going through the motions of her daily activities. And she resents her friends for bringing her back to such a life — Buffy feels that the “song” that should have comprised her life has been taken from her and left her with nothing but confusion and emptiness.
This is what Hurlburt’s “symphony” argument reminded me of; he seemed to be making a very similar assertion about the effect that very long lives might have on people. But, like “Depressed Buffy”, Hurlburt fails to acknowledge that life is not about some grand story arc imposed upon you from the outside so much as what you choose to make of it, and find within it. At one point during the musical episode of Buffy (which isn’t nearly as ridiculous as the premise may sound), another character sings the following in response to Buffy’s lament about the disruption of her “song”:
Life’s not a song,
Life isn’t bliss,
Life is just this –
It’s living.
Given the existentialist leanings of series creator Joss Whedon, it seems very likely that these few simple words are actually intended to express a very powerful truth about existence: that life is not a song, but something else — something that is, rather, an end unto itself. Buffy did eventually come to terms with this truth and begin to appreciate the world once more — perhaps even more deeply than she did prior to her death, because her viewpoint was less naive and better informed regarding the true lack of absolute certainty in the universe. When even death cannot be relied upon as either certain or final, a person is thrust into a position of having to engage in some of the most difficult philosophical explorations known to humanity.
Hurlburt made much of the notion that to seek life extension is to express a kind of “spiritual immaturity” — as if somehow, those who advocate for effective longevity medicine simply have not “faced” their mortality and its implications. While I can see how he might think this, given the fact that most human myths and archetypes involving longevity end with a moralizing lesson about being careful what you wish for, I would venture to suggest that not being able to conceive of a meaningful life without age-related death is actually more indicative of “spiritual immaturity” than actually being able to do so.
Overall, it seems that Hurlburt confuses the naive “immortality quest” (characterized by an outright fear of death, and little reflective content) popularized in myth and legend with the more serious, pragmatic, deeply-thought-out desire for longevity medicine shared by the majority of the healthy life extension community. I haven’t taken a survey, but I would imagine that most longevity advocates have, in fact, “faced death”, stared into the void, meditated to the point of ego-dissolution, or done any number of other things that have allowed us to observe the starkness and majesty of existence and our own frail, vulnerable presence within the context of the whole.
When I was about 20 years old, the notion of mortality actually hit me quite abruptly — I was reading a book at the time that claimed that humans find it impossible to imagine their own non-existence, and because I like a challenge, I attempted to imagine just that. I’ve learned subsequently that this sort of exercise is similar to some Buddhist practices, but I am not a Buddhist nor am I particularly well-versed in that system, so whatever I did seems to have been purely the result of experiment and chance. But regardless of how I did it, I was actually able to (briefly) “peer into the void”.
I do not assign any supernatural significance to this experience, but it was quite personally significant, because from that point onward I have been acutely conscious of the fragility and beauty of life. For several months after that experience I had to deal with sorting through a wellspring of new emotions, realizations, and philosophical points that had simply never occurred to me before. I remember going to my parents in tears and explaining to them that I’d just become viscerally aware of the relative brevity of life, and I will never forget what my stepmother told me at that point:
“So, what now? Are you just going to go hide in a cave and wait to die?”
I thought about that, and while I still had to go through a few more months of sorting out my new perspective (which made me extremely moody) after this, those words stuck with me and I kept coming back to them whenever the sense-memory of that brief moment of utter transparency and smallness struck me. Yes, humans are tiny. Yes, reality is vast and unforgiving. Yes, we are tremendously, almost poignantly vulnerable. Yes, we are at the mercy of many, many forces utterly beyond our control. But none of that means that the right way to go about things is to simply sit back and try to force-fit our imaginations, aspirations, and ability to appreciate beauty and complexity into a structure imposed upon us by culture, tradition, and lack of good sound medical care for people of all ages.
Life has a pervasive depth to it that exists at all scales and across all structures, and there is absolutely no reason to assert that this depth would somehow go away if people didn’t need to worry so much about dying of old age anymore. In short, I don’t think anyone, Hurlburt or otherwise, has the right to tell anyone else what makes their life meaningful. When people impose their paternalistic “life’s a song, and I get to tell you what that song should sound like” attitudes on others, the result is no less than insulting. I’ve seen this in autistic advocacy as well: I don’t like people insisting my life will be “meaningless” or “incoherent” if life extension becomes a reality any more than I like them insisting that my existence is somehow only a pale shadow of what it “could be” if I were neurotypical.
Hurlburt asserted that he had personally “faced his frailty”, but he did not seem to allow for the fact that a person can simultaneously face their own frailty and advocate for longevity research at the same time. I have no illusions that any length of life in particular is assured; my intent in living, and doing the things I do while living, is to live a life that is worthwhile regardless of length. It is a terrible oversimplification to assert that life extension advocacy must come from a place of naivete, or to assume that longevity advocates get some kind of comfort from the mere fact of being advocates. We all have to face our own frailty, and the potential for our own eventual nonexistence, regardless of what scientific endeavors we prefer to promote — no rational person anywhere is spared the necessity of this.
