During the military parade celebrations in Beijing on September 3, 2025, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin were overheard talking about the prospects of organ transplants and biotechnology as a means of prolonging life. The quest for “eternal life” has been a preoccupation of science fiction plots and James Bond capers that have particularly fascinated autocrats. In the Bond film Die Another Day, the villain is a North Korean colonel named Zao who undergoes gene therapy in Cuba to gain immortality. Incidentally, the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un also took center-stage in the ceremonies this week! Beyond the malevolent use for prolonging autocracy, such genetic manipulations may indeed help us understand the structural causes of aging and whether there is opportunity for their reversal.
Aging in essence is a process by which the body loses information. DNA and genetics present the body with a sort of “digital” form of information; the body must read that information at the molecular level through an analogue process of transcription, which biologist David Sinclair refers to as the epigenome. The prefix “epi” refers to environmental factors that can lead to particular genes being activated or not, for better or for worse: hence, nature– nurture complementarity is perennially relevant (approximately one- third nature and two- thirds nurture dependence). The Nobel Prize- winning discoveries of John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka found that mature cells could be reprogrammed to become “pluripotent,” whereby they could essentially go back to an earlier stem state. This revolutionary insight indicated that we could turn back the cellular clock in what was previously believed to be an irreversible process.
Why is the life expectancy of mice 3 to 4 years while whales can live as long as 200 years? What underlying structural reasons account for such divergences? The dominant hypotheses in this regard relate to sexual reproductive years as being the key determinant in evolutionary outcomes of how long organisms may live. Since rodents can reproduce within a few months of birth, the evolutionary investment in perpetuating longer life expectancy is not warranted. Human beings reach sexual maturity after 12– 15 years, and females can reproduce for a few decades; hence our life expectancy has emerged accordingly. An additional factor which plays into life expectancy is how long a species has been around to overcome some aspects of “evolutionary neglect” and still increase life expectancy. Humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years, while whales have been around for at least 30 million years.
Immortality may be in the offing for all practical purposes through computational means as well. Human beings, in essence, “live” through their memories and their personalities. If those neural attributes of what we call our “mind” can be “uploaded” into a digital form that could then be manifest in either a physical or virtual persona, we could have mortality without the same degree of resource constraints that a biological form would entail. This is also referred to as whole brain emulation (WBE). Such an approach has been championed by futurist Ray Kurzweil, currently a “visionist” at Google, as well as by Israeli- Swiss neuroscientist Henry Markram who started the Blue Brain Project in 2005 and which this year became the Open Brain Institute. This project aims to develop detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mouse brain, ultimately leading to similar options for human brains. Using data to generate neural order of this kind would require enormous amounts of energy which is yet to be accounted for.
Already within the past 100 years, humanity has been able to double life expectancy through the wonders of modern medicine. Much of this statistic has to do with reducing infant mortality but there is little doubt that we have now vanquished many diseases and unlocked the secrets of the ageing process itself. The environmental movement in the mid-twentieth century was preoccupied with population growth due to high fertility rates, and this was considered a threat resource security for the planet by ecologists like Paul Ehrlich. At present we are less concerned with population growth itself due to rapid decline in fertility rates. However, an increase in longevity and the prospect of physical, or even virtual, immortality remains a conundrum for sustainability science.