First, here’s a little bit about her…
Dr. Schaub earned her bachelor’s degree with highest honors from Kenyon College in 1981. Her master’s degree and doctorate are from the University of Chicago. Prior to entering academe she was assistant editor of The National Interest magazine in Washington, D.C.
She is a member of the American Political Science Association, the Society for Greek Political Thought, The Montesquieu Society, and is the author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters”.
She is also a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and is currently participating in the Cato Institute’s dialogue, “Do We Need Death? The Consequences Of Radical Life Extension“. Let’s dive right in…
So, to anyone interested in these issues, I strongly recommend Star Trek, the original series, of course, not any of the second-rate sequels…
you might expect that the show would be gung-ho for the conquest of nature, including pushing the envelope of our human nature. In fact, however, episodes of Star Trek repeatedly confirm the needfulness of human limitations…
Many episodes of the show dealt with issues of mortality and immortality. Let me mention just two, an episode entitled “Miri” (a name intentionally reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Miranda who delivers the famous line “O brave new world that has such people in’t!”) and an episode entitled “Requiem for Methuselah”…
In the first episode…the crew happens upon the results of a Life Prolongation Project that went disastrously awry…All the adults on the planet are dead…The planet is populated entirely by children, who are hundreds of years old…As a result of the Life Prolongation Project, they age one month for every one hundred years of real time, until reaching puberty at which point the virus causes them to age rapidly and horribly.
The show raises some important considerations…Perhaps most fascinatingly, the episode is premised on the connection between mortality and fertility-a connection highlighted by the Council’s report. Apparently, in the research conducted thus far, the most common side-effect of age retardation is sterility or reduced fertility. It seems as if, in pursuing an ageless body, the balance between the individual and the species is altered.
When we choose vastly longer life for the individual, the propagation of the species is sacrificed…In a sense, the virus is the internal truth of their project, for the virus makes impossible the succession of the generations. Fertility brings with it an immediate sentence of death…Without any power of regeneration, this society of perennial youngsters is slowly dying.
Actually, that turns out not to be the case.
It all depends on which intervention strategy you use, and how you use it. Caloric restiction for instance, has been known to shut down fertility, yet it also preserves it. Mice that reached the equivalent of 80 human years of age were still sexually active, and when ad libitum feeding was restored, were still capable of reproducing.
As well, I believe Dr. Kenyon’s researches have turned up some new genetic modifications that have little or no effect on her worms fertility. A ten percent reduction in sex drive in return for a doubled or tripled lifespan? Not really a problem.
Best for last. The Case Western supermice were not only stronger, hungrier, longer lived, and capable of greater endurance and activity than everyday mice, they were also more aggressive.
It was evident from the beginning that these mice were very different from average mice. Hakimi commented, “From a very early age, the PEPCK-Cmus mice ran continuously in their cages.” She said she could identify which mice were from this new line by simply watching their level of activity in their home cage. Animal behavior studies later demonstrated that the PEPCK-Cmus mice are seven times more active in their home cages than controls; in addition, the mice were also markedly more aggressive.
“The enhanced level of activity noted in the PEPCK-Cmus mice extends well beyond two years of age; this is considered old-age for mice,” the researchers said.
Perhaps we should call them the Khan Noonien Singh mice. Now, back to our sampler…
The other episode, “Requiem for Methusaleh,” examines another sort of immortality, lest we think that perpetual maturity would be better than perpetual youth. The Enterprise encounters Flint, a 6000 year old man…He was born in 3834 BC, inexplicably endowed with the capacity for instant tissue regeneration. He has lived a thousand different lives…Over the centuries, he has amassed wealth and knowledge. And yet, he is now as cold and unyielding as his name, Flint.
He is quite prepared to kill the whole crew of the Enterprise in order to protect his privacy…
Actually, he was prepared to not kill them. Here’s an excerpt from the episode itself…
“You’d wipe out four hundred lives?”
“I have seen a hundred billion fall! I know death better than any man — I have tossed enemies into his grasp! And I know mercy; your crew is not dead, but suspended.”
“Worse than dead! Restore them; restore my ship!”
“In time; a thousand, two thousand years. You will know the future, Captain Kirk.”
Really folks, I can’t stress this enough. It always pays to check your primary sources.
By the way, this episode of Star Trek was written by Jerome Bixby. Perhaps you remember the Twilight Zone episode ” It’s A Good Life“? He wrote the short story it’s based upon, submitted here, for your approval.
He died, prematurely in my opinion, just a few years ago, and a project that was dear to him has just been released on DVD. It’s called “The Man From Earth“, and it explores many of the same themes as “Requiem for Methuselah”, albeit from a rather different perspective.
Experientially, it views very much like an extended “Twilight Zone” episode, depending on lots and lots of dialogue in a one room setting to carry the show. Sorry kids, no special effects here! To tell the truth, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. That’s because I’m so sentimental. “Woofie!”
Perhaps Dr. Schaub should consider adding it to her Netflix list…
His longevity has rendered him misanthropic…In the end, Flint learns that in leaving Earth’s atmosphere, his immortality has been compromised. From now on he will live out a natural lifespan. This knowledge of his mortality immediately improves his character, as he resolves to devote the remainder of his now precious days to helping his fellow man.
Again, it seems that a major point is being missed. Flint began his many lives as a Sumerian soldier. The 23rd century version that Kirk and Spock deal with is cut from immeasurably finer cloth. He has become a scholar, an inventor, a cultured man who is now capable of sympathy, and of being shamed. The memory of Contantinople during the plague years can still can horrify him, a thousand years on.
Had he only lived his “first” life, he would have died, as the show itself states, “a bully…and a fool.”
