Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates Page 11

  Today’s assignment: in one hundred words or less, what would you die for? (N.B.: Because of limited stock, the Joan Rivers Diamond Dust Nail Collection is off the table.)

  Nungy . . . snick . . . frup . . .

  How’s that, Daryl? Are you saying that’s not it—you’re in perfect health?

  Okay, now we get it: You’re depressed. You’ve had a bad run of it. Your stocks are tanking; your son, Daryl, Jr., is dating your sister; your wife has joined a free-love cult. You just want to say a final goodbye to the mess your life has turned into. We feel your pain.

  But before we get into some moral issues about suicide that you may not have considered, here ’s a fable that addresses some practical issues you may have overlooked:

  A schlemiel suspects his wife is cheating on him. One day he calls her at home and she answers out of breath. He plays it cool and drives home from work without her knowing. When he gets home, he sneaks up the stairs to the bedroom and busts open the door to find his wife having sex with the neighbor.

  The schlemiel goes on a tirade, screaming, yelling, crying. Finally, he pulls out a gun and puts it to his own head and says, “I can’t take this, I’m going to kill myself.”

  His wife and the neighbor just laugh.

  And the schlemiel says, “Don’t laugh, you’re next!”

  Where were we? Oh, yes, like we say, the choice is yours—that is, if you don’t mind the fact that your final act is considered to be seriously immoral by some of the greatest thinkers who have ever lived. So take a moment and listen up.

  Saint Augustine argued that suicide violates the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” He says that self-love is the gold standard of love in scripture: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. So the commandment not to kill clearly includes not killing yourself. Augustine says the Stoics’ concept of flourishing is way too narrow. We should listen, he says, to the words of the apostle Paul and wait with patience and hope for the inexpressible happiness of the hereafter.

  Saint Thomas Aquinas argues that suicide is contrary to natural law, the law of self-love, and he adds two other considerations that still resonate today in our arguments about suicide: first, suicide harms the community—we ’re guessing burial costs for starters; second, “it belongs to God alone to pronounce the sentence of death and life.” The latter, or some natural-law variation of it, is reflected in our various state laws prohibiting suicide.

  On the other hand, the British Enlightenment philosopher David Hume looked at the “community harm” argument from a secular point of view and found it unconvincing. He argued that there comes a time for many of us when our value to the community has become severely limited or when we have even become a liability to the community. “Suppose that it is no longer in my power to promote the interest of society, suppose that I am a burden to it, suppose that my life hinders some person from being much more useful to society. In such cases, my resignation of life must not only be innocent, but laudable.”5 It is arguments like this that make Hume singularly unpopular with the seniors in Sun City.

  Hume ’s German contemporary Immanuel Kant, however, saw suicide—and almost everything else—as a question of duty. Our rational will is the very source of our moral duty, he argued, so how can it ever be morally acceptable to destroy our rational will by suicide? That ’s the kind of question we’d expect in a book with a title like Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals.

  Perhaps we can shed a little light on the concept of duty with the following story:

  A woman comes home early and finds her husband in bed with her best friend, Lucy. She stares incredulously at Lucy and shouts, “Me, I have to! But you??”

  Daryl? Daryl?

  Worggle . . . flurp . . . WHEW! I finally got that chunk of Milky Way out of my molar!

  You were using a gun to pick your teeth?

  I came out to walk the dog. Why would I carry a toothpick?

  “We have no mandatory retirement age, Dave,

  but under certain conditions we tend to encourage people to die.”

  · VI ·

  Biotechnology: Stop the Presses!

  Is death passé in the new millennium?

  Is this book even necessary?

  And more importantly,

  if not, can I get my money back?

  { 12 }

  Immortality Through Not Dying

  We don’t know about you, Daryl, but we hope against hope that this whole death business is about to become a thing of the past. On this issue, we are of the same mind as Woody Allen, who famously said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

  Imagine a world in which there would be no need for reincarnation or flitting about heaven with gauzy wings. You could toss out the whole catalogue of otherworldly, post-life-on-earth destination spots. Instead, you would just continue being a human being for eternity right here in Bayonne, New Jersey.

  Among its many appeals, an infinite life span on earth offers familiarity; it ’s what you know, in fact, it ’s all you know, Daryl. You can hang on to all the stuff that has made you who you are, like your passion for the Mets and your knowledge that Guido’s is the best pizza parlor in the neighborhood. All those otherworldly options for immortality require a leap of faith and some radical transformation, not to mention a drastic change of address and wardrobe.

  You’re just playing make-believe, right?

  Not really, Daryl.

  Until recently, biological immortality only existed in childhood fantasies and science-fiction novels. But recent discoveries in cell biology and artificial intelligence have given rise to serious scientists with advanced degrees who call themselves Biological Immortalists, researchers who foresee the possibility of genetic breakthroughs like cloning and stem cell therapy that will eliminate all the non-accidental causes of death. And there are also Cryobiological Preservation Immortalists, who are putting their money on freezing us while we wait for the breakthroughs. And then there are Cyber Immortalists, who see digitization of the human nervous system as the key to immortality. These people conceive of the possibility—nay, the likelihood—of a day in the not too distant future when they and their ilk can provide you with the means for eternal life more or less as you exist right now. The mind boggles, especially if it resides in a philosopher.

