Eternal Youth and the Girl Who Doesn’t Age
Brooke Greenberg weighs 15 pounds and is 30 inches long. To look at her, you see a near-toddler who is maybe a year old. In fact, she is 16 years old. Brooke is a child who does not age.
This remarkable girl is documented in this ABC news story and video. The reporter puts her finger on the flashpoint of this issue in the first few seconds of her introduction: Brooke is “a little girl who could give the world the key to eternal youth.”
The Fountain of Youth by Lucas Cranach the Elder
The facts of her case are baffling. Doctors say that parts of her are maturing at different speeds: she still has her baby teeth, for instance, while her bones have the density – but not the size – you’d expect to see in a 10 year old. In terms of mental development, she remains at the stage of a 1 year old, and does not speak. She has not been diagnosed with any genetic abnormalities that would stunt growth. Her case seems to be unique in the world, and her parents appreciate this fact. They have already followed it through to the next step.
“What if Brooke holds the secret of aging?” her father asks. “We’d like to find out. We’d like to help people. When people ask you – everybody’s here for a reason. Maybe this is why Brooke is here.”
These news stories do not get into details about what doctors are doing to analyze her “fountain of youth” attributes. One assumes testing is being done, given parents open to exploring this question, and the great scientific anomaly that Brooke’s lack of aging presents to the medical community. And here is where this human interest tale diverges from anomalous curiosity, and into the realm of science fiction and social issues.
What if We Could Stop Aging?
There is instant fascination with the concept of staying young forever, or at least a good span longer than we ordinarily have. As the old addage has it, “Youth is wasted on the young.” What would it be like if you could arrest your aging process at any point you like – say, your early or mid-20s? Then, though you continue to age emotionally and experientially, your body remains youthful along with the health and fitness that generally accompanies youth. A glowing future stretches ahead: you have much more time to do what you please, without having your physical resources and capacity being slowly diminished by the aging process. Better health, more time to be productive in work and play, more time for life.
Who would say no to this golden opportunity? This is the stuff of legend. The Fountain of Youth was mentioned by Herodotus, and the quest for it drove Juan Ponce de Leon to explore Florida in 1513. Belief in it has faded with time, but interest in the notion has not. Eternal youth – or at least, a substantially increased life span – would be of compelling interest to elites who aspire to power, influence, and/or financial empires: such things take time to grow to maturity. Its siren call will also be heard by anyone who hates growing old. Add to this all those caught up in the vanities of western youth culture, and a goodly number of women whose security and love relationships depend upon their being a fertile and ideally nubile lover, and one can hear the clamoring masses already.
Pandora’s Box
But if we could stop or seriously slow the aging process – would we want to? In the personal lifetime, this means decades, conceivably even centuries, of time. If you’ve ever gotten bored with a long vacation or retirement, how bored will you become when you’ve seen it all, done it all, and feel stuck in a rut that stretches endlessly ahead of you? Or, if you do not have that kind of personality and mental outlook, you would still be faced with the challenge of creating meaning in a lifespan that far exceeds anything we have ever been taught to cope with. We have rites of passage, cultural touchstones that mark the progress of the years. We have expectations, habits and institutions subtlely and not so subtlely tied to the process of aging in our various cultures. Old folks become respected for their wisdom, or are shunted aside as too burdensome for the young to deal with. Increasingly, as the Boomer generation ages, the once-young become caretakers to the elderly. What if such things were suddenly non-issues? The portion of the population that ceases to age – at whatever point in their development this should occur – will be playing a whole new ball game.
The dark shadow of this, of course, is the specter of over-population. Already the globe is burdened with billions difficult to feed and water. What happens when a part of that population, large or small, stops aging entirely? Say we do not attain ”eternal youth” per se, but only a substantially extended lifespan. Still, this pseudo-immortality threatens change on two fronts.
On one, it alters the balance of power among elites, for those who live extended lives are automatically at advantage in the gamesmanship of power.
On the other, people who do not age and die in the normal allotment of time continue to use resources even while breeding and producing offspring over a longer period than the “short”-lived would. Longer span of fertility means population increase. A lowered rate of mortality means population increase. Take those separately or together: in either case, a world with the exceptionally long-lived in it will force fundamental shifts and new challenges in the world we live in.
The Eternal Youth Race
These pitfalls notwithstanding, its a sure bet that someone’s eyes light up at the prospect of not dying. This prospect is of course a greater temptation and imperative to older people facing their own mortality. They are also the people with more resources, who could afford to develop such a treatment and afford to buy it. Fortunes stand to be made, and will be, should the puzzle of Brooke Greenberg’s unaging self be solved.
One can imagine a future where eternal youth is a closely guarded trade secret, available to – and affordable by – only the elite. With this as a tool, the infrastructure of power on the global stage changes. Unless the secret is smuggled out of the lab and made available to the masses, the elite will be able to maintain tighter (and inevitably corrupt) control of the mechanisms of government, finance and power by virtue of their entrenched positions (enabled by their extended lifespans). For just one example: if the average extended lifespan is, say, 200 years, then why should a president in the US (or any elected representative) be limited to 2 terms – merely 8 years – of governance? Would governance not benefit from wisdom and a view to the long haul? Therefore a long-lived official in office for a decade or 20 years – a meager fraction of his own lifespan – makes a perverse kind of political sense.
The variations on this theme are myriad.
If the secret is smuggled out of the lab, and becomes available to the public at large, then the equivalent of drug wars will ensue as an incredibly valuable commodity makes it way into the social network. Eventually, if enough people are affected by the Immortality Drug, the nature of the world’s population, fertility and mortality changes shape, bringing on a whole host of other, very mortal, problems to contend with.
Dark scenarios? Perhaps. But I think it naive to believe that if scientific curiosity unravels the long-sought-after Secret of Eternal Youth, that things will stop in a laboratory’s record books. Where will they head instead?
Well, that might be the stuff of science fiction.
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Comments
elizabeth: …it’s true-only the supposed “elite” of the world would be able to attain this dream…so what’s the point? we dont like the state if our world now, why would we try and outlive it?
Assuming this is available only to elites depends on assumptions about how the gene is changed and spread, and other availability issues. For the sake of argument, let’s assume it could become relatively widely avaiable. In that case, if we lived significantly longer, we would have to deal with the consequences of our actions more immediately: for instance, if we destroy our environment or exhaust our oil supplies without finding alternatives, it would not be our grandchildren who would have to deal with that “eventual” future, but rather ourselves. Longevity would change the calculus of policy choices.
And maybe if folks lived longer, there were be a larger measure of far-sighted wisdom injected into public and personal decisions. That would be a refreshing change. I would hate for only a few elites to have this, though: there’d be no better way to concentrate unbelievable power in the hands of a few who have the equivalent of multiple lifetimes to pursue their goals.
Hm, that would be some good science fiction….
i think this stuff is amazing and completely mind-boggling. the prospect of maintaining youth for an amount of time is not only a timeless dream for those from the past-juan ponce de leon and practically every alchemist from many chinese dynasties who were comissioned to create the elixer of life-but a dream for many of those from this age as well. speaking as a youth, im sure that all the controversies surrounding this touchy subject will keep this discovery from my generation, even if the gene is located and it turns out that freezing age through the manipilation of this gene is possible, i dont think it will be accessible to those who look at this possibility now in wonder. i will admit, i dont know that i would be able to stay away from this temptation…then again, it’s true-only the supposed “elite” of the world would be able to attain this dream…so what’s the point? we dont like the state if our world now, why would we try and outlive it?