Medical Science and the Pursuit of Immortality
I give you the head of CERN – Sir Blunderbus Wigins. Now there’s the look of a man who’s just won twelve billion on the lottery. Either that or someone’s finally paid the electricity bill, which, I’m told, runs to something in the region of fourteen million pounds a year.
One scientist described the cost of the CERN experiment as “peanuts.”
Well… maybe. It certainly puts Stephen Hawking’s famous $100 wager that they wouldn’t find the Higgs boson into perspective.
Talking of which, let’s consider what medical science has achieved—and, perhaps more importantly, what it promises for the future. I think the comparison with CERN is relevant.
If medical science gets its way, then three hundred years from now your great-great-great-grandfather will still be sitting at the breakfast table, slowly working his way through a bowl of Kellogg’s. (That’ll be me, hopefully.) Trust me, at some point you’re going to be thinking:
“When, oh when, is that bugger going to die?”
Will that really make for a happier society?
I’m not convinced.
The problems of an ageing population are already with us, thanks in no small part to medical science. Even a trip into town can become a hazardous experience when you’re in danger of being run over by enormous motorised wheelchairs being piloted by ageing lunatics with dementia. These people take more medication than Ozzy Osbourne, yet somehow they’re considered perfectly safe to command miniature four-wheel drives on the pavement. Add a few chromium-plated Zimmer frames into the mix and you’re taking your life into your own hands.
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Don’t get me wrong—we all grow old.
Well… actually, we don’t.
But if I’m honest, I don’t particularly feel sorry for old people. They’ve had their chance. It’s children I worry about.
Of course, I’m also a complete hypocrite.
If my hips eventually give up the ghost, I’ll probably be first in the queue for a replacement. In fact, if it hadn’t been for medical science, I wouldn’t even be here. At the age of fourteen I developed peritonitis—”the Devil’s Grip”, as it was sometimes called. A century earlier it would almost certainly have killed me.
So where’s the line?
Saving a life is one thing.
Prolonging life indefinitely is another.
This is a difficult subject, especially for me. My mother has Parkinson’s disease, and medical advances undoubtedly improve her quality of life. My only reservation is the use of animals in research, which raises difficult ethical questions. Nevertheless, in the case of Parkinson’s, medicine is not artificially extending life far beyond what nature intended—it is alleviating suffering.
Take IVF as another example.
Here we have an enormously expensive medical procedure designed to help people who, quite simply, cannot have children naturally. I defy anyone to stand at the top of Tokyo Tower—or any skyscraper overlooking one of the world’s great cities—look out across the endless sea of humanity and conclude:
“You know what this planet really needs? More people.”
When someone dies unexpectedly, we seem unable simply to accept that they died. Instead, we invent an impressive-sounding medical label. In the words of Billy Connolly:
“You might as well eat white bread. Not doing so might give you another two weeks—but you won’t get them when you’re thirty-five and enjoying yourself. You’ll get them when you’re ninety-five with tubes sticking out of every orifice.”
I recently took my daughter to see Pixar’s Wall•E. Yes, I know what you’re thinking—but the film actually made a serious point.
It isn’t difficult to imagine a future in which we’ve trashed the planet, escaped into space, grown enormously fat, and left robots to tidy up after us. Sometimes I wonder whether science is quietly helping us towards exactly that outcome.
As I’ve already said, I can’t help feeling that science is pushing us in the wrong direction, while resources are being channelled into projects that satisfy our curiosity rather than our long-term survival.
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