  For one thing, it boggles with a whole new set of ethical problems like, Is there room for all these immortals on this planet, let alone in New Jersey? Is an infinite life span natural? Holy? Desirable? Affordable? Tedious? What are its implications for long-term bonds? For long-term relationships? Since we will have all the time in the universe, should we wait a few millennia before we get married?

  This last question raises another problem.

  Sean and Bridget had been seeing each other steadily for forty years.Then one day after a leisurely walk in the green hills of Kerry, Sean turned to Bridget and said, “You know, maybe we should get married.”

  Replied Bridget: “At our age, who’d have us?”

  As we delve into the research that scientists are doing today at major universities on clone-immortality, cryo-immortality, and cyber-immortality, some metaphysical and epistemological questions also arise. Questions like, Am I still me if I’m only a defrosted brain? If I’m made entirely out of regenerated stem cells? If I only exist on a microchip? Who’s the real me if there are four of me? Do I still need a condom for virtual sex?

  But before we inquire further into a life without ever dying, let us take a moment to ponder just how long eternity is. Again we turn to Professor Allen for some insight: “Eternity is very long, especially near the end.” Woody’s point here is that just when you think you’re nearing the end of eternity, they move the goalposts.

  Sy comes home after his mother’s funeral to try to put the place in order, and in the attic he finds an old trunk. Inside it, he discovers his father’s World War ll uniform. Sy tries it on and it’s a little tight, b
ut before taking it off, he puts his hand in the pocket and comes up with a piece of paper. It’s a shoe repair ticket for Herman’s on West Fifty-third, dated January 14, 1942. He can scarcely believe it. An unclaimed ticket almost seventy years old!

  Weeks later, Sy happens to be in the area of West Fifty-third and wanders over to see where the shoe repair was. He can’t believe his eyes; a shoe repair store is still there. He wanders in and tells the story of finding the ticket to the old man at the counter. The man says his name is Herman and he has owned the shop for seventy years. “Gimme the ticket!” barks Herman and wanders to the back of the shop.

  Sy is amazed.

  A moment later Herman shuffles back and says gruffly, “Okay, I’ve got your shoes.They’ll be ready next Tuesday.”

  HIPPOCRATISY

  From the point of view of medicine, the idea of preventing death is basically what doctors already aim for, so preventing death forever is just an extension of their Hippocratic protocol. Rare is the doc who sits you down and says, “We ’ve knocked out your arteriosclerosis, so I’m happy to say you’ll die of something else.” On the contrary, we are always reading about medicine ’s glorious goal of wiping out the major causes of death—heart disease, stroke, and cancer—with no mention of the diseases waiting in line for the top spots on the mortality hit list. Thus do doctors behave as if they are immortalists, as if they can cure every ailment you will ever get.

  HE WHO DIES WITH THE MOST BIRTHDAYS WINS

  Living a long time always seems like more fun than living a short time, primarily because it’s, well, more—more life, one of our favorite pastimes.

  But as yuppies start to hit the three-score mark, living a long time has acquired an added value: it’s an achievement, like getting a big job or selling the movie rights of your novel or seducing Angelina Jolie. As Michael Kinsley observes in his New Yorker essay about insights he has gained since being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, “Mine Is Longer than Yours,” competitive longevity is the aging Baby Boomers’ final big contest. Writes Kinsley:Of all the gifts that life and luck can bestow—money, good looks, love, power—longevity is the one that people seem least reluctant to brag about. In fact, they routinely claim it as some sort of virtue—as if living to ninety were primarily the result of hard work or prayer, rather than good genes and never getting run over by a truck.”1

  Of course, there is a built-in paradox to this competition: The last man or woman to approach the Big Finish Line has no one left in his age group to one-up.

  The comedian Steven Wright nailed the oat-bran munching Boomer set with his observation, “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink or do drugs. Because some day they’re going to be in a hospital bed, dying, and they won’t know why.”

  DOCTORS WHO NEVER SAY DIE

  THE PRIMORDIAL OOZE OOZES ON

  From the point of view of evolutionary microbiology, an infinite life span is as familiar as a walk in the primordial ooze. Our germ line, the cells that produce our eggs and sperm, originated in this ooze, and we still carry this same prime cellular material around inside us. So, at the very least, microbiologists can say there are parts of us that are immortal. What this comes down to is that we have the capacity to reproduce our germ line indefinitely, which clearly is not the same as being a single complex organism that lives eternally, but hey, it ’s a step in the right direction.

