The quest to extend human life is not new – it's fraught with moral peril

Independent

24-02-2025

'Who wants to live forever?' Freddie Mercury mournfully asks in Queen's 1986 song of the same name.
The answer: Quite a few people – so much so that life extension has long been a cottage industry.
As a physician and scholar in the medical humanities, I've found the quest to expand the human lifespan both fascinating and fraught with moral peril.
During the 1970s and 80s, for example, The Merv Griffin Show featured one guest 32 times – life extension expert Durk Pearson, who generated more fan mail than any guest except Elizabeth Taylor. In 1982, he and his partner, Sandy Shaw, published the book 'Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach,' which became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and sold over 2 million copies. One specific recommendation involved taking choline and vitamin B5 in order to reduce cognitive decline, combat high blood pressure and reduce the buildup of toxic metabolic byproducts.
Last year, Pearson died at 82, and Shaw died in 2022 at 79.
No one can say for sure whether these life extension experts died sooner or later than they would have had they eschewed many of these supplements and instead simply exercised and ate a balanced diet. But I can say that they did not live much longer than many similarly well-off people in their cohort.
Still, their dream of staying forever young is alive and well.
Consider tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson's 'Project Blueprint,' a life-extension effort that inspired the 2025 Netflix documentary 'Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.' His program has included building a home laboratory, taking more than 100 pills each day and undergoing blood plasma transfusions, at least one of which came from his son.
And Johnson is not alone. Among the big names investing big bucks to prolong their lives are Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page, and Oracle's Larry Ellison. One approach involves taking senolytics – drugs that target cells that may drive the aging process, though more research is needed to determine their safety and efficacy. Another is human growth hormone, which has long been touted as an anti-aging mechanism in ad campaigns that feature remarkably fit older people. ('How does this 69-year-old doctor have the body of a 30-year-old?' reads one web ad).
These billionaires may reason that, because of their wealth, they have more to live for than ordinary folks. They may also share more prosaic motivations, such as a fear of growing old and dying.
But underlying such desires is an equally important ethical – and, for some, spiritual – reality.
Is it a good thing, morally speaking, to wish to live forever? Might there be aspects of aging and even death that are both good for the world and good for individuals?
Cicero's 'On Aging' offers some insights. In fact, the ancient Roman statesman and philosopher noted that writing about it helped him to find peace with the vexations of growing old.
In the text, Cicero outlines and responds to four common complaints about aging: It takes us away from managing our affairs, impairs bodily vigor, deprives us of sensual gratifications and brings us to the verge of death.
To the charge that aging takes us away from managing our affairs, Cicero asks us to imagine a ship. Only the young climb the masts, run to and fro on the gangways, and bail the hold. But it is among the older and more experienced members of the crew that we find the captain who commands the ship. Rome's supreme council was called the Senate, from the Latin for 'elder,' and it is to those rich in years that we look most often for wisdom.
As to whether aging impairs bodily vigor, Cicero claimed that strength and speed are less related to age than discipline. Many older people who take care of themselves are in better shape than the young, and he gives examples of people who maintained their vigor well into their later years. He argued that those who remain physically fit do a great deal to sustain their mental powers, a notion supported by modern science.
Cicero reminds readers that these same pleasures of eating and drinking often lead people astray. Instead, people, as they age, can better appreciate the pleasures of mind and character. A great dinner becomes characterized less by what's on the plate or the attractiveness of a dining partner than the quality of conversation and fellowship.
While death remains an inevitable consequence of aging, Cicero distinguishes between quality and quantity of life. He writes that it is better to live well than to live long, and for those who are living well, death appears as natural as birth. Those who want to live forever have forgotten their place in the cosmos, which does not revolve around any single person or even species.
Those of a more spiritual bent might find themselves drawn to the Scottish poet George MacDonald, who wrote: 'Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.'
What if the dreams of the life extension gurus were realized? Would the world be a better place?
Would the extra good that a longer-lived Einstein could have accomplished be balanced or even exceeded by the harm of a Stalin who remained healthy and vigorous for decades beyond his death?
At some point, preserving indefinitely the lives of those now living would mean less room for those who do not yet exist.
Pearson and Shaw appeared on many other television programs in the 1970s and 1980s. During one such segment on 'The Mike Douglas Show,' Pearson declared: 'By the time you are 60, your immune function is perhaps one-fifth what it was when you were younger. Yet you can achieve a remarkable restoration simply by taking nutrients that you can get at a pharmacy or health food store.'
For Pearson, life extension was a biomedical challenge, an effort more centered on engineering the self rather than the world.
Yet I would argue that the real challenge in human life is not to live longer, but to help others; adding extra years should be seen not as the goal but a byproduct of the pursuit of goodness.
In the words of Susan B. Anthony: 'The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball – the further I am rolled, the more I gain.'