“Who wants to live forever?” Freddie Mercury mournfully asks in Queen’s 1986 track of the similar identify.
The solution: Fairly a couple of folks – such a lot in order that existence extension has lengthy been a cottage trade.
As a health care provider and student within the clinical humanities, I’ve discovered the search to enlarge the human lifespan each interesting and fraught with ethical peril.
All the way through the Nineteen Seventies and 80s, as an example, The Merv Griffin Display featured one visitor 32 instances – existence extension knowledgeable Durk Pearson, who generated extra fan mail than any visitor except for Elizabeth Taylor. In 1982, he and his spouse, Sandy Shaw, revealed the e-book “Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach,” which become a No. 1 New York Instances bestseller and bought over 2 million copies. One explicit advice concerned taking choline and nutrition B5 in an effort to scale back cognitive decline, fight hypertension and scale back the accumulation of poisonous metabolic byproducts.
Remaining 12 months, Pearson died at 82, and Shaw died in 2022 at 79.
The 1982 e-book by way of Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, ‘Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach,’ has bought hundreds of thousands of copies.
Amazon
No person can say needless to say whether or not those existence extension professionals died someday than they’d have had they eschewed many of those dietary supplements and as an alternative merely exercised and ate a balanced vitamin. However I will be able to say that they didn’t outlast many in a similar way well-off folks of their cohort.
Nonetheless, their dream of staying eternally younger is alive and nicely.
Believe tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s “Project Blueprint,” a life-extension effort that impressed the 2025 Netflix documentary “Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.” His program has integrated construction a house laboratory, taking greater than 100 capsules every day and present process blood plasma transfusions, a minimum of one in all which got here from his son.
And Johnson isn’t on my own. A few of the giant names making an investment giant greenbacks to lengthen their lives are Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Web page, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. One way comes to taking senolytics – medication that concentrate on cells that can force the getting older procedure, regardless that extra analysis is had to decide their protection and efficacy. Every other is human enlargement hormone, which has lengthy been touted as an anti-aging mechanism in advert campaigns that function remarkably are compatible older folks. (“How does this 69-year-old doctor have the body of a 30-year-old?” reads one internet advert).
Those billionaires might reason why that, as a result of their wealth, they’ve extra to reside for than strange other people. They might also percentage extra prosaic motivations, reminiscent of a terror of rising previous and loss of life.
However underlying such wants is an similarly essential moral – and, for some, religious – truth.
High quality as opposed to amount
Is it a just right factor, morally talking, to need to reside eternally? May there be facets of getting older or even dying which are each just right for the arena and just right for people?
Cicero’s “On Aging” provides some insights. In reality, the traditional Roman statesman and thinker famous that writing about it helped him to search out peace with the vexations of rising previous.
Within the textual content, Cicero outlines and responds to 4 not unusual proceedings about getting older: It takes us clear of managing our affairs, impairs physically vigor, deprives us of sensual gratifications and brings us to the verge of dying.
To the rate that getting older takes us clear of managing our affairs, Cicero asks us to consider a boat. Simplest the younger climb the masts, run back and forth at the gangways, and bail the hang. Nevertheless it is without doubt one of the older and extra skilled individuals of the group that we discover the captain who instructions the send. Rome’s excellent council was once referred to as the Senate, from the Latin for “elder,” and it’s to these wealthy in years that we glance maximum ceaselessly for knowledge.
Cicero was once willing to differentiate between amount and high quality of existence.
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As as to if getting older impairs physically vigor, Cicero claimed that power and velocity are much less associated with age than self-discipline. Many older individuals who maintain themselves are in higher form than the younger, and he provides examples of people that maintained their vigor nicely into their later years. He argued that those that stay bodily are compatible do a perfect deal to maintain their psychological powers, a perception supported by way of trendy science.
Cicero reminds readers that those similar pleasures of consuming and ingesting ceaselessly lead folks off beam. As an alternative, folks, as they age, can higher respect the pleasures of thoughts and persona. An excellent dinner turns into characterised much less by way of what’s at the plate or the beauty of a eating spouse than the standard of dialog and fellowship.
Whilst dying stays an inevitable end result of getting older, Cicero distinguishes between high quality and amount of existence. He writes that it’s higher to reside nicely than to reside lengthy, and for individuals who live nicely, dying seems as herbal as beginning. Those that need to reside eternally have forgotten their position within the cosmos, which doesn’t revolve round any unmarried individual and even species.
The ones of a extra religious bent may to find themselves attracted to the Scottish poet George MacDonald, who wrote: “Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.”
Embracing the circle of existence
What if the desires of the existence extension gurus had been discovered? Would the arena be a greater position?
Would the additional just right {that a} longer-lived Einstein may have completed be balanced and even exceeded by way of the hurt of a Stalin who remained wholesome and full of life for many years past his dying?
One day, holding indefinitely the lives of the ones now dwelling would imply much less room for individuals who don’t but exist.
Pearson and Shaw seemed on many different tv systems within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. All the way through one such section on “The Mike Douglas Show,” Pearson declared: “By the time you are 60, your immune function is perhaps one-fifth what it was when you were younger. Yet you can achieve a remarkable restoration simply by taking nutrients that you can get at a pharmacy or health food store.”
For Pearson, existence extension was once a biomedical problem, an effort extra focused on engineering the self relatively than the arena.
In spite of getting cash as existence extension gurus, Durk Pearson, proper, and Sandy Shaw didn’t outlast maximum American citizens.
But I’d argue that the actual problem in human existence isn’t to reside longer, however to assist others; including additional years will have to be noticed no longer because the objective however a byproduct of the pursuit of goodness.
Within the phrases of Susan B. Anthony: “The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball – the further I am rolled, the more I gain.”