  Evolutionarily speaking, apparently where we humans went wrong is in the way we reproduce, the whole male/female, sperm/egg thing. Single-celled organisms reproduce by splitting their bodies into two biologically identical parts. After this reproductive split, two baby single cells are created. The original cell is no longer around to undergo aging, so it ’s reasonable to say that these species possess biological immortality. Not a bad trade-off for an unsexy sex life, but then again, single-celled organisms also miss out on tango lessons and Scrabble tournaments. Nonetheless, the bottom line remains that once we evolved our two-gender system for reproduction, this primordial form of immortality was lost to us. Women—you can’t live eternally with them, you can’t live eternally without them.

  THE IMMORTALITY DOCTOR IS IN

  There is a variety of immortality therapies currently out there, many with reasonably sound theoretical models, and some with promising ongoing research.

  Take stem cell replacement therapy, a form of regenerative medicine that substitutes body components generated from undifferentiated cells (stem cells) for broken or dead components in a body. Most cells have a specific function—say, skin cells or brain cells—so once they’ve taken on their particular function (differentiation), they can’t be tailored for any other function; but since stem cells are undifferentiated, they can develop into any kind of cell in the human body once they are “programmed” with the right instructions.

  Stem cell therapy has already claimed success in inserting blood-producing cells into blood-damaged patients, and there is a host of other stem cell substitution therapies in the works, like spinal cord and partial brain replacements. On the drawing boards is a “totipotent” cell, a cell that could be inserted into a body and would then reconstruct any damaged or dead body component as needed, in the nick of time.

  To get an idea of how this could result in immortality, picture a 1956 Chevy Bel Air that over time has had all of its parts replaced so that now it is exactly the same as when new except that it is not composed of any of its original material. Now imagine that you are that Bel Air.

  Feelin’ good, Daryl? Feeling like yourself ? Do you even care?

  Of course, the body regenerates cells on a regular basis, but only up to a point—death. Not so for the totipotent insert—it ’s on the job for eternity.

  Which brings us to telomerase therapy, an immortality strategy that corrects the built-in death wish of our DNA. Scientists compare telomeres to the plastic tips on shoelaces in that they prevent chromosome ends from unraveling and sticking to one another, a scenario that could mess up an organism’s genetic information and cause cancer and/or death. But there’s a major downside to this function: each time a cell divides, the telomeres get shorter, and when they get too short, the cell is kaput. It’s the ticking time-bomb inside all our chromosomes. This prompted the brainy folks at the genetic engineering company Geron to try to figure out how to put more telos in our telomeres.

  In 1997, the Geron people discovered a gene that encodes a protein called telomerase that rewinds the “aging clock” at the ends of the chromosome. To date, they have had success only in petri dishes, where the opportunity for a rich and varied life is severely constricted. The Geron folks’ guess is that in the future, telomerase therapy will stop aging indefinitely, but most scientists do not think it can reverse aging. Keep this in mind if you are seventy-five years old, like Malcolm:

  Malcolm was taking a walk when he saw a frog in the gutter. He was startled to hear the frog suddenly say to him, “Old man, if you kiss me, I’ll turn into a beautiful princess. I’ll be yours forever, and we can make mad passionate love every night.”

  Malcolm bent down and put the frog in his pocket and continued walking.

  The frog said, “Hey, I don’t think you heard me. I said if you kiss me, I’ll turn into a beautiful princess and we can make passionate love every night.”

  Malcolm said, “I heard you all right, but at my age I’d rather have a talking frog.”

  Another biotechnological strategy for prolonging life indefinitely goes by the space-age moniker nanorobotics. These are devices that range in size from 0.1 to 10 micrometers, the same scale as the body’s molecular components. Working in a way similar to stem cell replacement, nanorobots could be inserted into the body for perpetual search-and-repair missions at the molecular level. Not only is the immortality doctor in, he ’s inside you. Nanorobotic scientists believe they will have workable models in the next twenty to thirty years. If you don’t expect to live until then, not to worry—cryonic therapy is right around the corner.

  Cryoge
nics is as old as Clarence Birdseye, the Father of Frozen Foods, who hatched his multimillion-dollar idea when, as a fur trader in Labrador, he discovered that the Eskimos routinely froze fish and caribou for later consumption. Yum, said Clarence, after downing a defrosted dolphin.

  “You’re not fired, Harris.

  I’m just having you frozen till things pick up again.”

  Okay, so Birdseye didn’t invent cryonics, but the principle he discovered lives on in laboratory freezers around the world. Cryonic preservation is the process of preserving cells or whole tissues by cooling them to sub-zero temperatures, temperatures at which all biological activity, including any reaction that could lead to cell death, is arrested.

  These days it is routine to freeze sperm, human eggs, and embryos for later defrosting and use. So why not freeze entire human beings for later use, say for a future time when the diseases that once threatened a body now have a cure?

  Well, for one thing, some sticky practical problems arise from the fact that the best way to freeze a body for future reanimation is when that body is still alive. This can be a major dilemma if you are in the middle of a major financial transaction or a wild love affair at the time of your optimum freezing point. So far, the folks who have opted for full or partial (i.e., brain) freezing have chosen the chancier route of being frozen as soon after the instant of death as possible. We consider that a choice based on lack of faith.