Eve Herold - Beyond Human: How Cutting Edge Science is Extending Our Lives

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Meet Victor, the future of humanity. Hes 250 years old but looks and feels 30. Having suffered from heart disease in his 50s and 60s, he now has an artificial heart that gives him the strength and vigor to run marathons. His type 2 diabetes was cured a century ago by the implantation of an artificial pancreas. He lost an arm in an accident, but no one would know that he has an artificial one that obeys his every thought and is far stronger than the original. He wears a contact lens that streams information about his body and the environment to his eye and can access the Internet anytime he wants through voice commands. If it werent for the computer chips that replaced the worn-out cells of his retina, he would have become blind countless years ago. Victor isnt just healthy and fit, hes much smarter than his forebears now that his brain has been enhanced through neural implants that expanded his memory, allow him to download knowledge, and even help him make decisions. While 250 might seem like a ripe old age, Victor has little worry about dying because billions of tiny nanorobots patrol his entire body, repairing cells damaged by disease or aging, fixing DNA mistakes before they can cause any harm, and destroying cancer cells wherever they emerge.

With all the advanced medical technologies Victor has been able to take advantage of, his life has not been a bed of roses. Many of his loved ones either didnt have access to or opted out of the life-extending technologies and have passed away. He has had several careers that successively became obsolete due to advancing technology and several marriages that ended in divorce after he and his partners drifted apart after forty years or so.

His first wife, Elaine, was the love of his life. When they met in college, both were part of a movement that rejected all artificial biomedical interventions and fought for the right of individuals to live, age, and die naturally. For several decades, they bonded over their mutual dedication to the cause of natural living, and tried to raise their two children to have the same values. Then, one day, Victor unexpectedly had a massive heart attack. Having a near-death experience shook him to the core, and for several years he and Elaine both pursued every natural avenue of fending off heart disease. They exercised, ate only heart-healthy foods, and Victor took a cholesterol-lowering drug. However, his heart disease gradually worsened, and by the time he was sixty-five, he had prematurely entered end-stage heart failure. Victors heart had become grossly enlarged, and it was greatly weakened in the process. Day after day, he felt weak, dizzy, and had more and more trouble breathing. His feet and legs swelled up so much from water retention that he could barely walk. Then he could no longer sleep lying down because the fluid in his lungs made him feel like he was drowning. Being both ill and severely sleep-deprived made Victors quality of life miserable. Elaine, who was in much better health, remained completely devoted to caring for him.

Gradually it dawned on Victor that he was dying. After all the years of illness and disability, this should have come as no surprise, but he was deeply disturbed by the idea. He and Elaine had a loving marriage and had just welcomed their first grandchild, and Victors love and anticipation of seeing his granddaughter grow up was far more intense than anything he had ever imagined. Soon another grandchild was on the way, and he wanted desperately to be alive long enough to welcome and know this child. He took stock of his situation. By then, there were millions of people who had received artificial hearts and thereby been completely cured of heart disease. Although he had always thought that he did not want to live to an advanced old age, he couldnt deny that he knew more and more people who had accepted some of the radically life-extending technologies becoming available, and had achieved far greater health and vitality than he and Elaine enjoyed. He had never accepted a pacemaker or an internal defibrillator, so his heart disease had proceeded unchecked and his health was rapidly deteriorating. Soon his cardiologist could do nothing more to assist him as long as he remained stubbornly attached to the worn-out heart he was born with. When he asked his cardiologist whether he would live to see his new grandchild born, the answer was, Probably not.

His cardiologist disapproved of Victors refusal to accept an artificial heart. Artificial hearts had completely replaced biological heart transplants because they could not be rejected by the body, were widely available, and were far more durable than biological hearts. So far, the earliest artificial heart transplants had already lasted more than eighty years, and the technology was constantly improving. Still, Victor was rather set in his ways and found the idea of having his natural heart removed and replaced by a metal and plastic electronic device deeply unsettling. Then one night, he woke Elaine up in a panic, telling her that he had severe chest pains and couldnt breathe. Elaine immediately called 911, but in the meantime Victor stopped breathing.

The next thing Victor remembered, he was in the hospital emergency room with doctors, nurses, and emergency medical personnel swarming around him. They had revived him with repeated shocks from a heart defibrillator, but he felt his heart fluttering wildly and lost consciousness again. The next time he opened his eyes, his wife, son, and daughter were all gathered around him, their eyes red from crying, while his cardiologist was telling him something that he at first couldnt understand. He caught the words terminal and surgery, being spoken with great urgency. Then he focused on the faces of his adult daughter and son as they leaned over him, their faces stricken and their eyes full of tears. The thought of never seeing these beloved faces again seemed utterly impossible to accept. With a weak, silent nod of his head, he agreed to the implantation of a permanent artificial heart. While Elaine signed the release form for Victor to have surgery, an anesthesiologist quickly administered an injection into his IV, and he drifted away again.

Victors life after the surgery was remarkable. He suddenly had more energy and mental clarity than he had enjoyed in twenty years. In fact, it was only then that he realized how terribly sick he had been. The fluid in his lungs and the swelling in his body completely disappeared, and he told Elaine that he felt like an entirely new man. His long-held ideology about aging and dying naturally suddenly seemed stubborn and irrational. He noticed that even though Elaine was relieved and grateful that he was still alive, she wasnt changing her mind about her own dedication to allowing the aging process to proceed without any drastic intervention. He consoled himself with the secret belief that Elaine would change her mind when she faced her own serious health crisis. And he insisted that he still drew the line at getting one of the neural implants that so many people were hailing as a miracle cure for age-related memory problems, even Alzheimers disease. It seemed that he and Elaine still had plenty of time ahead of them to enjoy their growing family, including four grandchildren who were rapidly approaching their teen years. It was hard to believe, but soon they would be entering adulthood, getting married, and having children of their own. Victor noticed that he had more energy and vitality than Elaine, who now had several chronic health problems, but he felt sure that all she needed was a wake-up call via some health crisis to convince her that it was time to take advantage of some of the amazing new medical technologies that would rejuvenate her and drastically extend her life.