Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [134]
“That’s a slight exaggeration,” Rachel Trehaine protested.
“I know,” Damon said. “But the point is that it’s only slight. As long as they’re united, and as long as they can keep buying up innovators like PicoCon and OmicronA, the gods of New Olympus really do own the earth—and they’re busy reinventing the laws of trespass.”
No reply was forthcoming to that observation, but Damon hadn’t expected one. “I looked at the background material Madoc dredged up for me,” he said. “Adam Zimmerman’s so-called confession is a remarkable document—as remarkable, in its way, as the charter he set up for the foundation. His penultimate will and testament poses an interesting philosophical question, though. You’re supposed to bring him out of suspended animation when you have the technology available to make him young again and keep him that way forever—barring the usual accidents, of course—but what would qualify as reasonable grounds for believing that the latter criterion had been achieved? Some might argue that a man of his age—he was forty-eight, wasn’t he, when he was consigned to the freezer?—already has a good chance of riding the escalator all the way, but you’d undoubtedly take the view that he’d want the benefit of much better rejuve technology than the current market standard—technology that could be guaranteed to beat the Hayflick limit and the Miller effect.”
“With all due respect,” said the red-haired woman, “the internal affairs of the foundation are none of your concern.”
“I understand that. I’m only talking hypothetically. I’m intrigued by the question of how we could ever know that we were in possession of a technology of rejuvenation that would stop aging permanently, preserving the mind as well as the body. How could we ever know that a particular IT suite was good for, say, two thousand years, without actually waiting two thousand years for the results of the field tests to come in? What sort of data analysis would allow us to reach a conclusion regarding the efficacy of the technology ahead of time?”
“It wouldn’t be easy,” Rachel Trehaine admitted warily. “But we now have a very detailed knowledge of the biochemistry of all the degenerative processes we lump together as aging. At present, we arrive at estimates of projected life spans by monitoring those processes over the short term in such a way as to produce an extrapolatable curve. That curve has to be adjusted for rejuvenative interruptions, but we can do medium-term experiments to monitor the effects of repeated rejuvenative treatments.”
“Do you still use mice for those experiments?” Damon asked.
“We use live animals in some trials,” she countered rather stiffly, “but most of the preliminary work can be done with tissue cultures. I assume that what you’re driving at is the impossibility of getting rid of the margin of uncertainty which arises from dealing with any kind of substitute for human subjects. You’re right, of course—we’ll never be sure that a treatment which multiplies the lifetime of a cell or a mouse by a thousand will do the same for a human being, until we’ve actually tried it.”
“As I see it,” Damon said, “we’ll never be able to tell the difference between a technological suite that will allow us to live for a long time and one which really will allow us to live forever. Most people, of course, don’t give a damn about that—they only want the best there is—but you have to decide when to wake Adam Zimmerman up. You have to decide, day by day and year by year, exactly how to balance the equation of potential gain against potential risk—because you can’t leave him in there indefinitely, can you? Nor can you keep waking him up to ask his advice, because every journey in or out of susan multiplies the risks considerably, and even the nanotech you pump into him while he’s still down and out can’t fully compensate for the fact that the first susan technology he used was pre-ark.