While the idea of saving lives in general is neither new nor remarkable, the idea of saving the lives of people 100, 110, 120, and even older is often considered to be radical at best. And while there are indeed various technical and practical challenges to achieving effective health care for people who are nearing (or in) the triple-digits, the existence of political challenges is somewhat confounding.

What makes someone’s impending death less of an emergency when they are ninety than when they are nine? If you were told that someone was dying and you didn’t know how old they were, would it even occur to you to ask, with the intent of using their age to decide whether they were worth trying to save or not? Most likely, it wouldn’t. If you can understand that age should not matter as a variable in terms of whether someone’s life ought to be saved, you have grasped the philosophical underpinnings of life extension. Because that’s all life extension advocacy is, really — a recognition of the fact that effective health care must be capable of saving a person’s life in order to earn the “effective” designation, and that older people deserve effective health care as much as younger people do. I am all in favor of keeping the definition of “health” expansive and pluralistically aware so as to avoid the emergence of coercive medical paternalism, but there is no definition of health I can possibly imagine that includes the state in which a person is literally dying*.

Some would (rightfully) point out that there are people right now of all ages who are subject to abuse, coercion, squalid living conditions, and torture — and that that stopping these outrages should be the paramount priority of political activism (and that the idea of life extension suggests something vaguely superfluous). Therefore, it is necessary to examine the idea of where life extension fits into this political equation, if anywhere. Is life extension activism even political at all, or is it something that can be tackled from a more purely practical standpoint? These are questions well worth exploring, particularly in a world where there are so many people still subject to horrors perpetuated by other humans who really ought to know better. Where does life extension, or longevity advocacy, stand in the arena of things that demand our attention?

One thing to acknowledge is that we do not presently have the means to save the lives or preserve the viability of persons 100 and older reliably; this needs to be remedied through research, and part of longevity advocacy is making sure that this research happens (and that it happens soon, so that more lives may be saved). However, we do already have the means to treat our neighbors with more respect, to end torture, and to prevent abuses — there is no great scientific breakthrough that needs to come about in order to make the world a much, much better place than it presently is for many.

This is a hard fact that needs to be reiterated again and again regardless of how much new gee-whiz technology comes down the line: there is a lot we can do to make the world more hospitable to all kinds of people, and for various reasons (many of which are probably political), we are simply not doing enough of it. Perhaps new technologies can help some in terms of making the implementation of political solutions more effective, but the bottom line is still that attitudes (and the ramifications of changing them) are more powerful than most give them credit for.

So, in response to the idea that life “extension” ought to be less of an explicitly political priority than certain other issues, I can tentatively voice agreement — not because I don’t think longevity medicine is as “important” as other things, but because its hurdles are presently more practical than political. In response to my recent analysis of attitudes toward death, Russell Blackford noted:

Death may be non-morally bad, but I don’t see how it can be described as “an outrage”. To me, that suggests a moral judgment, but the fact that we all die isn’t something that anyone brought about deliberately. Moral reactions to something like death are just not appropriate. It’s like saying, “Earthquakes are an outrage” or “attacks by sharks are an outrage” No, they are (in many situations) non-morally bad things, and we have reason to try to avoid them or ameliorate their effects. But it’s not like some god causes any of these things and we can (rationally) blast this being’s actions as “outrageous”.

Here, Blackford is responding to a poll item that included the statement, “Death is an outrage”. And his reasoning is sound; it is true that death (specifically age-related death) does not come as the result of any particular person’s direct, horrific actions. The comparison of age-related death to earthquake or shark-induced death is quite apt from the moral standpoint; all are things that happen for reasons largely outside the realm of human intent. People dying of “old age” is unfortunate (and that is an understatement), but at the same time, you cannot approach age-related death politically the same way you would approach abuse-related death, or poverty-related death. The idea of life extension has really only wandered into the realm of the political because of the need to break down old, outmoded cultural notions of death as justified equalizer or arbiter of final justice (as well as the need for well-funded research) — but in essence, it is about as political as the notion that we ought to cure cancer or AIDS, meaning somewhat political but largely practical.

The difference between longevity advocacy and other kinds of advocacy pertaining to mainly human-sourced atrocities is that if the means to allow people to live well beyond 100 in good health (by their own standards, of course) actually existed, I honestly do not think that there would be many political barriers to disseminating these means. People make a lot of noise about the existential value of death (and particularly age-related death) but I do not see it as likely that they would block their grandmother from undergoing a treatment to boost her immune system or unclog her arteries if such a thing were available.

However, the fact remains that there are unequal power distributions in the world as well as a lot of political and social convolution that do block people from getting needed care. Discrimination, bigotry, and systematic devaluation all still exist (particularly when it comes to poor, minority, and disabled persons), and everyone with half a conscience ought to be outraged at these things. These things, after all, are perpetuated by people and stoppable by people, and we should be making every effort to curb them.

The fact that we are technically capable of stopping many abuses but that many continue go so far as to make excuses for these abuses is symptomatic of the need for intense political action in the areas of those abuses. But there is no reason save time constraints that a person cannot be a longevity advocate and a civil rights advocate simultaneously, and certainly no reason to think that longevity advocacy represents anything more esoteric than the simple quest for effective health care for everyone (irrespective of age) that it actually is. Mainly, I think, for most people, it is simply a matter of getting used to the idea of a very different sort of social demography.