My years watching Star Trek have left me receptive to the view that mortality is, if not precisely a good thing, then at least the necessary foundation of other very good things, and that there is something misguided about the attempt to overcome mortality. Still, one can’t help but wonder “what if…?”
Knowing that Mr. Kass has recently published a book on Genesis, I have just one question. We are told in Genesis that the earliest generations of men, through Noah, had lifespans closer to a millenium than a century. We also know that things ended rather badly for them. While Star Trek’s “Methuselah” reforms, the Biblical Methuselah was done away with in the Flood.
Would greater longevity for modern man result in the same incorrigibility?
Or do we have more resources now-psychological, political, religious-for dealing with the consequences of longer life?
Antediluvian man was unfamiliar with death. Perhaps our sense of mortality is sufficiently well-established to allow us to delay the actual blow. So long as we still die, and we know we still die, no matter how far in the future that date is, won’t we still have the experience the poet speaks of: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”?
And if so, if time still presses us, won’t the salutary human responses to death perdure?
Wouldn’t even long-lived men walk the now well-worn paths of transcendence: procreation and poetry, philosophy and faith?
Since the quest for immortality will never be satisfied through an ageless body, won’t human beings still seek participation in the eternal?
I tinkered a bit with the page layout to emphasize the reliance on questions. I hope nobody minds.True to form, many are asked but none are answered.
Age retardation is already being pursued with quite remarkable results in animals. Through genetic manipulations, researchers have achieved a sixfold increase in the life span of worms. Genetic manipulations coupled with caloric reduction have produced a 75 percent increase in the life span of mice.
So now would be the time, before a dramatically extended human life span is on the horizon, to conduct some thought experiments aimed at ascertaining whether longer life holds promise or peril for us.
Why? We’re going to do it anyway.
The report does this by speculating about possible transformations in our outlook on life and death, our level of commitment and aspiration, and our familial and societal relations. It struck me while reading the report that science fiction has always been a good source of these sorts of thought experiments, and perhaps also that science fiction could help informing the sort of public opinion that will be necessary to stave off some of these developments.
Emphasis mine. What does “stave off” mean in this context? To slow down? To stop? It seems to me that either course would condemn many people to needlessly premature deaths. Is this a desirable goal? More to the point, is it even achievable? I think not.
I believe that wishful thinking is merging with hubris here, and that clarity of thought is being crushed to death beneath their mighty hams.
But what the heck do I know?
Here’s some more graceful poeticism/ tortured metaphore from our eminent guest scholar…
On the cover of Human Cloning and Human Dignity: The Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics is the image of a fingerprint. It’s an inspired choice, for the fingerprint, as the Council’s Chairman, Leon Kass, explains in the Foreword, “has rich biological and moral significance.” The fingerprint is at once emblematic of our common humanity and our individual uniqueness… As Kass points out, fingerprints are the marks left by our grasp on things–a grasp that is sometimes illicit.
This is why the police know as much about fingerprints as scientists do. And it is why the decisions to be made about cloning are properly political decisions. It belongs to citizens and legislators to police the bounds of the human grasp…
Again, emphasis mine.
Let me suggest another metaphoric image that comes to mind while reading the Report: not the fingerprint but the navel, and especially the exercise referred to as “contemplating your navel.”
I hope the readers will forgive me while I indulge in a practice which is disreputable at best. I refer of course to the act of quoting one’s own self, and approvingly, no less.
Perhaps Ms. Schaub could find something definitive in Leviticus, or even The Omega Glory, proscribing such an action. Regardless, I shall press on, since the words are as relevant today as when I first spewed them, squid-like, onto these phosphor-dot pages.
Fingerprints. Bellybuttons. These people could find equal significance in just about anything. Color me unimpressed. I could say much the same things about a bookcase, with equally little meaning. In fact, just for the hell of it I think I will…
The vertical members betoken the male, upright societal principles, providing overall structure and a firmly clasping support to the horizontal female elements, or shelves. Encouched upon these uplifting yet supportive planes of well-finished wood (a material itself starkly revealing of the organic and therefore ultimately transient nature of humanly acquired knowledge and its origins) we find the ontological reasons for this embodied integral unity, the books themselves.
Yet I am not sure of these books. I just don’t know if they (if such can be said to constitute a they) can be said to articulate a reason in and of themselves.
Nestled warm and snug (much like eggs in a nurturing ovary, themselves symbols rich with meaning) upon their shelves, they are revealed as deeper symbols of humanity, or more accurately, humanity’s focused volition, or more accurately yet, of volition itself, which leads me to a sober meditation upon why I didn’t just say that to begin with.
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It’s a gift. I can spin this stuff out by the yard, without even thinking about it, which is perhaps why I hold it in such low esteem. Want another? Sure you do. Just give me a minute here…
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The mystery of the vacuum bottle is concealed within a smoothly reflective shell, giving nothing to the outside observer by giving back everything. Concealed within this cool paradox is the yet more paradoxical core of hot dark nutriment.
Former life pressed into the service of current life, death enabling growth, it waits decently hidden, behind a curtain-wall of mirrored glass, which is itself encircled and protected by an aegis of tough sheet metal, perhaps with a decorative plaid pattern.
Such a pattern harkens back to older days and ways, when pastoral peoples wove their own garments and slaughtered their own provender, thus remaining mindful of nature’s given order. When one reflects upon the ancient Greek root word (one need merely think of Thermopylae, the “Hot Gates”, where the oiled and glistening youths of Sparta formed a muscular, nude bulwark against swathed Persian aggressors), one sees the rooted wisdom of the inventors.
They named their contrivance for the essential quality of that which is carried within it. Therm. Thermo. Thermos. There is a satisfying fittingness to it. And yet, a thermos can also keep things cool…
There now. Don’t we all feel more thoughtful?