Born To Die

Desire to live long has agitated human heart for ever. Our myths are built around the immortality of gods in heaven and the transience of life on earth. In their longing for an unending life our ancestors adorned their gods with preposterous life spans. A day in Brahma’s life, Kalpa, comprised 4.32 billion earth-years. This was followed by a night of similar length, Pralaya.

Humans are the only animals aware of their mortality. By being aware I mean, we, unlike any other animal, can vividly imagine a future where we would not be around. To preserve life is an instinct of every living organism. But none can imagine the scenario of their own demise. Prospection, an ability to look into the future world, is a unique human attribute. The prospect of death, magnificently illustrated by our foresight, is inconceivably disturbing. Longing to live for ever is born of this fear.

Death is negation of living. It is the irrevocable end of everything that a life represented – a companion, a spouse, a child, a parent. It is an inconceivable grief to know that a person who was the source of much joy in your life has ceased to exist for ever after their death. Did belief in after-life, one of the ineluctable creeds of every religion, arose as a balm for this grief?

It is only right that man turns to religion to seek remedy for this sorrow. For science with its stark rationales and indifferent reasons provides answers that appear cruel in face of an insurmountable anguish. Science avers that nature is neither harsh nor kind. It is as it is. It works on certain simple laws that were born with the evolving universe. We humans are one of the products of this change, alike the galaxies, planetary systems, the black holes, and the billion suns in universe. Laws that transformed inert matter into a living cell, also wrote in its constitution an unalterable recipe for its demise. To be born is a chance, to die is inevitable.

But must we die?

Answer to this question depends on another – why were we born? Explanation that appeals to most is that we were created by God. In Life on earth, we want to see embodiment of God’s insatiable urge to create. But it stretches credulity thin – unless one attributes malfeasance to the creator – to believe that a God capable of creating an infinitely complex organism should be incompetent of assuring its immortality.

Science offers an escape from this convoluted logic. There is no grand design behind life and universe. The only force that drives the infinitely fecund process of evolution is the insatiable need of every living being - a unicellular bacterium or a many-trillion-celled human – to leave behind as many copies of itself as possible. Thus, information survives the body, carried in the genes of its progenies. Bodies are perishable. But genes can be immortal if assured of newer bodies in successive generations. Bodies are merely gene manufacturing machines.

Grand, though this machine is, it is susceptible to wear and tear – that we call aging – alike other gadgets in nature. Mutations occur spontaneously throughout the life of an organism – some occur spontaneously in the process of copying of the genetic information during replication, others are caused by the minute fractions of cosmic radiations that occasionally penetrate earth’s atmosphere. Most mutations are benign. A few are harmful. Biologist B.S. Haldane postulated that harmful mutations that are expressed in young are weeded out because such individuals would not be able to reproduce. While harmful mutations that are manifested in old age persist because individuals have already passed on their genes, with these mutations, to their progenies. Peter Medawar, a brilliant British biologist proposed that it is these accumulated mutations that are responsible for aging. Another biologist, George Williams, suggested that nature selects for mutations that are harmful in later life because they are advantageous in young. One such example is genes that help us grow in childhood but are responsible for cancers and dementia in old age.

Nature is frugal. Repair of faults in genetic information is costly. If such errors affect only the old who have finished reproduction, nothing is gained by spending resources in this repair. Aging is thus a bargain nature has struck in favour of reproduction. It has been seen in experiments on fruit flies that mutations that reduce fecundity increase the longevity. A study analysed British aristocrat women in the past 1200 years who had survived beyond sixty (to control for deaths that occur in childbirth, accidents, and disease). Women who had fewer children lived the longest.

We never wonder about death of other life forms on earth: bacteria, animals, or plants. It is a monumental human folly, and a manifestation of our preposterous egos, to believe that humans occupy a special niche in nature. All living species originated from the same natural process. Very few animals in the wild die of old age. Most die of predation or disease long before. But for predation this was the fate of most humans too, about a century back. Nature did not gain much by prolonging human life beyond reproductive years. We have learnt to treat and prevent diseases responsible for majority of human deaths in past only in the last century. Modern human beings have been on earth for about 400,000 years. That which nature evolved in 4000 centuries cannot be undone in two.

Human-lifespan has risen steadily and rapidly in the last century. This is the most spectacular achievement of modern science. In 1947, at the time of independence in India, life expectancy at birth was 32 years. Today it is 72. But this phenomenal rise in longevity is now slowing world over.

