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I think less highly of collective human common sense. (As Kay tells Jay in that brilliant philosophical work, "Men in Black," "A person is smart. People are dumb ...) And so there's no reason to suppose we will handle this knowledge wisely.

Why aren't we immortal already? If it's so easy to turn on a gene here and turn off a gene there, why do we wear out and die? It's all about reproduction, of course. Once we've produced the next generation and gotten them on their feet, what happens to us is of no relevance to the future. People who have two children and live to be 100 are less successful from an evolutionary standpoint than people who have three children and keel over in their 50s.

So the impressive genes that allow people to reach 100 on a diet of bacon and beer are not favored by natural selection. (Although if the centenarians spend all their time calling up their great-grandchildren and asking when they're going to have babies and the great-grandchildren cave in and produce more children than they otherwise would have, that might favor those genes a bit.)

Still, it seems a little odd that there are no immortal species around. Quahogs live to be 200, but they probably feel that's not nearly long enough. Perhaps species of immortal animals would always be outcompeted by species of mortal animals, since mortal species evolve and acquire exciting new bells and whistles to repel insect pests, protect against disease and fool dinosaurs into thinking you wouldn't dream of eating their eggs.

If we stop dying will our species stop evolving? Not if we keep reproducing. Not everyone thinks we need to keep evolving. Many of us feel that we are already the pinnacle of perfection and that all our species needs to do is stay as sweet as we are. Others disagree.

My friend Cynthia Heimel says she does not feel we are nearly finished evolving, and she is eagerly looking forward to an era when we have progressed to having just four toes on each foot. She says it is because little toes are no use and catch on the bed corner, but I believe she just wants to wear pointier shoes.

In the choice between living long and having kids, natural selection has always favored having kids. Now that choice will be up to us. Obviously if we choose to do both, the world will fill up with people to such an extent that we'll have to look for new planets.

We will ourselves become natural selection -- unnatural selection if you prefer. Instead of allowing the ceaseless cherry-picking of the generations to get rid of our back problems, our impetuous driving habits and that pesky fifth toe, we will do it all at once with gene therapy.

Will everyone get to live forever, or will we make decisions about how long people get to live and when they have to stop?

This is one of the reasons Hayflick thinks increasing longevity is a dreadful idea. "I defy anyone to describe a scenario in which it would be a good thing," he says.

Hayflick told the Savannah Morning News, "If indeed we had a way of extending human longevity the probability is very high that therapy would be available to the rich and powerful. I don't know how you feel about the rich and powerful, but I can think of lots of them that I would not like to see live forever." For example, he notes, "I don't think that having Adolf Hitler around for the next 500 years makes much sense."

You know Fidel Castro isn't ready to die. And while I am under the impression that I have accepted my own mortality, I must admit that I don't accept the mortality of my loved ones. It's not that I want them to be immortal, it's just that I don't want them ever to die.

The fact that we spend such a huge proportion of our health budget in the last few months of our lives is testimony to this. (As my father remarks, "You can't tell what truly expensive way of living a little longer will be discovered.")

Spending money on gene therapy will undoubtedly be more popular than the feeble unappealing ways we have now of extending life span a little. You know, boring stuff like eating right, keeping fit, signalling your lane changes.

There are some things people won't do to live longer, after all. Yes, we'll slam down melatonin, DHEA and random antioxidants by the fistful just in case they slow aging. But almost nobody has leapt on the caloric restriction bandwagon (which holds that since rats on meager diets live longer, maybe we would too, so let's not eat anything at all every other day), because it's so unpleasant.

I have also heard men complain about how unfair it is that women live longer on the average. (Some of them will glare at a lady as if she'd been sprinkling free radicals on their salads.) Yet although it has long been known that castration can extend a man's life span by an average of 14 years, guys consistently pass on the chance to even the score.

Is it any more unnatural to use gene therapy to become more or less immortal, than it is to use prolong life in other ways? After all, during most of human history most children died as infants, women couldn't effectively limit how many children they gave birth to (and were far more apt to die in childbirth), and very few of them reached old age -- yet hardly anybody objects to medical care to fight these causes of death.

But what all these changes amount to for our species is simply a movement along the spectrum from the kinds of species that have brief risky lives in which they produce as many progeny as possible -- like mice -- to the kinds of species that have longer lives during which they have fewer progeny, in whom they invest more parental care -- like elephants. These life strategies are called r selection and K selection, and there's nothing so unusual about a species becoming more or less K-selected.

But among all the variously r- and K-selected creatures in the world, one thing seems constant: Everybody dies eventually. Immortality is something different.

Then there's the matter of addressing ethical conflicts before we proceed. The track record on this is not so great. Conferences are held and panels meet and people go right ahead and do what they want. And people really really want to live. "If it becomes possible, people will do it," says Steven Austad.

There are people worrying now about the way better health care is producing an unprecedentedly large population of older people, and the effects this has on medical spending, education spending, Social Security and the GNP. Oh, and the ballot box.

Well, they haven't seen anything yet. The world will fill up a lot faster if nobody dies.

Maybe we'll make people choose between living forever and having kids. If you're going to bring more people into the world, you'll have to be willing to leave it yourself on a reasonable schedule. Conversely, if you refuse to leave the party, you can't bring crashers. Of course, this would create an interesting two-tiered world full of crabby child-haters who think they know so much because they've seen it all and breeders speaking smugly about how they're being not only natural but also more evolved.

What about natural selection? It got us this far, didn't it? If immortality is a bad idea, won't nature take care of it? It might do just that, but not in way we'll enjoy. Since natural selection is mindless and purposeless, it has no objection to dead ends and short-term successes. Eventually some species could come along which has all our excellences, plus the advantages of mortality, and it will eliminate us. Not if we can stop them first, of course, but eventually (and this is a very long run indeed) we will be out-competed. Will the new Lords of the Earth then turn to making themselves immortal? Very likely, but it won't be our problem. Mother Nature doesn't care, ahistorical, short-sighted fool that she is.

Perhaps in the far reaches of time, as one mortal species after another crushes species that have succumbed to the temptation of eternal life, a species will arise that will remain mortal, and will allow itself to change. Perhaps they will never be overthrown by another species. Perhaps they'll have a zoo, and we'll be in it, and will learn the full reality of a life sentence.
salon.com | March 30, 2000

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