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Do we really need to get personal about longevity enhancement?

When I'm 164, by David Ewing Duncan, Published by TED Books (Available for Kindle, iPad, Nook)

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

Half cultural prognostication and half science journalism, David Ewing Duncan's TED Books longread When I'm 64 explores whether medicine will one day make it possible for us to live forever -- and what would happen to human society if we did. It's a hotly debated topic, and Duncan takes his time tackling every aspect of it in this lengthy essay. Engaging and often fun, the book takes us from the labs where scientists are exploring the genes that control aging, to brain-computer interface demonstrations where paralyzed people are learning to control artificial limbs with their minds. Whether we do it with biology or machines, it's likely that humans will artificially enhance our longevity at some point. Though the prospect of doubling our life expectancy seems crazy to some, Duncan argues it's not entirely implausible. Especially given how far we've come over the past century. 

Still, ethical questions plague the project. While researching his book, Duncan ran a survey online and in his lectures where he asked people if they would like to live beyond the standard 80 years. Most said no, though a significant minority said they wouldn't mind living to be 120 or 164. Those yearning to be immortal represented less than one percent of respondents. Many people felt that living longer than 80 years would mean depleting the Earth's resources even more quickly than we already are. Others worried that young people would have no chance at getting good jobs, since their elders could keep working for decades longer. Some simply felt that living for a long time would be depressing and boring.

Several sections of the book are devoted to Duncan's quest to understand how it would change humanity if we could live much longer than we do now. From the rational world of tissue engineering labs where researchers hope to use 3D printers to make healthy, new organs, he ventures into Singularity University where would-be immortals from Silicon Valley listen eagerly to longevity advocate Aubrey De Gray's prediction that the first person who will live to be 1,000 has already been born. These true believers imagine that science will solve our energy problems and economic difficulties long before overpopulation due to immortality becomes a planet-destroying problem.

As if acknowledging the mostly unscientific nature of the longevity project, Duncan explores its implications by discussing mythology and science fiction about immortality. We may not know what role telomeres play in aging, but we certainly know that The Matrix and Terminator warn against using technology to enhance humans. Given the speculative nature of his topic, Duncan's forays into fiction make a lot of sense, and help provide a cultural frame for debates over longevity enhancement.

Here on Download the Universe, we often discuss how a particular e-book makes use of the medium, whether with enhanced images, video, or even just a good set of links out to more sources. But with When I'm 164, I'd like to talk about a stylistic quirk of e-books that has nothing to do with format: the fact that it's become standard practice for online writing to include a lot of first-person, confessional storytelling. 

Should online writing always be personal? Certainly it's refreshing that online writers try to avoid some of the print media's fake objectivity. But should that always mean authors need to personalize their subjects?

Like a lot of longreads online, Duncan's book veers into the personal. He delves into his sadness at his parents' impending deaths, interviews both them and one of his sons about their views on life extension, and ultimately concludes the book by declaring that he's emotionally torn by the idea of living forever. In some ways, the climax of the book is Duncan's final declaration of ambivalence about scientifically enhanced longevity. I think this personal touch works in some ways -- it helps to draw the reader in, and acknowledges the highly personal responses that many people have to this area of research.  

But it often reads as cheesy and unnecessary, as if Duncan were just going through the motions of making his online writing more personal than print.  Of course it's easy to sympathize with his sadness at a parent's decline, but there is nothing particularly insightful or unusual to Duncan's first-person stories about these issues. He paints the scientists and thinkers he's consulted for this book in far more interesting detail than he paints himself. The first person bits just weren't necessary to make this story compelling.

Duncan is at his best when coaxing out intriguing speculations from scientists, engineers and philosophers about their views on life extension. Duncan's observations of their work form the meat of this extremely gripping tale about one possible future -- of enhanced longevity -- that could arise from contemporary medical science.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, and the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (coming in May 2013 from Doubleday).

Snow Fall: A Gorgeous Ebook Comes to Life on the Web

Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. By John Branch. The New York Times and Byliner.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

On Wednesday night, a mysterious new article appeared on the New York Times site. News of it began to leak out via Twitter, and people who headed over to read the first chapter of Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, an account of a backcountry ski run turned deadly, found a piece not only grippingly reported but physically gorgeous, laced with soaring animations of the mountain, a looping GIF of the wind over the snow, and haunting audio and video captured by the survivors. Here's a sample of the reaction, from Atlantic correspondent Yoni Applebaum:

That @johnbranchnyt feature on Tunnel Creek? If this is the future of journalism, it looks beautiful: nyti.ms/UGCPpU

— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) December 20, 2012

 

By Thursday morning, the rest of the story--five further sections in all--had been posted, and we'd learned that Snow Fall, a groundbreaking example of journalism enhanced by the web, would appear without multimedia features in the Sunday edition of the NYTimes and be the first ebook released through a new collaboration between the New York Times and Byliner.

