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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).

How a locked-in woman took control of a robot arm

The Electric Mind written by Jessica Benko. The Atavist, 2012. Kindle Singles, The Atavist app , iBooks, and other outlets via The Atavist website.

Reviewed by Ed Yong

Throughout the history of neuroscience, we have gained an inordinate amount of knowledge by studying people with severe brain damage, and watching how they manage to live. HM’s surgically altered brain revealed secrets about how memories are formed – after his death, he was revealed to be an American man called Henry Molaison. KC, a Canadian man whose real name is still unknown, also taught us much about how memory works, following brain damage sustained during a motorcycle accident. SM, a woman with an inherited brain disease, reportedly feels no fear.

These patients are known by abbreviations that preserve their anonymity, but also shroud their contributions. Their hopes, struggles and lives are condensed into patterns of injury and aberrant behaviours, and distilled into pairs of letters. But sometimes, very rarely, we get a privileged opportunity – a chance to unpack the people behind the letters, and to learn not just how they became a part of science, but how science became a part of them.

Jessica Benko’s new story, The Electric Mind, provides just such an insight. It is the latest in an increasingly strong portfolio of stories from The Atavist, a digital publisher that produces stories “longer than typical magazine articles but shorter than books”.

The Electric Mind is the story of Cathy Hutchinson, a woman known in the scientific literature as S3. She’s a mother-of-two who was “always goofing around and singing and dancing”, until a stroke disconnected her brain from her spinal column and left her with an active mind imprisoned in a frozen frame.

For several years, Cathy has been taking part in a groundbreaking experiment called BrainGate – not a sordid cerebral scandal, but a bold project that aims to give paralysed people control over mechanical limbs. The scientists behind the project fitted Cathy with microscopic electrodes that read the neural buzz within her motor cortex – the area of her brain that controls movements. The implant acts like an electronic spine that links Cathy’s brain to a computer or robot, bypassing her own immobilised flesh.

At first, she used the electrodes to control the movements of an on-screen cursor. More recently, she commandeered a robotic arm. As she thought about grabbing a bottle, the electrodes deciphered her mental commands and the arm carried them out. “For the first time in 14 years—indeed, for the first time for any quadriplegic—Cathy was able to reach out into the world.”

The project’s crowning results are published today in the journal Nature, concurrently with the launch of Benko’s story. The paper itself preserves Cathy’s anonymity, and describes her in the starkest of terms. She’s “a 58-year-old woman with tetraplegia caused by brainstem stroke… She is unable to speak (anarthria) and has no functional use of her limbs. She has occasional bilateral or asymmetric flexor spasm movements of the arms that are intermittently initiated by any imagined or actual attempt to move. S3’s sensory pathways remain intact.”

The reality behind these cold, precise words comes through in Benko’s skilful narration. Right from the start, she plunges us into Cathy’s world, as she wakes from a coma to hear the sound of the ventilator beside her bed.

We get to know Cathy through Benko’s eyes, as she tracks down the woman via her son, and meets her for the first time. First-person accounts can break the fourth wall to a distracting extent, and many journalists would balk at inserting themselves so prominently into a story. But Benko earns her place as a protagonist in her own tale, in a way that reminds me of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The author’s quest becomes an inextricable part of the story itself. Through Benko’s expectations of meeting Cathy, her descriptions of their first meetings, and her difficulties in interviewing a woman who can only communicate via eye-flickers, we learn the extent of Cathy’s disability, and the frustrating complexity of seemingly simple tasks.

Writing about extreme disability (and attempts to overcome it) is not easy. You’re always an adjective away from being mawkish, and an adverb away from being ghoulish. Benko deftly negotiates the tightrope. She cleverly uses essays from other locked-in patients to describe hardships that would sound overwritten from her own hand. And she’s a master of keenly observed but simply delivered prose. When Cathy laughs, for example, it’s “a short burst of air that vibrated across vocal cords she can’t voluntarily control.” No embellishments required. These scenes throw their own punches. Benko just puts you in the ring.

Benko’s eye for detail also elevates her descriptions of experiments that have been reported again and again in the press. We see what Cathy’s nursing home room is like. We learn that the electrodes were fired onto her brain with “a pneumatic device like a tiny air hammer”. We discover that the bottle that Cathy lifted via robot was a thermos full of coffee (she loves coffee), “emblazoned with the initials and insignias of the research team and sponsors”. She finds drama in minutiae. While other reporters rush straight for a snare-drum crash of incredible implications, Benko takes her time with scenes that build to a steady crescendo.

Using Cathy’s story as an anchor, The Electric Mind stretches back in time to look at the historical events that preceded BrainGate (including a horse accident and suspected psychic powers). The story also pulls outwards at other means of reaching the same ends, such as functional electrical stimulation, where electrodes stimulate a patient’s own muscles instead of a robotic limb.

