Never Say Die: The Techno-Politics of Radical Life Extension

The Last Exit: Science And Immortality

The anti-aging sector can be divided into four distinct subsectors: 1) established researchers who want to make the normal lifespan of approximately eighty-five years healthier; 2) the moderate life extensionists, who hope to push the average human lifespan to one hundred and twenty-five years; 3) the radical age extensionists, led by figures such as Aubrey de Grey, who envision future lifespans of at least three hundred years; and 4) the immortalists (Stambler 2014), who see in nanotechnology, biotechnology, and/or digital technology the skeleton keys that will eventually unlock the secret of life itself. Key to the growth of the anti-aging industry is a rhetorical and scientific shift from seeing aging and death as intrinsic to the human condition to the notion that “death is a curable disease” (Istvan 2019) and thus vulnerable to advances in science and technology. This distinction is not simply semantic; rather, aging or death as a curable disease metaphor unmoors these conditions from the realms of theology and philosophy and places them squarely within an engineering framework. From this vantage point, aging becomes amenable to human ingenuity and biotechnological interventions that reverse time and deterioration. Via the systematic reverse engineering of natural processes, the hope is that we can potentially unlock the secrets of aging and thus find a way to forestall a fate that once seemed inexorable.

Synthetic biology explicitly conceptualizes biology as a subfield of engineering, but the basic idea has a long lineage in the Western tradition. Since the late nineteenth century, many scientists have sought to elucidate the mechanistic basis of life and thus render natural processes amenable to human intervention. In Artificial Parthenogenesis and Fertilization (Loeb 1913), for example, biologist and physiologist Jacques Loeb documents experiments in which he manipulated the eggs of sea urchins in vitro to develop embryonically without sperm. Throughout his career Loeb focused on the possibilities of controlling biological processes in the lab, writing to his colleague, physicist Ernst Mach, in 1890, “the idea is hovering before me that man himself can act as a creator, even in living Nature, forming it eventually according to his will. Man can at least succeed in a technology of living substance” (Pauly pp. 50-51). Professor Victor de Lorenzo’s assertion that “what you want [in biology] is to create or recreate systems that have some properties of life from engineering principles” (Briethaupt 2006, p. 21), or entrepreneur J. Craig Venter’s belief that “biology in the twenty-first century has become an information science” (Venter p. 5), represent the contemporary ascendance of a paradigm that began to take shape at least a century earlier.