The hunt to increase human life is each fascinating and fraught with ethical peril

“Who needs to dwell perpetually?” Freddie Mercury mournfully asks in Queen’s 1986 music of the identical identify.

The reply: Fairly just a few individuals – a lot in order that life extension has lengthy been a cottage trade.

As a doctor and scholar within the medical humanities, I’ve discovered the search to broaden the human lifespan each fascinating and fraught with ethical peril.

In the course of the Nineteen Seventies and 80s, for instance, The Merv Griffin Present featured one visitor 32 instances – life extension knowledgeable Durk Pearson, who generated extra fan mail than any visitor besides Elizabeth Taylor. In 1982, he and his associate, Sandy Shaw, printed the e-book Life Extension: A Sensible Scientific Strategy, which grew to become a No. 1 New York Occasions bestseller and bought over 2 million copies. One particular advice concerned taking choline and vitamin B5 with the intention to cut back cognitive decline, fight hypertension and cut back the buildup of poisonous metabolic byproducts.

Final yr, Pearson died at 82, and Shaw died in 2022 at 79.

Nobody can say for certain whether or not these life extension specialists died eventually than they’d have had they eschewed many of those dietary supplements and as an alternative merely exercised and ate a balanced weight loss plan. However I can say that they didn’t live longer than many equally well-off individuals of their cohort.

Nonetheless, their dream of staying perpetually younger is alive and properly.

Take into account tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s Mission Blueprint, a life-extension effort that impressed the 2025 Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Needs to Dwell Without end. His program has included constructing a house laboratory, taking greater than 100 capsules every day and present process blood plasma transfusions, a minimum of one in every of which got here from his son.

And Johnson isn’t alone. Among the many huge names investing huge bucks to extend their lives are Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Web page, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. One method includes taking senolytics – medicine that focus on cells which will drive the growing old course of, although extra analysis is required to find out their security and efficacy. One other is human development hormone, which has lengthy been touted as an anti-aging mechanism in advert campaigns that function remarkably match older individuals. (“How does this 69-year-old physician have the physique of a 30-year-old?” reads one internet advert).

These billionaires might cause that, due to their wealth, they’ve extra to dwell for than extraordinary of us. They could additionally share extra prosaic motivations, reminiscent of a concern of rising previous and dying.

However underlying such needs is an equally vital moral – and, for some, religious – actuality.

High quality versus amount

Is it an excellent factor, morally talking, to want to dwell perpetually? Would possibly there be elements of growing old and even dying which can be each good for the world and good for people?

Cicero’s On Growing old provides some insights. In actual fact, the traditional Roman statesman and thinker famous that writing about it helped him to seek out peace with the vexations of rising previous.

Within the textual content, Cicero outlines and responds to 4 frequent complaints about growing old: It takes us away from managing our affairs, impairs bodily vigor, deprives us of sensual gratifications and brings us to the verge of dying.

To the cost that growing old takes us away from managing our affairs, Cicero asks us to think about a ship. Solely the younger climb the masts, run from side to side on the gangways, and bail the maintain. However it’s among the many older and extra skilled members of the crew that we discover the captain who instructions the ship. Rome’s supreme council was known as the Senate, from the Latin for “elder,” and it’s to these wealthy in years that we glance most frequently for knowledge.

As as to if growing old impairs bodily vigor, Cicero claimed that power and velocity are much less associated to age than self-discipline. Many older individuals who deal with themselves are in higher form than the younger, and he provides examples of people that maintained their vigor properly into their later years. He argued that those that stay bodily match do an important deal to maintain their psychological powers, a notion supported by trendy science.

Cicero reminds readers that these identical pleasures of consuming and ingesting typically lead individuals astray. As an alternative, individuals, as they age, can higher admire the pleasures of thoughts and character. A terrific dinner turns into characterised much less by what’s on the plate or the attractiveness of a eating associate than the standard of dialog and fellowship.

Whereas dying stays an inevitable consequence of growing old, Cicero distinguishes between high quality and amount of life. He writes that it’s higher to dwell properly than to dwell lengthy, and for individuals who reside properly, dying seems as pure as beginning. Those that need to dwell perpetually have forgotten their place within the cosmos, which doesn’t revolve round any single individual and even species.

These of a extra religious bent would possibly discover themselves drawn to the Scottish poet George MacDonald, who wrote: “Age isn’t all decay; it’s the ripening, the swelling of the contemporary life inside, that withers and bursts the husk.”

Embracing the circle of life

What if the goals of the life extension gurus have been realized? Would the world be a greater place?

Would the additional good {that a} longer-lived Einstein may have completed be balanced and even exceeded by the hurt of a Stalin who remained wholesome and vigorous for many years past his dying?

Sooner or later, preserving indefinitely the lives of these now residing would imply much less room for individuals who don’t but exist.

Pearson and Shaw appeared on many different tv packages within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. Throughout one such phase on “The Mike Douglas Present,” Pearson declared: “By the point you might be 60, your immune perform is maybe one-fifth what it was while you have been youthful. But you possibly can obtain a exceptional restoration just by taking vitamins you can get at a pharmacy or well being meals retailer.”

For Pearson, life extension was a biomedical problem, an effort extra centered on engineering the self quite than the world.

But I might argue that the actual problem in human life is to not dwell longer, however to assist others; including further years ought to be seen not because the purpose however a byproduct of the pursuit of goodness.

Within the phrases of Susan B. Anthony: “The older I get, the larger energy I appear to have to assist the world; I’m like a snowball – the additional I’m rolled, the extra I achieve.”

Richard Gunderman is Chancellor’s Professor of Radiology, Pediatrics, Medical Schooling, Philosophy, Liberal Arts, Philanthropy, and Medical Humanities and Well being Research at Indiana College. This text is republished from The Dialog.