The men who want to live forever
These people might pause on their eternal journey to consider the frightening void at invincibility’s core
ould you like to live forever? Some billionaires, already invincible in every other way, have decided that they also deserve not to die. Today several biotech companies, fuelled by Silicon Valley fortunes, are devoted to “life extension” — or as some put it, to solving “the problem of death.”
It’s a cause championed by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the TED Talk darling Aubrey de Gray, Google’s billion-dollar Calico longevity lab and investment by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The National Academy of Medicine, an independent group, recently dedicated funding to “end ageing forever.”
As the longevity entrepreneur Arram Sabeti told The New Yorker: “The proposition that we can live forever is obvious. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it.” Of all the slightly creepy aspects to this trend, the strangest is the least noticed: The people publicly championing life extension are mainly men.
Not all of them, of course. In 2009, Elizabeth Blackburn received the Nobel Prize for her work on telomeres, protein caps on chromosomes that may be a key to understanding ageing. Cynthia Kenyon, the vice-president for ageing research at Calico, studied life extension long before it was cool; her former protegee, Laura Deming, now runs a venture capital fund for the cause. But these women are focused on curbing age-related pathology, a concept about as controversial as cancer research. They do not appear thirsty for the Fountain of Youth.
But now, as powerful men have begun falling like dominoes under accusations of sexual assault, that video with its young women clustered around an elderly multimillionaire has haunted me anew. As I recall my discomfort with the proclamations of longevity-driven men who hope to achieve “escape velocity,” I think of the astonishing hubris of the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, those who saw young women’s bodies as theirs for the taking. Much has been said about why we allowed such behaviour to go unchecked. What has remained unsaid, because it is so obvious, is what would make someone so shameless in the first place: These people believed they were invincible. They saw their own bodies as entirely theirs and other people’s bodies as at their disposal; apparently nothing in their lives led them to believe otherwise.Historically, this is a mistake that few women would make, because until very recently, the physical experience of being a woman entailed exactly the opposite - and not only because women have to hold their keys in self-defence while walking through parking lots at night. It’s only very recently that women have widely participated in public life, but it’s even more recently that men have been welcome, or even expected, to provide physical care for vulnerable people.
Only for a nanosecond of human history have men even slightly shared what was once exclusively a woman’s burden: the relentless daily labour of caring for another person’s body, the life-preserving work of cleaning faeces and vomit, the constant cycle of cooking and feeding and blanketing and bathing, whether for the young, the ill or the old. For nearly as long as there have been humans, being a female human has meant a daily nonoptional immersion in the fragility of human life and the endless effort required to sustain it.
Obviously not everyone who provides care for others is a saint. But engaging in that daily devotion, or even living with its expectation, has enormous potential to change a person. It forces one to constantly imagine the world from someone else’s point of view: Is he hungry? Maybe she’s tired. Is his back hurting him? What is she trying to say? The most obvious cure for today’s gender inequities is to put more women in power. But if we really hope to create an equal society, we will also need more men to care for the powerless — more women in the boardroom, but also more men at the nurses’ station and the changing table, immersed in daily physical empathy. If that sounds like an evolutionary impossibility, well, it doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it. It is surely worth at least as much investment as defeating death. Perhaps it takes the promise of immortality to inspire the self-absorbed to invest in unsexy work like Alzheimer’s research. If so, we may all one day bless the inane death-defiance as a means to a worthy end. But men who hope to live forever might pause on their eternal journey to consider the frightening void at invincibility’s core. Death is the ultimate vulnerability. It is the moment when all of us must confront exactly what so many women have known all too well: You are a body, only a body, and nothing more. Dara Horn is the author, most recently, of the novel Eternal Life.