The Bioethics of Living Forever

Yesterday I read an article in the March twentieth issue of U.S News and World Report that was even more frightening to me than the recent talk of human cloning. The article, "The Cells of Immortality," by Joannie Schrof Fischer, described the scientific community's intentions to prolong life indefinitely-- make humans immortal-- and that to me seems like playing with fire. Just like cloning, I believe it is completely unethical to eliminate death. I trust humanity will abuse eternal life and create an immortal world dictator who will enslave the human race. I think shutting off mortality is a bad idea.

I order to understand how scientists plan to stop death and aging, one must first understand what causes death in a scientific sense. The cells of a living body actually contain genetic material in their DNA which codes for their eventual demise. That is to say that each cell has its own biological clock that tells it exactly when to stop. Scientists hope to be able to reset these biological clocks and make cells immortal.

Most of the trouble in cells that leads to their expiration is the genetic code, or is caused by DNA replication. Most of us should have learned about DNA replication in sophomore biology, but one thing the text book left out was the telomere. Telomeres are strands at the end of the DNA that shorten and disappear as the cells divide and replicate; once the telomere is gone a cell can no longer divide and is doomed to die once it gets too large to run effectively. The way scientists have fixed this problem is by injecting the enzyme telomerase into a cell to rebuild the telomere. Once the telomere is rebuilt, the cell can continue to divide and replicate as long as the the telomerase is present. So, in effect, scientists have made immortal cells.

Luckily, no one has been able to take immortal cells and make an immortal human; but scientists have come close to creating immortal organs. Now, one may argue that potential organ transplants could be a a possible application for this new technology, and this may be so since current organ transplants require someone to die so that someone else may live, but I believe using immortal organs for organ transplants is tampering with a pretty good Now just think, this new technology is trying to stop aging, or if people don't live forever they will certainly live a long time because of this technology. Where will we put so many people? And we think geriatric health costs are high now.... It worries me to think what we will end up doing with this technology.

There are, naturally, many ethical and theological objections to artificially prolonged life. One of them being do we have the right to turn off aging or do we even have the right to create a switch to regulate aging? Are we tampering with God's plan, biology or the natural order of things by altogether eliminating death? I have for a long time debated as to whether or not we are intended to control life at all, but making it infinite seems like avoiding the question and not worrying about the consequences. Even if we decide that ending death is ethical, there is no doubt in my mind that there will be serious repercussions. It seems that every time we conquer a major disease, for instance, small pox, it seems that other more dangerous diseases spring up in its wake. If we solve the problem of death who can guess what life will be like for the immortal? What sort of problems will the immortals have to face in the future? I am fairly convinced that the human race will destroy itself long before the sun explodes engulfing the earth in a fiery explosion of helium; is this the medium for our destruction--eternal life?

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