Free Immortality by Stephen Cave Page A

collapsed in his store in agony, and within hours was dead of a perforated stomach ulcer.
    But Herman Pauling had lived long enough to pass on his faith in the healing power of science. By the time he was twenty-nine, Linus Pauling was a full professor at the newly established California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He had an extraordinary scientific instinct that he was able to apply to one field after another, each time bringing revolutionary insights that kept him at the forefront of research. This talent first brought him a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, before he turned his attention to the less orderly realm of biology. He passionately believed that the same underlying laws applied to both disciplines—and proved this when he discovered that the fatal sickle-cell disease was caused by a tiny abnormality in a single crucial protein, a discovery that helped launch the now-booming field of molecular biology.
    Then in 1966, at the height of his reputation and when mostpeople would have been looking forward to a comfortable retirement, Pauling experienced a revelation. While giving a speech in New York City, he mentioned that he hoped to live for another fifteen or twenty years in order to witness the further developments in science and society. A few days later, he received a letter from a fellow biochemist, Irwin Stone, who had been in the audience. Stone promised Pauling that he could indeed live this long—if he would take massive doses of vitamin C. Pauling consulted the scientific literature and quickly concluded that vitamins were the compounds he—and his father before him—had been seeking, the magic molecules that could help the body ward off disease and even halt aging: the real elixirs of life.
    He launched a crusade advocating megadoses of vitamins that dominated the next twenty-five years of his long life and reshaped our understanding of medicine and nutrition. He saw it as the climax of his life’s work—applying the discoveries of science to bring health and longevity to the human race. But the rest of the scientific establishment did not share his enthusiasm for what they saw as a hippieish fad. In 1976, the editor of a respected medical journal wrote that the public was losing faith in scientists because they could no longer be relied on to present the evidence plainly, and “the most tragic example” was Linus Pauling. So when his wife was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, it was his chance to prove his critics wrong.
ENGINEERING IMMORTALITY
    T HE first of our paths to immortality—Staying Alive—is as widely pursued now as in the day of the First Emperor: the prospect of the elixir of life continues to intoxicate us. Indeed, it is at the foundation of contemporary Western society, with its faith in science and progress. In this chapter we will ask whether this powerful immortality narrative can deliver on its extravagant promise.
    We have seen that civilizations have always held out the hope ofthwarting death. Indeed, the innovations that define advanced societies really do bring improvements to the human condition, which really do enable many people to live much longer, if not yet forever. But broadly speaking, early civilizations aspired mostly to maintain the gains they had made—to defend themselves against the onslaught of the barbarians and prevent a collapse into chaos. This is reflected in the form of their immortality narratives: they looked backward to their founding fathers, such as Xu Fu or Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, who were thought already to have found the elixir. Their ambition was to maintain or rediscover past glories, not to move toward something new.
    But the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Europe, with its newfound faith in reason, changed all that. This was when the modern scientific method emerged, promising previously undreamed-of knowledge. Its followers began to hope that they might surpass the achievements of the past, that the real utopia lay not in a