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THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

becoming
methuselah Every year, we push death back
a little bit farther. B Y C H I P W A L T E R

T
he long habit of living,” British
thinker Thomas Browne once
wrote, “indisposeth us to dying.”
How true. But indisposed or not, we are all
genetically programmed to break this
particular habit—destined from the day
we are born to find our own, inevitable
end. No pills or procedures conjured so
far have contrived a way to deal death itself
a deathblow.
As a species, we have made some
progress at outfoxing what nature throws
at us. We fight the elements with clothing
and shelter; we’ve invented agriculture and
domesticated animals to better handle
hunger; and we’ve devised parties, singles
bars and Match.com to aid with the prob-
lem of mating. All, in their way, have loos-
ened death’s grip. Sanitation and antibi-
otics have done wonders to elongate life,
too. But still, the end refuses to be, once
and for all, ended.
For as long as we’ve been aware that
death is inescapable, we’ve also devised
philosophical and spiritual ways to
address the issue. There’s heaven, which
makes death easier to swallow by turning
it into a short transit ride we can take to a
new and improved version of the life we
were experiencing before we died in the
first place. Despite the many advantages
heaven offers, it hasn’t seemed to signifi-
illustration by Tim Lee
94 PITTSBURGH APRIL 2004

cantly diminish our collective dread of
death—a fact that renders suspect the faith
some profess.
There’s also reincarnation, though per-
sonally I never saw the advantage of com-
ing back for another round of life if it
meant remaining clueless about the first
go-around. Where’s the second chance in
that? Hindus and Buddhists imagine nir-
vana, a state of complete bliss and enlight-
enment reached after suffering through
enough reincarnations that you literally see
the light. Nirvana doesn’t so much require
a new life as a new you. There may be
something in that.
Even atheists and agnostics, who believe
the end really is, or could be, the end, can
gather up a few morsels of immortality by
invoking the family they leave behind as
living memorials. This, however, places
you in the uncomfortable position of
entrusting how you’ll be forever remem-
bered to your offspring. Keep in mind
these are the same people you spanked,
disciplined and repeatedly embarrassed
when they were teenagers.
Finally, there is the work we leave
behind, which can serve as a tribute. But
few of us bequeath bodies of work that
have the shattering effect of, say,
Shakespeare or Einstein. Much as we
would like to think otherwise, not many of
us are likely to head chapters in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
With death so severely outflanking us
like this, what are we to do?
Personally, I’m prepared to hang on as
long as my rattled brains and shriveled
shanks let me. As a card-carrying baby
boomer, I’m counting on medical break-
throughs that will amend the universal
genetic contract that reads: “The deteriora-
tion of the 100 trillion or so cells that com-
pose you is an irreversible and foregone
conclusion. Please accept this and get on
with what life you have remaining. Time is
running out.”
True, time is—but if you scan the tech-
nological horizon, my hopes for a contract
amendment turn out to be not altogether
delusional. In fact, you can make a reason-
able argument that we may, at last, have
death in our crosshairs, though we aren’t
yet able to pull the trigger. Not only that,
we may be living in just the right city for
carrying off this neat little trick.
P
ittsburgh, because it has one of the
nation’s oldest populations, has
become a kind of beta test for deal-
ing with old age and death. Demographers
usually see this as a bad thing, but with so
much of the world growing collectively
older—Europe and Asia as well as North
America—and with more than 70 million
baby boomers headed in lock-step for that
great Rolling Stones concert in the sky, get-
ting an early handle on the death problem
could be a growth business.
Maybe this is why so much work seems
to be getting done in the region that focus-
es on keeping the Grim Reaper at arm’s
length. Since death is, collectively, a little
closer in these parts, we pay closer atten-
tion to it than do folks in other places.
A joint project between Carnegie
Mellon’s Robotics Institute and the
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center,
for example, is developing robots to help
the elderly live longer on their own with-
out needing to enter an assisted-living
home. And according to Ken Gabriel, a
founding co-director of a Pittsburgh-based
nanotech initiative called the MEMS
Industry Group, MEMS (MicroElectro-
Mechanical Systems) technologies, which
will operate inside the human body at the
scale of clusters of cells, are under devel-
opment. They will monitor key internal
organs and obediently deliver reports on
how they’re doing when an electronic
wand is waved in their vicinity. Other
MEMS devices promise to deliver drugs,
hormones and biochemicals in just the
right doses at just the right time, like arti-
ficial glands tailor-made for reducing pain
or rectifying imbalances that often accom-
pany the advance of age.
Pittsburgh has also been a leader in
transplant surgery for more than a decade,
a breakthrough that has stopped death in
its tracks thousands of times. Building on
those successes, the McGowan Institute for
Regenerative Medicine is pioneering the
design of bioartificial hearts, lungs and liv-
ers: high-tech bridges to more permanent
solutions. UPMC is also developing ways
to genetically manipulate transplant tissue
to reduce the need for drugs that suppress
the immune system.
Where have these and other efforts got
us over the past 50 years? Pretty far. Today
we’re expected to live to 77. In 1950 it was
APRIL 2004 PITTSBURGH 95
 Since death is, collectively, a little
bit closer around these parts,
maybe we pay closer attention to it
than do folks in other places.