I've read the story and examined both the Web and ebook versions, and I'm here to tell you: buy the ebook if you'd like to carry the text around with you, but please, please do yourself the favor of reading it online.

The story starts on the back side of Cowboy Mountain in Washington. Two days' powder lie thick over the landscape, and professional skier Elyse Saugstad and a group of 15 other ski industry professionals and local experts have just joyfully begun the descent of an out-of-bounds run named Tunnel Creek. Standing in a copse of old-growth trees, Saugstad looks uphill and sees something that should not be there: a two-story-high wall of snow. Seconds later, she and an unknown number of others are buried in a river of ice that, if it had not already crushed them to death, would suffocate them within minutes.

These skiers and boarders weren't noobies. Over and over again, you hear, in the survivors' own voices in the embedded videos, that this was a dream team of backcountry skiers with decades and decades of experience between them. They would have known if it had been unsafe to go. But in meticulous reporting John Branch gently teases out the new technologies that have given out-of-bounds skiers enough of a boost in confidence that avalanche deaths have leapt in recent years, along with the cultural effects—the politesse, the bravado of even smart skiers—that clicked together like the parts of a deadly machine in Tunnel Creek.

The comparison that immediately comes to mind is with Young Men and Fire, the last book written by Norman Maclean. Maclean's 1992 masterpiece is a reconstruction of the Mann Gulch Fire, a disastrous 1949 blowup in Montana that consumed 12 smokejumpers, the elite fire-fighting parachutists of the Forest Service, in less than 10 minutes. As I watched the animations laying out the tracks each skier took, and watched the helmet cam videos of Saugstad and others taken just before, and after, the mountain fell, I thought, “This is what Young Men and Fire would have looked like, had the smokejumpers had video on their helmets.”

If the Byliner version, which has only text and a few photos, were the only version, I'd be crowing over it. But having seen the beauty and skillfulness of the web version, I have to wonder why the New York Times did not release Snow Fall through The Atavist, which has made it their business to tell multimedia stories in ebook form. Perhaps there's a business question in play here. After all, the Atavist offers stripped-down Kindle versions of their stories, which sometimes climb up Amazon's best-seller charts. For now, there may just not be enough demand for elaborate programming for these long-form features. And since the Times has already built Snow Fall an online home--and, as of Friday morning, sold most of the advertising slots in it to Sotheby's--they may see the ebook simply as a way to skim a little more cream off what they've already done, without investing too much more work.

That's a bit of a pity. But at least we'll always have the Web.

 

Veronique Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter here.

Behind the scenes with "Electric Shock," Matter's new ebook on regeneration

"Electric Shock" by Cynthia Graber. Published by Matter. $0.99. Available online and for Kindle, iPad, and others.

by Seth Mnookin

Last spring, Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson, a pair of British journalists who'd written for everywhere from The New York Times and The Guardian to Economist and Wired, announced their intention to launch Matter. It felt, to many of us in the science-writing racket, like a quixotic effort: Was there really pent-up demand for in-depth, independent reportage that covered breaking news about science within the parameters of long-form non-fiction?

To answer 'yes' to that question required ignoring decades-long secular trends in journalism. Legacy news organizations ranging from CNN to my hometown paper, The Boston Globe, have been jettisoning specialized science reporters since the late 1990s. As profits disappeared and newsroom budgets shrank, "in-depth" projects became rarer and rarer. This is hardly a surprise. Nuanced, investigative reports have always been the equivalent of newsroom money pits: They require (relatively) highly paid reporters and editors, they don't produce a lot of copy relative to the amount of effort needed, and they don't typically deal with subjects advertisers want to be associated with. (Can you think of any companies that'd be eager to pitch their wares alongside this excellent Times series on the abuse of developmentally disabled patients in New York State group homes? Me neither.)

Cold Blooded: A Doping Investigation Primer

Cold Blooded by Jere Longman. $1.99 (Amazon Prime members can borrow the book for free.) Available as a Kindle single.

Guest review by Christie Aschwanden

In early October, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) released hundreds of documents implicating seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong in something the agency dubbed the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen. Jere Longman's Kindle Single Cold Blooded is essentially a Cliff Notes version of the USADA report.

In just 49 pages, Longman's ebook provides a cohesive synopsis of the case. Condensing the material was no easy feat. The USADA report contains 200-plus pages, including affidavits from more than 25 witnesses and hundreds of supporting documents, such as bank records and blood test results. Longman expertly turns this data dump into a readable summary that contains both the most important evidence (Armstrong's payments of more than one million dollars to Italian doctor Michele Ferrari) and the most amusing, such as Armstrong teammate David Zabriskie' parody of the Jimi Hendrix tune Purple Haze,

EPO all in my veins

Lately things just don't seem the same

Actin' funny, but I don't know why

'Scuse me while I pass this guy

The Zabriskie anecdote aside, Longman's writing is detached and uninspiring, no doubt because he pieced the story together from the USADA documents rather than first-hand reporting. The following passage is typical:

Shortly after the 2000 Tour de France ended, French authorities began an investigation into suspected doping by Armstrong and the Postal Service team. An anonymous letter had been sent to prosecutors in Paris. A television crew had spotted two men - Postal Service team personnel - tossing medical waste into a trash container.

