Science between Fringe and Mainstream
by Michael Rose
I. Among the Atlanta Immortalists
During November, 2005, I went to two conferences that were such complete contrasts that they provoked the following question: What are the roles of fringe and mainstream science in the advance of knowledge?
In Atlanta I went to the first conference put on by the Immortality Institute, the group that recently brought out the book The Scientific Conquest of Death, to which I contributed the opening article, "Biological Immortality." I was there in Atlanta's Georgia Tech Conference Center to supply the color slides to back up my black-and-white prose. You can catch up on the conference on the Immortality Institute's web site: ImmInst.org.
The day was organized into three parts. In the morning we got the uploaders, the Singularity fans, who want to achieve immortality by having the contents of their brains copied onto the internet. Greg Benford is fond of pointing out that these people obviously don't know the difference between a photocopy and an original document, but one might more charitably view their interest in becoming electronically immortal as a cross between the old ambition for literary immortality and the commonplace desire to leave biological progeny. Thus on the internet the new cybernauts would be producing transduced clones of their minds. Benford will be posting something on the Singularity on this web site later. This isn't a prospect that inspires me personally, which led to an interesting confrontation later in the meeting, as you will see.
In the early afternoon, we were treated to a cryonics festival, which commingled hope, technology, and life insurance pitches. Benford and I have already discussed this endeavor in our Amazon Short, "Back from the Freezer?" We both have sympathy for this project, but some skepticism about present-day cryonic technology. However, I remain on the fence as to whether or not I would be willing to be frozen. I am not an Alcor member, but my graduate student Molly Burke hopes to make cryonics technologically feasible. So we'll see.
The last third of the day was given over to a trio of speakers made up of myself, Chris Heward of the Kronos clinic, and the inimitable Aubrey de Grey. I was up first, and I presented my talk "Biological Immortality," which I will be posting here as a PowerPoint presentation. Chris Heward came next. He and Kronos are in the day-to-day business of helping people "age healthily," the same idea as Andrew Weil presents in his book Healthy Aging. Weil is generally unenthusiastic about living longer as a goal in itself, while Heward is in favor. They both recommend supplements, but they are hardly snake-oil merchants.
The real star of our session was of course Aubrey de Grey. This is a man with a story and a passion. In his early 40s, Aubrey is a perfect representative of fringe science, about as good as the stuff ever gets. A computer science PhD from Cambridge, he has never published a laboratory experiment or been employed as a regular faculty member. Yet he manages a fruit fly database for the University of Cambridge and is the editor of the journal Rejuvenation Research, a respectable if not quite dominant journal in the aging field. Aubrey is married to Adelaide Carpenter, a mainstream Drosophila geneticist who gave up a tenured faculty position at the University of Calfornia to work at the University of Cambridge as a laboratory technician. There is a great love story here, but I'm afraid I don't know the details. I do know that Adelaide is significantly older than Aubrey, without a veneer of American-engineered youth. She also smokes, has grey hair, and lacks some teeth. For his part, Aubrey looks like a Warner Brothers cartoon hillbilly, or a more hirsute version of Sir Richard Francis Burton if you prefer, extravagant russet hair bursting from every part of his head, rake thin, with an Oxbridge drawl that becomes a stutter when he is agitated. Adelaide and Aubrey have a marriage of minds to rival the heyday of Bloomsbury, with all the idealism and impracticality that you might imagine of people whose lives are unfettered by children or financial ambition.
In short, Aubrey is a perfectly cast fringe scientist, a delight for journalists and satirists. But he is also utterly brilliant, courageous, and cagey. He has marched into the field of aging research and scorned the Pharisaical professors and NIH administrators for their neglect of the mission to postpone human aging. But Aubrey goes well beyond denouncing them for sloth and careerism. He has proposed that their key mistake has been to insist on working out all the details of aging before doing anything about it. Instead, he has proposed that we should take an engineering approach, and simply repair any damage caused by aging, whether we fully understand its causes or not. With this strategy, Aubrey repeatedly declaims, people who are now under the age of 50 might live effectively forever, subject to the occasional fatal mischance.
Needless to say, Aubrey's vision is like red meat to baying hounds for a crowd of immortalists, people who have personally committed themselves to living forever. At meetings like the one in Atlanta, Aubrey only needs to walk on stage to earn a round of enthusiastic applause. He is their standard-bearer, and they love him.
After Aubrey's typically inspiring and appropriately climactic speech, there was a question-and-answer session for our panel, Aubrey, Chris, and myself. Of course some of our interlocutors fawned all over Aubrey. There was also a fellow who rambled on for some minutes about secret or suppressed, I couldn't tell which, experiments before being told to ask a question or surrender the microphone, much as one would expect at a fringe science meeting.
I was a bit surprised when I was publicly upbraided by a Singularity speaker, who held me to task for not acknowledging that any technology that kept us in our fleshly incarnations longer was only a bridge to a future in which we would all become electronic immortals. I was reminded of the disapproval that I have been dealt by Christian theologians, for whom our sojurn on Earth is only a preparation for our immortal life in Heaven. [See the first chapter, "The Sphinx and the Rabbi," from my book The Long Tomorrow.]
My reply to this well-intentioned scolding was polite but, I hope, sharply worded. I see no societal necessity to progress from anti-aging to electronic immortalism. That has to be up to the individual. We might not all be willing to join them among the servers and fiber optics of their brave new world.
