CHIP WALTER EXPLORES THE SILICON VALLEY BILLIONAIRES WHO WANT TO LIVE FOREVER
Chip Walter chronicles cutting-edge quest for immortality
Contrary to popular opinion, death is not inevitable. At least not for too much longer.
That’s the startling and perhaps disturbing conclusion author Chip Walter comes to in “Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever.”
The Pittsburgh-based science writer tracks several years of work by visionary scientists funded by the likes of Google. They’re seeking not just to help us live longer, healthier lives. They’re trying to actually end aging and thus extend human life indefinitely — or, as Mr. Walter puts it, to “cure death.”
The account unfolds mostly since 2013, when Google launched Calico, a biotech company focused on aging. The gallery of characters features Calico founder Larry Page, Google Ventures’ Bill Maris and Apple board chair Art Levinson. Science types include famed engineer and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who believes human and artificial intelligence is bound to fuse, in what he calls “the singularity”; biochemist Craig Venter, a key figure behind the Human Genome Project; and Aubrey de Grey, an eccentric Brit who pioneered the notion that aging is a disease.
If some of this material rings familiar from newsmagazine headlines, Chip Walter brings it all between two covers. He offers intriguing glimpses into his protagonists’ personal lives — some of them lost parents early or had other formative experiences with death — alongside accounts of how all that investment money was assembled. And he provides cogent explanations of the science, for instance cataloging all the ways our very cells age.
There are also entertaining passages on animal aging. Genetic researchers, for instance, have extended the lifespans of laboratory earthworms and mice. Others ponder creatures including the bowhead whale, Greenland shark and naked mole rat, none of whom seem to grow old. While the scientific challenges remain daunting, Mr. Walter concludes that advances in computing power, gene-editing technology, and more, make victory over death, to use Mr. Kurzweil’s term, “inevitable.”
“Immortality, Inc.” isn’t always easy to follow: It’s stuffed with a dizzying array of the names of people, corporations and projects, shifts in point of view, and leaps forward and backward in time. Readers might also find Mr. Walter’s writing style distracting. He does offer some nice turns of phrase. At one point, Mr. Levinson wonders whether one newfangled technology is “a big fat lamp without a genie.” And when Venter’s computer scientists blanch at a technical challenge, he looks at them “like a saddened rector who had caught the altar boys sipping the church wine.”
But often, Mr. Walter seems inspired by the antic style of Tom Wolfe (who is honored on the dedication page), and it doesn’t always suit. We get sentences like, “[N]ow the human race had its A-Team on the case and woe betide the avenging angel, death’s nemesis.” (Pardon?) Elsewhere, Mr. Walter offers, “It was one of those nights when the whole spine of the Milky Way rises up like diamond dust and you can feel the great wheel of the cosmos hold you in its galactic hand”— a festival of mixed metaphors.
But in a book like this, a bigger concern is the lack of dissenting voices. As New York Times health reporter Nicholas Bakalar wrote in 2018, “[N]o serious scientist believes in immortality.” Yet Chip Walter stakes out a spot on the technophile end of the spectrum — “Science is going to cheat death,” he writes — and the fact that critics have real doubts about this research gets scant attention.
Similarly shortchanged are worries that making people immortal might have, you know, downsides. The first named critic doesn’t appear till halfway into the book, and his concerns — such as, how would we accommodate all the extra people? — get just one page. Billions of Earth’s human denizens still struggle to get by. Is a fantastical, and fantastically expensive, effort to indefinitely prolong life for (let’s face it) the wealthy be where we should be putting our money?
Of course, such considerations won’t stop efforts to “cure death.” Still, anyone hoping to live forever ought to contend with the prospect that plenty of scientists say the climate crisis might threaten civilization within a few decades — a prospect that would cut short certain people’s planned multicentury retirement schemes.
“Immortality, Inc.” is a valuable look at this particular playing field, but Mr. Walter might have taken a harder look at the implications of the game.