68. According to the National Center for
Health Statistics, deaths from heart disease
have dropped 40 percent since 1970, and
since 1990 cancer mortality rates have
declined 20 percent. It seems we are not
quite as mortal as we used to be. In
Western Europe and Japan, people are
doing even better.
There’s a startling pattern emerging
here—one that’s hard to reconcile with
our deeply ingrained acceptance of death.
In an upcoming book, A Short Guide to a
Long Life, futurist Ray Kurzweil holds that
current trends show that by 2015 we will
be elongating our lives by more than a
year every year. Do the math. This con-
ceivably means that a significant number
of us who are still alive today may survive
our way into immortality, or at least into
lives of long and biblical proportion. It’s
not so much that we have eliminated
death; we are just getting very good at
buying time.
New technologies, and the new medical
breakthroughs that rush in with them, are
advancing at an exponential rate. That
means we can expect to make more
progress in the next 50 years than we made
in the last 700. (We were struggling to
escape the Dark Ages 700 years ago.)
Suppose in 20 years, when you hit today’s
expected date with death (age 77), new
medical procedures will have advanced as
much as they have since 1950. Chances
are that whatever is about to do you in,
unless it is a speeding bus or an angry
spouse, will now be fixable in 2024. And if
you are repaired and gain another 10 years
in the bargain, chances are that the newer
breakthroughs made in the intervening
decade will buy you still more time.
W
hen I pass this scenario
around among friends and
family, the general reaction is,
“I don’t want to live forever.” Some, just a
spare few, say they are all for it, but most
say, contrary to the advice of poet Dylan
96 PITTSBURGH APRIL 2004
Thomas, that they actually do plan to “go
gentle into that good night.” (We’ll see.)
The main argument for not living too
long is the feeble factor. Who wants to
reach old age and then spend the next 100
years in elderly care facilities drooling on
him- or herself, dependent on Depends,
trying to recall the next sentence he or she
wants to say?
I’m not a big fan of this variety of long
life either. But let us suppose that the
future version of old age is not the enfee-
bled, brittle variety we mostly see around
us. Suppose that we could count on being
vital, sharp, even strong in our dotage?
Trends already indicate this is starting to
happen. Statistics based on the federal
government’s Program of All-inclusive
Care for the Elderly show that the number
of people over the age of 55 with chronic
disabilities that require help walking or
getting dressed has dropped 6 percent in
the last 20 years. Add in drugs and proce-
dures that reduce arthritic pain, enhance
sexual performance, retract wrinkles and
improve eyesight, and you begin to see
that old age doesn’t have to be a decrepit
march into weakness, isolation and bad
daytime television.
You can also argue that the current crop
of medical miracles (often, admittedly, not
quite as miraculous as advertised) is really
just a warm-up for the truly powerful vari-
eties on the horizon. The McGowan
Center’s explorations today of bioartificial
organs are crude precursors to the human-
made, molecularly assembled biomachines
that will some day aid your heart or pump
your testosterone just as effectively as the
natural versions.
Nanotechnologies 20 years down the
road will very likely be capable of cleaning
out the plaque in your arteries or hunting
down and destroying cancer cells one mol-
ecule at a time. The titanium mechanical
prostheses that currently (and painfully)
replace joints will themselves be replaced
by bioengineered polymers that are inject-
ed into a pained limb and then grow natu-
rally to replace damaged tissue. Genetic
therapies will eliminate or treat diseases
like sickle-cell anemia, schizophrenia or
cystic fibrosis that currently wipe out or
debilitate millions. They may even make it
possible to grow our own replacement
organs so that we can have them on hand
when the original gives out.
The really big breakthrough, however,
will come when scientists finally track
down the nastiest disease of all: old age
itself. There is no clear reason why cells
begin to misfire with age to create less-
than-perfect replacements for themselves.
They just do. It may be genetically pro-
grammed; it may be thanks to roaming
bands of oxygen molecules called free rad-
icals that tear apart the invisible chains of
matter within us atom by atom. But as we
drill down into these invisible worlds,
we’re finding ways to increasingly
rearrange things to our satisfaction. Soon
enough, we may manage to refine the
work to the point at which we can not
only slow or halt the inevitable deteriora-
tion, but also molecularly reverse it so that
no matter how many years you spend on
earth, you can pass them feeling as you did
at age 35. You will be handed, in other
words, a new you.
So maybe Hindus, Buddhists and rein-
carnationists can say they had it right all
along—except that with this second
chance, we’ll be aware that it IS a second
chance. Or will we finally have created
heaven on earth? That’s debatable. What,
after all, will we do with all of us who refuse
to die? Florida is only so big. Will our own
longer lives allow us to save the 3 million
children who die each year from starvation,
or eliminate war, greed and poverty?
In a strange way, maybe. I believe the
accrued wisdom that piles up with our
lengthened lives will help. So much of it
currently goes out the door with death,
locked in the person who accumulated it.
How much better off would we be if
Leonardo and Shakespeare, Einstein and
Confucius had lived even another 50
years? I suspect that by combining our
newfound banks of human wisdom with
ever newer innovations, we’ll get better at
solving the looming, ugly global problems
that lie ahead. Call me an optimist, but I
think history, so far, is with me on this.
After all, we are all still here to hope,
aren’t we?

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