Calico Cats Quandry
I currently subscribe to global news feeds including NYT, WAPO, WSJ and FT, but also read New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair and NatGeo. Oh, very relevantly, I also read the monthly AARP Bulletin. When Apple News feeds me something I can’t read without subscribing, I generally pass and just absorb the headline. I also use Prime, Netflix, AppleTV, HBO Max and Hulu for subscription videos. I will ignore the social media subscriptions I maintain because I just use them for local and friend/family news even though they do more or try to. The point is, I try to stay current and well-read, but admit that it’s hard to keep up completely at any moment with the latest trends and news.
Today I read a story fed to me by FT with the intriguing title Can We Defeat Death. The article chronicles the efforts to prolong human life and perhaps target immortality for human beings. It’s amazing how much is going on in the life-prolonging space. Naturally, all medical science is targeted at prolonging life, but not necessarily at prolonging vibrant high quality life rather than morbid hanging-on life. These other specific life extension efforts are about finding ways to regenerate cells in such a way that life goes on robustly in youthful vigor rather than fade into decrepitude. Efforts to prolong life are as old as Methuselah, but it’s the Ponce de Leon world of a fountain of youth that inspires most of this latest high-powered research effort.
Naturally, these efforts are being funded and spearheaded by those billionaire elites that Washington is now trying to tax to help pay for the broad infrastructure initiatives seeking to improve the productivity of life for the population as a whole. And while billionaires reside all over the world and certainly can choose to live wherever they want, there are still more of them in California than anywhere else. Forbes says that in 2021 there are 189 billionaires in California despite losing high profile defectors Larry Ellison and Elon Musk to Hawaii and Texas respectively. California, home of Silicon Valley and Hollywood seems to have a disproportionate amount of people who enjoy their party lifestyle so much that they never want it to end. They stay fit, they have plastic surgery, and now they fund genetic research into everlasting life.
Dying of old age actually has an official medical classification and goes by MG2A in the International Classification of Disease listing. There are several foundations and start-ups that are now totally focused on MG2A eradication, or at least mitigation. All the movies on the subject seem to focus on laboratories in Switzerland and indeed, the Longevity Science Foundation does operate from Switzerland, but the Hevolution Foundation, funded by the Saudi royal family is a key driver and it is headed by Dr. Mehmood Khan, who came out of PepsiCo where he was chief science officer and now seems to sit at the vortex of UK and US governmental efforts at prolonging life. Then there is Altos Labs, the highly secretive Silicon Valley start-up that is backed by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and that is focused on radical life extension aiming at allowing those who could afford it to last for centuries…that’s right, I said centuries. As of this moment, the oldest living person lasted for 122 years (my own mother made it to 100), but it is felt that living much longer is within reach.
In 2013, none other than Google and MIT formed something called the California Life Company, known colloquially as Calico. The Calico objective is to focus on attacking cancer and neurodegenerative diseases to get life expectancy out to 150 years and longer. I remember seeing an ad on the Westside Highway that said “The first human to reach 150 years old is alive today.” It was an ad for a life insurance company and smacked of wishful actuarial thinking. But Calico is a serious effort and the Silicon Valley elite seem very serious about keeping their party going for years to come.
Naturally, the notion of extending life in a meaningful way in a world of 7.8 billion people, most of whom just want to get through that day with enough food and shelter for them and their dependents, is a notion fraught with ethical dilemmas. It is felt that with just non-radical medical research we are going to see another decade extension to normal life expectancy, which, in Japan, already exceeds 90 years. Demographers note that these radical life extension efforts could lead to a quadrupling of global population in a mere few generations. I’m not sure I want my grandkids to face a world with over 30 billion people. It started to feel like that old Catskills joke about the awful food where the portions are nice and large as well.
Several philosophers have already addressed the dilemma and have concluded that limited lifespan is the price we pay for sex and procreation. This puts us squarely into the Brave New World and 1984 territory projected by Huxley and Orwell. I, for one, agree with the notion expressed by Daniel Ives, a British scholar working in the arena, who said, “Maybe if you really want four kids, you have to leave the planet and let your kids enjoy it for a bit.” A 2013 Pew Research study showed that Americans aren’t all that keen on living forever. Only 4% were interested in living past 120 years with a slight 1% wanting to live forever. It was noted at the time that this was probably more driven by the view that living longer was considered to be more a matter of dying longer due to the illnesses associated with aging. Clearly that is what all these well-funded start-ups are trying to attack. But those efforts don’t help the ethical issues of prolonging life in an imperfect world filled with human suffering. That was the very topic in the Matt Damon movie, Elysium, which tells the tale of a world where the elite can have eternal healthy life, which they live out on a luxurious satellite space station while the masses toil away supporting that lifestyle in an earthbound world plagued by unpleasant climate change and extreme pollution and disease.
As a storyteller, I favor a narrative arc to all stories. They aren’t supposed to go on forever. They all have a beginning, a middle and an end. The real point of a good story is to make sure that that middle part has meaning, substance and goodness as its core values. Then, when the end comes it feels righteous and well-deserved. Rest in peace.