In the midst of all the talk of symphonies and coherence and balance and structure, Hurlburt revealed at least some of his views to be somewhat strangely reactionary. I’m not sure if anyone who isn’t female can relate to this, but there’s a certain mode of expression that some people have that can make you feel uncomfortably aware of your gender, and simultaneously invisible because of it. I half expected him to start complaining about how women being able to work outside the home (and vote, even!) was “destabilizing society”. He seemed somewhat fixated on reproduction and referred to the stages of life as “childhood, parenthood, and grandparenthood”. He remarked on how unfortunate it was that some women “wait too long to have children” and then have problems when they attempt to use techniques like in-vitro fertilization.
As someone who is not only female but who has also chosen not to reproduce (since there are a near-infinite number of things I would rather do with my time than bear and raise my own young), I felt simultaneously left out and liberated by Hurlburt’s proclamations. It didn’t seem like he was speaking to me, or anyone like me, at all. In light of this, I alternated between thinking, “Oh, PLEASE!” and figuring that his statements had so little to do with me that I was under no obligation to take them seriously in the first place.
Nevertheless, despite the other (possibly innumerable) rants I might be able to base off of many of Hurlburt’s statements, I do have to give credit where credit is due. Hurlburt may have a tendency to oversimplify, and he may have displayed a confounding lack of apparent imagination at times, but he was obviously not someone who had never at least tried to think seriously about pertinent bioethical issues. He made some good points about the far-reaching ramifications of altering one gene, or one “aspect” or a person or a population. He rightfully pointed out that “cure” was a loaded word (I could not have agreed more on that point), and suggested that the over-medicalization of human existence was perhaps not the best way to go about progressing into the future.
So, I agree fully that there is far too much medicalization of variation going on, but I draw a very clear line between variations and things that actually kill people. If aging kills people, then why not medicalize the parts of it that tend to be fatal? Of course, simply being old is not a medical condition in and of itself, and should not be portrayed as such — but think for a moment about what tends to kill people who are old.
Elderly people are not simply spirited away on an angel-drawn pillow surrounded by loving friends and family when they die — rather, they usually experience immune collapse, cancer, heart failure, atherosclerosis, strokes, pneumonia, or any number of other undeniable nasties. It isn’t the “being old” part of being old that ought to be medicalized — it’s the “being so sick that all your organs shut down and you die” part. If we wouldn’t want this to happen to a younger person, then we shouldn’t tolerate it when it happens to older people either — unless we are prepared to assert that a person’s life stops being valuable once they reach a certain “expiration date”. And that assertion is something I would find tremendously repugnant.
Another positive point for Hurlburt was the fact that he brought up the notion of whether a brain might even be capable of “storing” experiences and personal identity over a period of time far longer than today’s lifespans. This is almost certain to become an issue if we do achieve longevity medicine — I do imagine that we have yet to see the outer bounds of what an “unaugmented” brain can possibly do, but eventually, it does seem likely that a person will need to undergo some kind of cognitive modification in order to keep track of his/her experiences. Trying to postulate how those modifications might be achieved, or how they might be implemented, goes to a place of speculation I am not fully equipped to discuss at this time but it is definitely something I will be watching as the future unfolds. And while Hurlburt might have brought up this point as a reason for why we should be wary of extending lives, I think that postulating “death” as the only solution to this potential problem reveals nothing more than lack of imagination.
All that said, at times it almost seemed as if Hurlburt was not actually as opposed to the idea of superlongevity as his official position seemed to imply. He acknowledged that he was there to present certain arguments in favor of a particular position, and did so accordingly, but not without what almost seemed like hesitation at times. He even suggested that some longevity interventions might be acceptable in his estimation; he eagerly cited a research program involving hamsters and stem cells (that supposedly resulted in 30% longer lives for the hamsters). And during the “audience participation” session at the end, he seemed somewhat taken aback by some of the questions from various persons in attendance; there was one man in particular who made such a poignant statement about the reasoning behind “wanting more years” that I am not entirely sure anyone with even a modicum of empathy would have been able to dismiss that statement.
Overall, I reached the end of the presentation with a few new thoughts and things to ponder, but mainly a conviction that we definitely ought to at least run the longevity experiment. Whatever uncertainties, resource distribution challenges, population issues, or social unrest that could occur in a “worst case” longevity scenario are still better off occurring in a world where people are not simply expected (and even encouraged) to stop “presumptuously” existing once they reach a certain age. Rather than assuming the potential challenges of a very long-lived society will be insurmountable, why not at least put ourselves in the position to face them head-on?
(Back to Part 1)
My paper “Preparing For Our Enhanced Future” is now available in the latest issue of the Journal of Medical Licensure and Discipline (published by the Federation of State Medical Boards of the United States). A subscription is needed to access it. 
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