Can We Really Cheat Death? And If We Do, Then What?

Most of us share the belief that we are all doomed to age and die (assuming some other lethal event doesn’t do us in first). But there’s growing evidence that the aging that kills most of us may be curable. And reversible. If this happens, it will change absolutely everything.

The desire for immortality has been around for millennia — the Philosopher’s Stone, Faust, endless searches for mythic fountains of youth, and snake oil of all varieties. But a few years ago I began researching a book for National Geographic that asked this question: what if real and solid science could, at last, outfox the grim reaper? Had we reached such a point in human history? Given the rapid advances in genomics, genetics, and molecular biology, big data, nanotechnology, and machine learning, maybe the answer was yes. After all, during the past 120 years we had nearly doubled the average life span in America from our mid 40s in 1900 to nearly 80 in 2017. But now we are facing a new problem as we march into our extended lives. We may be living longer, but not necessarily better. Could we create a world where life spans not only increased, but health spans did too?

Truthfully, when I first began to look into the question, there wasn’t much to find. Eight years ago science mostly considered the elimination of aging as hokum at worst, and a dead end at…