These sections, where we leave Cathy and focus on the field at large, are arguably the weakest elements of the story. Around the two-thirds mark, the tale threatens to veer off course. From rich details about a woman steering a robot arm with difficulty, we’re suddenly plunged into hand-waving speculation about infrared vision, Avatar-like… well…. avatars, and telepathic soldiers (and the irony of reading a journalist’s words about electronic telepathy on a handheld device was not lost on me).

But then, in a rather daring move, it becomes clear that this was exactly the point (keep an eye out for the start of Chapter Seven). All the other characters not involved in BrainGate, from Nicolelis to a ridiculously breathless DARPA spokesperson, serve as foils for Cathy. Their visions are too far removed from the reality of her condition. They remind us about what The Electric Mind could easily have been – a story of technological triumph and glorious futurism. Instead, Benko has treated us to something far better – a story of extreme limitations and what happens when people (and science) run up against them.

*****

Ed Yong is a British science writer who writes the award-winning blog Not Exactly Rocket Science. His work has appeared in Nature, New Scientist, the BBC, the Guardian, the Times, Wired UK, Discover, CNN, Slate, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist and more. He lives in London with his wife. He has never been impregnated by a botfly but he does rather like ants.

Titanic: The e-Book Nobody Loved

Titanic: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Greatest Shipwreck, by National Geographic Shorts. National Geographic. Amazon Kindle/iBooks/Barnes& Noble

Reviewed by Jennifer Ouellette

Last fall, ABC launched a lazy, cynical reboot of the iconic 1970s TV series Charlie's Angels, hoping to cash in on the whole nostalgia trend. NPR's Linda Holmes wrote one of the most insightful reviews I've seen in a long time about just why the reboot was so much worse than the many other silly or trashy shows that mysteriously find their way onto primetime TV. To wit: nobody involved ever really loved the show, not even a little. This, Holmes writes, is what she hates most about TV:

"It's these dead, unloved, pre-chewed blobs that are spat out over and over again, truly serving no purpose other than filling time between commercials. Nobody thinks this show is fun, nobody thinks this show is interesting, nobody thinks this show is cool. Nobody thinks this show is anything. Nobody loves it, and you can tell."

I found myself reflecting on Holmes' observation while flipping through Titanic: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Greatest Shipwreck, a National Geographic "short" released just in time for the 100th anniversary of the famous sinking, which claimed the lives of more than 1500 people. NatGeo isn't the only organization seeking to cash in on the RMS Titanic's historical landmark moment; there's a reason James Cameron released Titanic 3D this year, after all, and most news outlets have obliged with their own takes on the tragedy.

The story of Titanic has captured the public's imagination for a century and inspired countless books and films, so I get why a publisher would be interested in capitalizing on a "sure thing" in these tough economic times. And as a lifelong Titanic fan, I'm absolutely the target audience. Alas, I'd be hard pressed to find a more lackluster,  uninspired, and disappointing excuse for a retrospective than this. Honestly? It feels like an afterthought. This is the e-book that nobody loved. And I paid $3.99 for the privilege.

Michael Sweeney's prose is clean and competent, if a bit workmanlike, and he does a decent job of bringing a few telling details and heartstring-tugging personal stories to the fore. He dutifully sums up the various theories about the sinking, and Robert Ballard's discovery of the wreckage on the ocean floor in 1986.

But this is well-traveled ground. We've heard most of these stories and met all these people before. There is very little here one couldn't find with a quick 15-minute Google search, or by leafing through one of the umpteen prior books about Titanic that are available.

That's not necessarily a problem -- especially for those sad souls on Twitter who have only just realized Titanic wasn't just a blockbuster movie -- but if you're going to rework old material and go the trouble of packaging it into an e-book, it's generally a good idea to find some new twist, a new way to shape the narrative, something to make it seem fresh. That freshness, alas, is sorely lacking here.

Still, that would have been less of an issue if the production values were a bit higher. There is so much good material in the way of old photographs and illustrations relating to Titanic, yet all we are given is the usual smattering of archival photographs, plunked perfunctorily at the end of each chapter. Not every e-book needs to be an expensive app with impressive bells and whistles, but a little more effort on that score would have added a bit of much-needed pizzazz to the presentation.

Cameron's blockbuster film has garnered its share of snark as well as praise over the years, but whether it's your cup of cinematic tea or not, you can tell Cameron loved that project. It's a reimagining of a timeless tale, not just a regurgitation of the same old stories. Cameron poured his heart and soul into it, obsessing over the smallest detail, and he's still at it, as evidenced by the new CGI animation below -- a dynamic model of the sinking sponsored, ironically, by National Geographic.

You just can't fake that kind of passion. And that's precisely what's missing from this e-book. Nobody seems to have cared enough to bring that extra spark of creativity to the project, perfectly content to just serve up a warmed-over rehashing of the events. In fact, it's possible that I expended more thought and time on this review than anyone spent on Titanic: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Greatest Shipwreck. Titanic deserves better.

Image: "Untergang der Titanic" by Willy Stöwer, 1912. Public domain.

Jennifer Ouellette is the author of several popular science books, most recently The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. She also blogs at Cocktail Party Physics and Discovery News. Follow her on Twitter.