Pursuing "Immortality" & Treating Aging As A "Disease": The Province of Cranks And Quacks

Barbara Ehrenreich has provided an antidote to the imbecilic view of aging as a disease, in her book 'Natural Causes'.  Basically the only reason humans fight aging (and mortality) is to continue the fantasy of a 'neverending', individual conscious self. 


In a recent Financial Times piece featuring an interview with bio-researcher and wunderkind Laura Deming, we learn:

"Anti-aging science seems to be the latest gold rush in youth-obsessed Silicon Valley. Like long-ago emperors, some tech elites are pursuing immortality through unproven treatments."

Let's first accept as a proposition that pursuing immortality for humans is a fool's errand. The corollary to that is treating aging as a "disease" with the daft aim to eliminate it like one might eliminate Measles or smallpox is equally balmy.  One of the best retorts to that bollocks came via a comment from one FT reader: 

"Aging is NOT a disease. It's life's  natural conclusion. Death is necessary for renewal of the species. Imagine being 200 years old or 300 years old. Eventually, the planet will be filled with old people."

Terse, but splendid logic which only a quack would attempt to refute. Why? Well because the quest for immortality is an idiotic fantasy which gets more at the nature of  human hubris in refusing to accept that death is an integral part of evolution.  Thus,  we need death to remove species' members to make way for either better adapted offshoots or new species. Imagine if Australopithecus never died out to make way for humans!  Imagine if the dinosaurs never died out to make way for the mammals.

But this tripe is now circulating from otherwise sober heads, even in journals such as Nature, wherein one reads in one issue (June 28, 2018): 

“If there is a mortality plateau, then there is no limit to human longevity,” says Jean-Marie Robine, a demographer at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Montpellier, who was not involved in the study.

That would mean that someone like Chiyo Miyako, the Japanese great-great-great-grandmother who, at 117, is the world’s oldest known person, could live for years to come — or even forever, at least hypothetically."

Live forever, because this demographer  (and others) found one Japanese elder who's 117? Give me a break! And this is supposedly on the basis of "statistical analysis" which then means either that analysis omitted selection effects or  indicates a total misreading of the data. In this case that a mortality plateau translates to the conclusion that "human lifespan doesn't have an upper threshold."  Did any of these specialists even take a course in basic logic? Evidently not.  And who are the main morons behind this twaddle?  Well, "anti-aging startups".    E.g.

Anti-Aging Startups Leading the Longevity Research Revolution

https://www.boldbusiness.com/.../anti-aging-startups-leading-longevity-research-revol...

1. Cached

Now, it is essential  here to differentiate those like Deming- who simply seek  to "increase humans' 'health span'  (i.e. the number of years of healthy life), from the brigade of cranks and quacks  in techie startups who want to convince you humans can actually aspire to achieve some cockeyed "immortality".  And to that end, the sheer chutzpah to treat aging as a "disease" that can be cured. 

Rather than aim at immortality like the cranks and quacks, Ms. Deming's goal is a tad more temperate:  simply to extend healthy years for normal lifespans. When asked by the FT about one of her experiments pertaining to longer life for worms, she references "starving them, mutating them, then cutting their gonads off." 

Translated to humans, think of near  starvation diets (like me doing the 5:2, 800 calories a day, 7 days a week), altering key genes and also cutting off the sex organs and hormone-producing glands (testes, ovaries). Somehow I doubt that sort of extreme 'cure' would fly for most Americans . But it gets to the core of what REAL measures would be needed to add even ten (quality) years to the lifespan of humans, far less 40 or 50!  In other words, vastly more draconian measures than merely getting a blood transfusion from a penniless millennial at a vampire center, e.g.

Blood ready to be infused into old farts - to try to stave off aging - at a vampire center

 Indeed when the FT asked Deming for real world evidence she replied "Korean eunuchs!"  Quickly adding she "wouldn't mess with her own fertility".  Gee, that's nice to know!  Bear in mind this is merely to add a few healthy years, not to advance some absurd proposal for indefinitely long lifespan.

At least to her credit, Deming admits there is no 'magic bullet' to stopping or slowing aging.  This shows she has her feet planted on the ground.  Also, her head isn't up in the clouds some place like the gaggle of longevity promoters who believe they can get human life spans up to 120 or 140 years, or "living forever".  (They'd do better to conquer Alzheimer's disease first!)

