Who wants to live forever?

For millennia, human civilization has been fascinated with overcoming death. Immortality, eternal youth or at least the prospect of reaching biblical age have had a strong lure for religion, art and popular beliefs. Life after death, which is, in essence, eternal life, is the one central element of nearly all religions since Ancient Egypt. If we believe the Old Testament, some of the patriarchs lived for several hundreds of years. In the medieval ages, the fountain of youth was a popular myth, often illustrated in paintings, such as Lucas Cranach’s The Fountain of Youth (Fig 1). And society today has not lost its fascination with immortality, as seen in Hollywood movies such as the Highlander films (1986–2000), The 6th Day (2000) or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and novels such as H. Rider Haggard’s She. But for the first time, modern science may provide the knowledge and tools to interfere with the ageing processes and fulfil this age-old dream. This possibility has triggered an intense debate among scientists and ethicists about the potential of anti-ageing therapies and their ethical and social consequences. Given that anti-ageing therapies could dramatically change the social fabric of modern societies, it is quite astonishing that these debates have neglected the views of the larger public. The prospect of halting or at least slowing down the body’s ageing processes is not so far-fetched. Several promising scientific developments may lead to interventions that could extend human life expectancy beyond the longest lifespan observed so far: 122 years, a record held by a French woman. Researchers are trying to use the enzyme telomerase to overcome the limit of somatic cell divisions to stop or slow cell senescence (Flanary, 2002; Hayflick, 2003). Others are searching for substances that mimic the effects of caloric restriction, which has been shown to extend the lifespan of mice by up to 30% (Ingram et al, 2004). The Human Genome Project has also provided new targets for pharmaceutical therapies that could slow ageing or prevent various agerelated diseases (Guarente, 2003). On the basis of such developments, intervening in the biological process of ageing is now discussed in the scientific literature as a real future possibility (Aaron & Schwartz, 2004; de Grey et al, 2002a). As a result, scientists, ethicists and demographers have begun to consider the probable outcomes of life extension research. Some, such as the transhumanists, believe that humans may attain immortality in the near future and that this is a goal worth pursuing (Elliot, 2003). At the opposite end of the spectrum, critics of life extension research doubt that even small increases in the maximum human lifespan would be possible (Olshansky & Carnes, 2001) and argue that we should focus our efforts on increasing average lifespan instead.