II. Supplicants to the National Academy
What could be more mainstream than the National Academies of Science, comprised of the National Academy of Science, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Academy of Engineering? Just four days after leaving Atlanta, I went to a meeting put on jointly by the Keck Futures Initiative (henceforth "KFI") and the National Academies (henceforth "NAS") at the Beckman Center of the NAS, in Irvine, California, just on the margin of the University of California campus where Benford and I work. One had to apply to be granted the privilege of attending the meeting. These NASKFI meetings are chaired by NAS members only, and invitations to speak are extremely selective. One can't help feeling that the chosen speakers who were not already NAS members were under consideration for such elevation, but that is only an impression. The membership of the NAS is self-sustaining and perhaps even more secretive than that other Academy which resides just 50 miles north of Irvine, the Academy that gets all the attention from the media. Certainly our speakers were outstanding, each giving definitive talks about their respective fields. I am of course narrowed by my occupation, but one couldn't help feeling that the national discourse would be greatly improved if the ideas and opinions of NAS members were given half the attention devoted to the inanities uttered by members of the Hollywood Academy.
Our Veterans Day weekend deliberations concerned the potential of genomics to help us deal with infectious disease. Nothing as important as an Oscar campaign, the breathless anticipation of which Nominated Actor in a Leading Role put on the best display of noble suffering according to a plurality of Academy voters. Only the future prospects of the AIDS epidemic, the development of countermeasures to deal with an imminent crossover of a deadly influenza from bird to human, the effective diagnosis and treatment of malaria, the contagious disease that kills more people in Africa and south Asia than starvation or civil war.
The deliberations of the NASKFI meeting were confidential, and I won't break that confidence. But the overall sweep of the meeting was nonetheless bracing. Here was a procession of extremely fine minds marshalling the latest technologies in the service of the suffering masses of the world. Sitting there with our laptops, the information rolled by on PowerPoints projected on the auditorium screen before us. The sound of fingernails clicking against keyboards reminded me of rosaries rattling in the pews of great cathedrals. Has medicine replaced religion as the great arbiter of life and death? I think it has in fact, though not yet in the minds of the many Americans who still pray instead of reading WebMD when they get sick.
III. Scientific Revolutions from Fringe to Mainstream
The transition from the Atlanta conclave to the NASKFI meeting was a vertiginous experience. First there was Aubrey de Grey, all fire and charisma, and then there were the NAS paragons, all sleek and self-confident. I spoke to both meetings, though only as a group rapporteur in Irvine. I was not speaking on my own behalf there.
I certainly do not find myself at home in either setting. Fringe science is based more on hope than experimental demonstration. Its typical theories are most often in the spirit of gestures rather than forced marches of reason. Mainstream science is based on consensus and received wisdom, the art of the soluble, if not the complacency of the already solved. Neither inspires me.
My taste leans more toward the moment of scientific revolution, when the radical enters the temple of established doctrine and slaughters the old dogmas. One thinks of the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 or Einstein's miracle year, 1905, and its string of epochal scientific articles. Those are moments of revolutionary science on a grand scale, when fringe science struck against major scientific orthodoxies.
But there are many smaller moments in science that have the same qualities. One thinks of the period from 1977 to 1983, when the indisputable demonstration of the existence of transposable elements (genes that hop around) destroyed the traditional model of the genome as an inert library of genetic information. Those were heady times. Audiences at mainstream scientific meetings interrupted speakers with spontaneous applause. But before that upheaval in the opinions of mainstream biologists, the idea of movable genetic elements was heresy. The main proponent of the idea was Barbara McClintock, an isolated figure within the academic establishment. Hers was a lonely voice arguing that all was not as it seemed in genetics. She had found that genetic elements in her corn plants were doing unnatural things in violation of Mendel's Laws of Inheritance. She would win a 1983 Nobel Prize, and her ideas would be enshrined as part of mainstream biology. Yet for decades her work was regarded as fringe science.
Also on a smaller scale, the work I have done has repeatedly migrated from the fringe to the mainstream, at least in terms of how it has been viewed by other scientists. This is not because I have become less radical over time. If anything, my present views on such scientific topics as aging or sex or human evolution are more extreme now than they were before. [Work in each area is surveyed in the abundantly illustrated Evolution and Ecology of the Organism, by Larry Mueller and myself.] The mainstream has moved toward me.
Louis Pasteur was one of most important medical scientists of all time, despite being only a lowly PhD. His work spearheaded the introduction of microbiology into medical practice, paving the way for the creation of modern scientific medicine. When Pasteur was born in 1822, bacterial diseases raged uncontrolled. For example, peritonitis killed Charles Darwin's mother when he was still a young child, while his physician father Robert looked on helplessly. As a result of Pasteur's zeal, antiseptic procedures were introduced to medical practice. It is more than notable that the physicians of Pasteur's time commonly resisted his efforts. It was both characteristic and damnable. Lives were lost while mainstream scientists and physicians obstructed and prevaricated.
So what will be Aubrey de Grey's fate? Will mainstream gerontology move toward him, and embrace his strategies for the control of human aging? Or is he doomed to be forever regarded as a crank who harasses the flank of legitimate science, his reputation dwindling to a small ember? The battle-lines have been drawn and Aubrey is now being systematically attacked by the aging science establishment, in journals and at meetings. It will be interesting to watch his story unfold, to find out how it ends for him and for all of us.