Author (and Atheist) Barbara Ehrenreich appears to grasp how this yen to conquer aging and death arose. She  is convinced it's all about a form of egotism, in this case belief in a never ending ego as tied to the conscious self.  As she writes in her book 'Natural Causes: An Epidemic Of Wellness, The Certainty Of Dying, And Killing Ourselves to Live Longer''


"Contemporary society is so deeply invested in the idea of an individual conscious self that it becomes both logically and emotionally impossible to think of a world without it."

She elaborates much more several pages on,

“No matter how much effort we expend, not everything is potentially within our control, not even our own bodies and minds. In death we will once again be equals - and so an egalitarian politics also means accepting this outcome.  You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible means to postpone it.  Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of  an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever surprising world around us."

This is a tough pill for the longevity cult  and their startups to accept, but eventually they will.  Her take here is the basic atheistic premise that death represents nothingness, no being at all, hence no consciousness of self or anything. If one had to compare it to something in human experience it would be closest to general anesthesia for a major surgery.  No sensation of time, and no memory...nothing.  So Ehrenreich's theory is that the longevity quacks are pursuing their fantasy as a means to escape this ego nothingness, the loss of fundamental personal identity. This makes perfect sense given the techie launching startups in this area perhaps possess the biggest egos - next to hedge fund owners and investment bankers. So it's no surprise they'd desire to go on forever.

But because they can't accept this ego-destroying state that Ehrenreich proposes, this condition of perpetual nothingness-  and they don't buy into religious immortality -  they conjure up a physical equivalent.  A kind of  ersatz biological immortality  based on cockeyed notions of extending life indefinitely. (Invoking the statistics of "death risk plateaus")

Now, don't get me wrong.   This is not to say there aren't advantages to living longer, provided good health is part of the package. (See e.g. WSJ,  May 21, 'The Advantages and Limits Of Living To 100', p. A13).  However, one huge disadvantage is that one needs to have plenty of wealth to support those added years. 

 In previous posts to do with this topic I already noted a  $550,000 net worth is probably okay for most 65 year -olds currently to have a comfortable 20 years of retirement.  Now extend that to 95 but with 2 percent inflation (conservatively) factored in each year and you come to $770,000. Take the tally on to age 105 and you are looking at $880,000 and to 115 we get, $990,000 and to 125 you're at $1.1 million and to 135 you're at $1.21 million.  We haven't  reached 142 yet, and I've not even factored into the mix medical inflation.

The reality now? Most Americans currently at age 65 don't even half that $550k net worth amount saved up, say to last until 85.  (The amount cited from a recent MONEY magazine issue was $195k)   So how are they going to last until 100 or 120 or 142 as some cockeyed longevity research quacks have suggested?  It is pure nonsense and wishful thinking. Also believing you will be hired by some corporation at age 90 or 100 or 110.  

If you believe that codswallop you probably believe in unicorns and flying monkeys too.

So why this obsession with increasing human lifespans when the last thing we need is a burgeoning population of oldsters?  It's because a segment of our species admits to no limits - either biological (in terms of lifespan), in energy consumption, or sex or anything else.  These denizens live in a universe of their own and the only way they will be brought back to reality is when it begins to actually bite. Such as when the energy finally runs out, the sex can no longer be sustained even with 200 mg of Viagra a day, and when the runaway greenhouse hits,  turning the planet into a massive oven - to cook all species.

As a prostate cancer survivor unsure of how many years he has left, or what the disease is doing now (though the last PSA test May 14 did show the velocity slowing  from 0.21 ng/ml / mo. to 0.12 ng/ml/ mo. , i.e. over two consecutive 6 month intervals).   I am trying to take an open minded approach combined with a realistic one.  Basically this means (and my primary care doc agrees) postponing any hormone treatments until I become symptomatic.   Thus, in my frame of reference, longevity is automatically tempered, not unbounded. It's measured in increments of additional quality years, not dozens or "forever". I look at each added day of quality as a relative achievement in quality of life and less so in quantity 

This is because I value quality of life more than quantity  - as these longevity startups ought to as well. Hence, using their funds to pursue Alzheimer's research, not living forever.  For me there is no ambition to live until 100 or 120.  Only to postpone the worst effects of the cancer as long as I can., and take those quality years as they come.  If that means only to age 77 or 80, so be it. I am not greedy, and I certainly don't inhabit the unhinged fantasy island of these startup longevity folks.

  I wouldn't presume to assert my approach is right for everyone, but for me it works, and I don't need to win a Powerball of $300 million to make it so.