In her memoirs, On Balance, justice Leela Seth mentioned an interesting anecdote. She was then about twelve, studying in Loreto Convent in Darjeeling. In one of the morning assemblies, headmistress announced that Leela’s father had died the previous day at a very young age. ‘No, no, he was not young. He was forty-two,’ Leela cried out.

My aunt's husband died in his early fifties. I was then seven or eight. My aunt loved me dearly. We met her after a few weeks. The moment she saw me she took me in her arms and hugged me tight to her bosom. I saw that she was unsuccessfully trying to suppress the sobs that broke from her chest like a train of hiccups. I was dazed. My uncle was very old. It was unbecoming, in my world then, to grieve so inconsolably over the death of an elderly person.

Fifty years ago, people approaching retirement at sixty wondered if they would be alive after a decade. Today at seventy, one is apprehensive if they would be healthy in mind or body when they reach eighty. It would appear, the anxieties of life remain same, and have only been moved a little forward. For, most of us are never prepared to die, at sixty or at eighty.

In a century we have added almost another lifetime to our lives. But it is not apparent that happiness has doubled in today’s world. Rather, our obsession to postpone death has only increased. How long a life would satisfy mankind? A hundred years, hundred and twenty, or one hundred fifty? Thirst for extra years would never be quenched. It will always remain a mirage.

A long life is not same as a long youthful life. It always means a lingering old-age. Even those centenarians who enjoyed a long healthy life invariably suffered from all the ailments that afflict old, in their dotage: failing vision and hearing, loss of memory, devastating dementia, inability to attend to tasks of daily-living.

Science must strive to add more healthful years to individuals and not merely draw out the process of slow failure of the organism. I see these shenanigans of modern medicine daily: Elderly patients in the grip of the irreversible effects of aging being subjected to repeated invasive interventions, extensive surgeries, the latest drugs – often with serious side-effects, and the unending life-support systems in intensive care units. Most suffer silently – some in ignorance of the feeble good that these medical interventions offer, and a vast majority in advanced state of unconsciousness. There comes a time in life when body begins to fail. Science must not prolong the misery of death, but enable an individual to let go of life with dignity.

Search for a magical potion that will indefinitely defer aging is a hot research subject in biological sciences today, commanding billions of dollars of annual expenditure. Venki Ramakrishnan, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, has brilliantly captured this research in his latest book Why We Die. He says that most of this anti-aging research is being funded by the neo-billionaires of the Silicon Valley. And he finds it ironical that these entrepreneurs who have made their billions by inventing gadgets that go obsolete in no time, want to prolong their own life infinitely.

Transience of life lends a poignant beauty to the passing moments. Knowledge that our time on earth is limited, makes us cherish each experience dearly. Brevity of sojourn lends an urgency to life. I do not know if one will pine for the joys of life as passionately if they knew that future stretches indefinitely. The unquenchable urge to discern some element of permanence in our existence, prompts us to look for an eternal meaning in our ephemeral lives. This search for meaning in a meaningless world, though futile and tragic, often becomes the profoundest aspect of a life.

Tide of youth, as it ebbs, leaves behind blatant driftwood: creaking joints, bent spine, receding hairline, parched and wrinkled beauty, enfeebled desires, and a fading mind. Knowledge that old age is the penultimate stage in the saga of life - that will soon pass into oblivion - enables one to bear its infirmities with fortitude.

But besides its obvious blemishes old age has its compensations. Fevered passions and obsessions of youth give way to placid acceptance of existence. Tolerance for varied human nature permits one to enjoy the innate worth of every person. Contrary to common view, old age offers more time to indulge activities like art, music, and reading. A mind not swayed by strong likes and dislikes can derive more pleasure and meaning from them.

In Summing Up, written when he was nearing seventy, Somerset Maugham summed up his thoughts on various aspects of life. On old age he wrote thus: ‘… the complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening.’

Our time on earth is evanescent. It was a fluke that we were ever born. We would do us good to enjoy this enormous blessing of chance: to have been born and that too with a mind which appreciates the changing pattern of our life and the fact that our birth was not inevitable.

Richard Dawkins in an essay in his book, Unweaving The Rainbow, said this in his inimitable prose: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

 

Elements that make our body arose in the core of stars during their evolution. These were later dispersed in universe as stars exploded and died. Over eons this matter organised on a nondescript speck of dust to begin a process that we call life. In billions of years this flicker of life evolved to give one of its forms a mind that wonders why this life and why its end.

A poetic justice is inhered in this journey.  Born of stardust, in the death of stars, we must perish in it - ‘For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.’