After all the conversations, queries, and explorations into the complicated ways death might be arrested; after I had traveled 50,000 miles from here to there and back again, meditating on what The End really meant, Hugh Hixon kept edging into my mind. I decided to go back for a visit and walk among Alcor’s shiny canisters and patients as they mutely awaited resurrection. There, Hixon—the constant gardener—remained, devotedly shuffling among his stainless steel dewars, topping them off, and, now and again, tipping the people who hoped never to die into their frigid cocoons.
Professor Laurence Pilgeram was still there, in one of the neuro cans. But his family wasn’t happy about that. They are suing Alcor for one million dollars, arguing that Pilgeram didn’t want to be a neuro after all.
But that wasn’t stopping other Alcor members from using the foundation’s services. When I last checked, neuro member A-1547 had passed through the veil, Norma Peterson. She was living near Alcor in a memory care nursing home. Then one February morning her heart gave out. The FCP team was right there. They performed the Final Protocols and, soon after, her vitrified body was placed in its appointed canister.
Hixon’s words echoed in my mind. Time is our enemy. I can’t stop it, but I sure as hell can slow it down. And he was doing just that. Counting Norma Peterson, 31 more patients had arrived at Alcor’s Chill Chamber since the day Laurence Pilgeram’s heart stopped in April 2015. Diane Cremeens, Alcor’s patient coordinator, said that in just those four years, people’s views of cryonics were changing. Interest was up, significantly. The calls she received about Alcor’s services were now arriving daily, and the foundation was adding roughly one new member a month. A few years ago that would have been unthinkable.
But again, Alcor was plan B. Where was plan A?
CALICO WAS WORKING ON THAT. The proof came just before and just after the beginning of 2018, when Art Levinson told me about two remarkable discoveries made at the lab. Each revealed that science might outwit aging after all, and finally turn Gompertz’s rising curve into the long, flat line of unending youth the company was built to create.
The first discovery came from Shelley Buffenstein’s preposterous mole rats. The findings revealed beyond a shadow of doubt that the critters simply refused to age.23 Even as the years passed, their hearts remained strong, females kept breeding even after 30 years, and their body compositions, bone quality, and metabolism functioned as well as they did when they were pups.
This was not simply surviving to a ripe old age, like Ikaria’s centenarians. This was as if a 100-year-old was romping around in the body and mind of a teenager. The little animals did die, eventually, of course, but not from aging; maybe a fight, or because of a genetic problem with a faulty organ or gland. But not from growing old. For Levinson, this proved that it was possible for a mammal to defy beta: the intrinsic, unstoppable killer. Now, Calico hoped to pass the same secrets on to Homo sapiens. Figuring that out might take some time, but at least now it looked as if science had at last proven that somehow aging could be stopped.
Calico’s second discovery unveiled the opposite side of the coin: the creation of youth. This research had to do with the way eggs and sperm talk to one another.
In any living organism, eggs sit dormant in the female, ready to be fertilized. But during that time, like every other cell in the body, the eggs also age, accumulating small clumps: the evidence of time’s damage. Given that damage, how can an older animal create a brand-new offspring, the epitome of youth?
Cynthia Kenyon’s group found the answer as they watched C. elegans sperm approach the creatures’ eggs. (Worms have sperm and eggs too.) In real time, they could see the sperm sending a chemical signal that awakened tiny membranes called lysosomes within the egg. These then reached out like long fingers to snatch the damaged clumps and obliterate them. That meant that by the time the sperm arrived for the happy moment, the egg was perfectly rejuvenated, ready to begin fresh and new.
So far, Kenyon and her fellow researcher K. Adam Bohnert had only seen this happen in worms and, later, frogs. But maybe the mechanism worked in all living creatures, including humans. It made sense that it would. Why, after all, would evolution toss aside a system that worked so well?
This opened the possibility that a drug for humans could be developed that might trigger similar lysosomes to happily go about shredding damaged cells found throughout aging bodies—rejuvenating hearts, livers, muscle, skin, brain, and bone. Was this possible? “Maybe,” said Kenyon, “maybe, maybe…with a little help from genetic engineering.”