For readers unfamiliar with cycling and the Armstrong case, Longman's book supplies a quick yet substantial overview. The work also stands as a convincing example of the ebook format's utility for condensing a bolus of evidence into a useful summary. I can imagine similar treatments for the next celebrity scandal or even the latest IPCC report.

Those familiar with the Armstrong case will find nothing new in Longman's ebook. If you're looking for character development or analysis, you're better off reading From Lance to Landis by David Walsh, or his forthcoming Seven Deadly Sins. Longman's colleague at the New York Times, Juliet Macur, also has a book in the works, and the USADA case report itself makes fascinating reading. Some of the affidavits weave narratives as compelling as you'll find in any novel.

The Lance Armstrong that emerges from the USADA report is a narcissistic bully who becomes increasingly vindictive toward those who dare to question him. He slaps lawsuits at his accusers and at one point, he sends a threatening text to the wife of a teammate who's set to testify against him. The evidence outlined in Cold Blooded leaves little doubt that Armstrong was a leader in what USADA CEO Travis Tygart calls a conspiracy "professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage through superior doping practices." As ESPN sports writer Bonnie Ford wrote following the report's release, "anyone who remains unconvinced [of Armstrong's guilt] simply doesn't want to know."

There's been a lot of deliberate not knowing over the years, and Armstrong was not the first to exploit it. Doping has been a part of cycling since nearly the beginning. The sport did not originate in the Olympic tradition but as a competition to get from here to there as fast as possible on your own steam. In the cycling's early days, racers often took cognac or amphetamines in hopes of boosting their performance. Back then, such practices weren't considered cheating. Drugs were eventually banned to protect rider health, not as a result of ethical qualms.

When U.S. team doctors and coaches blood doped members of the 1984 Olympic cycling team, they broke no official rules. Some of the team's riders refused to participate in the doping scheme, but they came to that decision via their own moral standards. Rules against doping received very little enforcement until the formation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its U.S. affiliate USADA in 1999, and even then, cycling's governing body remained more interested in protecting its sport's reputation and its rainmakers than in any notions of fair play. In Cold Blooded, Longman describes how Armstrong paid the UCI to cover up a positive test at the Tour of Switzerland in 1999 and the New York Daily News has reported that Nike, a long-time sponsor of Armstrong and his cancer foundation, helped pay for the bribe. 

Armstrong didn't invent doping, he just did it better than anyone else before him. He understood from the beginning that fans wanted something bigger than life to believe in, and he was more than willing to oblige. His triumph over cancer gave hope to countless patients around the world, and cancer became his shield to deflect criticism. Hope was a product he could sell to his sponsors and the public. He built an empire around a false story. As I've written elsewhere, even his comeback from cancer was not as remarkable as it seems. His fraud succeeded with the complicity of accomplices and bystanders who stood to gain from his success.

Some of these co-conspirators, such as team director Johan Bruyneel and doping doctor Michele Ferrari also face sanctioning in the USADA case. Other participants in the doping culture, like Bjarne Riis and Jonathan Vaughters, remain leaders in the sport to this day.

Cycling was dirty when Armstrong arrived at the sport. The question that remains is, will it remain dirty now that he's gone?

 

Christie Aschwanden is a contributing writer for Bicycling Magazine. She has written about doping for NPR, New Scientist, The Washington Post, BBC Future, and Smithsonian. She blogs about science at Last Word On Nothing.

 

Evolving Fish, A Dying Sea, And A New Genre: Digital Comics Science Journalism

Symbolia. First issue free. Subsequent individual issues $1.99. Annual subscription $11.99. Available as an iPad app or pdf; other devices to come. See web site for details. 

Comics first gained respectability as art, then as storytelling, and more recently as comics journalism. Joe Sacco's celebrated Safe Area Goradze, for example, showed how comics journalism could deliver powerful portrait of life during wartime. Published in 2001, Safe Area Goradze was the product of a pre-ebook age, the sort of printed work that you might buy as a deluxe hardbound edition and display on a shelf. A decade later, comics journalists are increasingly giving up paper and going digital.

A new example of this new genre is Symbolia, a magazine that released its first issue this week. It's been generating a good deal of buzz, with write-ups in venues like the Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter, and Publisher's Weekly. I decided to check it out and discovered a creation that was fit for reviewing at Download the Universe. That's because three out of the five stories in the first edition are about science.