But there is never going to be such a thing as an immortal man (I am talking now about the body, not the soul, about which I have no opinion). Everything wears out, without exception — and in challenging the degenerative diseases, medical research may well find itself attempting to give aspirin to the second law of thermodynamics.
I hope nobody will interpret this as pessimism, for I remain perfectly prepared to predict for men a possible lifetime of several thousand years. (In fact, I’ve written four novels from this assumption.) It seems to me that several trends in current research, now being actively prosecuted by both industry and government, point in this direction. They are:
(1) Permanent protection against all forms of infectious disease — and possibly against some forms of non-infectious ones, such as cancer — may be achievable with a drug which provokes the body into generating a non-specific immunity, This is necessary for true longevity because it obviates the possibility that a man’s life might hang from the thread of the availability of some specific anti-infective drug at some specific time. Several such drugs are already known; their common drawback is that they are highly toxic in themselves. It is only a matter of time before that drawback is eliminated.
(2) It may also be possible to eliminate atherosclerosis, a circulatory disease which causes almost 90 per cent of all cardiovascular deaths… and these are the most numerous of all the kinds of death today. Present research is aimed at interrupting the synthesis of a fatty substance called cholesterol in the body — a much more promising approach than eliminating it from the diet, since only about 25 per cent of serum cholesterol can be traced to what you eat. Again, there is a drug which does interrupt this internal synthesis, but it has drastic side-effects; and yet again, these can surely be eliminated sooner or later.
Given the success of both these approaches, there would be very little left to threaten a true longevity but accident. They are real approaches and the pharmaceutical industry, among others, is hotly at work on them.
In the meantime, the vast multiplication of curative agents which has occurred in our century has brought to the fore another problem which can only be touched upon here: the population explosion, which is the result of our having given our fellow men death control without the corresponding check of birth control. What is needed here, as everyone is now aware, is a cheap, simple oral contraceptive, inoffensive to anyone’s religious beliefs, which can be taken safely without a prescription and preferably at any time. The two oral contraceptives that are available now have just about every possible imaginable drawback: they require prescriptions, they are very expensive, they must be taken upon a regular schedule, they produce rebound pregnancy if they are neglected, and furthermore they must be taken by women, who probably won’t be able to find them in their pocketbooks much of the time. What is needed is something as simple as aspirin, which can be taken at need, by men. I think it will be found.
A second consequence of the curative drugs in today’s little black bag is an unprecedented increase in the urgency of accurate diagnosis. Antibiotics which cure or arrest more than 100 diseases have a tendency to mask what is wrong with the patient before the doctor can decide what really is the trouble, thus leaving behind a potential reservoir of future trouble. This can happen, for instance, when the patient has tuberculosis. The early stages of this disease often masquerade as pneumonia, and may be suppressed very quickly by penicillin and streptomycin, a common combination; but the TB is not really defeated and will come back. Or, a secondary infection resulting from early, undetected cancer may be cured by antibiotics, leaving the cancer undiagnosed and farther along in its course than it should be.
New diagnostic tools of many kinds, particularly those involving radio-active isotopes, are rapidly coming into use, and they are badly needed. Eventually, it should be possible to take a patient into the laboratory and produce a complete metabolic profile of his state of health, involving every organ, tissue, cellular and biochemical system he owns; when this is feasible, diagnosis will have become an exact science.
This, too, I think will happen. It cannot happen a moment too soon.
And after that, it will be up to the social scientists — if there are some real ones by that time — to figure out what we are going to do with a universally healthy population that lives an average lifespan of several thousand years.
THE SHIP WHO SANG
by Anne McCaffrey
The idea of a human brain connected to a mechanical “body” is at least as old as Frankenstein, and as new as the latest advance in prosthetics. The first story I recall which specifically considered the hooking up of a living brain to a spaceship was, coincidentally, James Blish’s “Solar Plexus,” almost twenty years ago. The difference in focus and treatment between that story and the one that follows are almost a two-step lesson in the Developmental Trends of Modem Science Fiction.
Anne McCaffrey describes herself as “the perfectly normal, well-adjusted wife of a public relations Duponter,” in support of which she points to a Wilmington home, three young children, and an ambitious canning, sewing, and den-mothering program. All nice-normal enough, till you add; she raises German Shepherds; sings in the Wilmington Opera Society and her church choir; translates opera. A trained linguist specializing in the Slavonic languages, she is also an ex-advertising copywriter.
She was born a thing and as such would be condemned if she failed to pass the encephalograph test required of all newborn babies. There was always the possibility that though the limbs were twisted, the mind was not, that though the ears would hear only dimly, the eyes see vaguely, the mind behind them was receptive and alert.
The electro-encephalogram was entirely favorable, unexpectedly so, and the news was brought to the waiting, grieving parents. There was the final, harsh decision, to give their child euthanasia or permit it to become an encapsulated “brain,” a guiding mechanism in any one of a number of curious professions. As such, their offspring would suffer no pain, live a comfortable existence in a metal shell for several centuries, performing unusual service to Central Worlds.
She lived and was given a name, Helva. For her first 3 vegetable months she waved her crabbed claws, kicked weakly with her clubbed feet and enjoyed the usual routine of the infant. She was not alone, for there were three other such children in the big city’s special nursery. Soon they all were removed to Central Laboratory School, where their delicate transformation began.
One of the babies died in the initial transferral, but of Helva’s ‘class’, 17 thrived in the metal shells. Instead of kicking feet, Helva’s neural responses started her wheels; instead of grabbing with hands, she manipulated mechanical extensions. As she matured, more and more neural synapses would be adjusted to operate other mechanisms that went into the maintenance and running of a space ship. For Helva was destined to be the ‘brain’ half of a scout ship, partnered with a man or a woman, whichever she chose, as the mobile half. She would be among the elite of her kind. Her initial intelligence tests registered above normal and her adaptation index was unusually high. As long as her development within her shell lived up to expectations, and there were no side-effects from the pituitary tinkering, Helva would live a rewarding, rich and unusual life, a far cry from what she would have faced as an ordinary, ‘normal’ being.