“Imagine if there was a pill that would compel the user to believe a magic bunny ruled the universe, and anyone that took this pill would then become committed to giving these pills to as many people as they could such that others would also believe in the magic bunny. Sound crazy? Well, religion is that pill. Religion is a virtual drug that incites this exact form of insanity, as it has done for eons. The con of religion must be seen for what it is, the oldest and largest pyramid scheme in all of history, that only truly benefits the wallets of the priests.” From BetterHuman.org, Inc.

While I fully agree with the con of man-made religions, the author of BetterHuman goes on to “prove” the impossibility of a god in our universe. He has missed the core concept: that we are all God. The Mass Consciousness is God.

Continue reading

Via Newsweek, Jerry Adler offers a fascinating look at the ever-shifting line between life and death primarily through the story of one man who “died” and yet lived to tell the tale. The article, aptly titled Back From The Dead, follows 61-year-old Bill Bondar who experienced cardiac death while unloading his car on May 23, 2007. In cases of cardiac death, states the article:

Without CPR, their window for survival starts to close in about five minutes. Life or death is mostly a matter of luck; response time to a 911 call varies greatly by location, but can exceed 10 minutes in many parts of the country. In rough numbers, they have a 95 percent chance of dying.

In Bill Bondar’s case, the odds were slanted in his favor for a number of reasons. His wife, who found him soon after he collapsed, had some residual knowledge of CPR training she’d taken a decade ago. She pushed on his chest to get a trickle of oxygenated blood to his brain and called 911, after which help arrived within a mere two minutes. Bondar’s pulse was restored through use of a defibrillator, and though comatose and at serious risk, he was at least no longer clinically “dead”.

The rest of Bondar’s tale begins with a move into the intriguing realm of medical hypothermia. Per Mrs. Bondar’s suggestion, he was taken to Penn University Hospital, one of about 225 United States hospitals equipped with hypothermia-inducing machines. There, he was injected with chilled saline and wrapped in a network of plastic cooling tubes that circulated chilled water about the outside of his body. Then, continues the article:

Bondar was kept at about 92 degrees for about a day, then allowed to gradually return to normal temperature. He remained stable, but unresponsive, over the next three days, while Monica stayed at his bedside. She finally went home Sunday evening, and was awakened Monday by a call from the hospital that she was sure meant bad news.

“Guess what?” said the voice on the other end. “Bill’s awake.”

Bondar made a full recovery and was sent home — a happy ending for him, his wife, and the doctors who worked diligently to save him. One such doctor was Dr. Lance Becker, who directs Penn Hospital’s Center for Recusitation Science. Becker, who noted that most documented exceptions to the “five minute survival rule” for cardiac death patients involved individuals who had been cooled to low temperatures (e.g., following a fall into an icy lake), has been investigating the potential clinical applications of this data toward very promising ends. In particular, the article discusses the potential roles of cell death, oxygen, and mitochondria in the processes of bodily death, physiological damage, and recusitation.

It is genuinely refreshing to see a mainstream article acknowledging things like the fact that “[c]ell death isn’t an event; it’s a process. And in principle, a process can be interrupted.”, and that “[f]ive minutes without oxygen is indeed fatal to brain cells, but the actual dying may take hours, or even days.” It is easy to see how archetypical imagery like the robed, scythe-bearing personification of death managed to proliferate before these scientific facts were understood; in the past, if someone had a heart attack and collapsed, the finality of the event seemed immediate, certain, and complete. Understanding that this is no longer the case — that as knowledge of human physiology grows more extensive, we can better parse the process of death into stages — is critical to the shift in consciousness that will ideally play out in the form of more support for effective longevity medicine and “stopgap” measures such as cryonic suspension.

Speaking of which, Back From The Dead also offers a surprisingly sympathetic look at cryonics as the natural extension of lifesaving medicine; the Alcor Foundation is mentioned and some of its methods and speculations about the future of suspension and reanimation are described:

The Alcor Foundation, in Scottsdale, Ariz., has signed up about 825 prospective patients, and has preserved 76 of them, including Ted Williams. These aren’t all whole bodies; some people opt for just their heads, which, apart from being cheaper, freeze faster than an entire body, reducing the danger of frost damage to the cells. Of course, we are a long way from knowing how to reanimate a frozen body, let alone just a head. One possibility, according to Tanya Jones, chief operating officer of Alcor, is to take a cell from the head and clone a new body to attach it to. The other is to scan the entire three-dimensional molecular array of the brain into a computer which could hypothetically reconstitute the mind, either as a physical entity or a disembodied intelligence in cyberspace. This, obviously, is not for the impatient. The physicist Ralph Merkle, an Alcor board member, has used this idea to popularize a fourth definition of death: “information-theoretic” death, the point at which the brain has succumbed to the pull of entropy and the mind can no longer be reconstituted. Only then, he says, are you really and truly dead.

Though the article wanders off into some mild fluff near the end in its discussion of “near-death” out-of-body experiences, overall I have to say that this is by far one of the best recent mainstream treatments of the shifting, evolving definition of death that I’ve come across.

While cryonics is often joked about even in optimistic circles as being “a mildly expensive funeral” or “the second worst thing that can happen to you”, I have long theorized that despite the notoriety it gained a while back due to previous media treatments of the subject, it might actually end up becoming one of the first novel death–defeating technologies to gain widespread approval. The fact that we can already cool the comatose and use this low-temperature state in lifesaving strategies bodes very well for the increasing acceptance of medical cryonics.