Nothing is certain in life, except death and taxes, as Benjamin Franklin let it slip while hoping for the permanency of the American Constitution. While you can get away with taxes if you are rich enough, money will not buy you immortality.
Existential anxiety is something that hit each of us at least once in a lifetime and many intelligent/rich people go to great lengths in avoiding death or pretending it does not exist. Medical doctors in particular don’t feel easy when confronted with death. Many of my colleagues (including me) hated assisting to autopsies, especially when we knew the patient during its life. Most of us chose medicine to control and even eliminate death, so each human being that inevitably dies is seen as our failure whether or not that was true. It took me lots of time to accept that medicine is largely limited – even in the 21st century. As such, medical doctors often fall pray to the illusion that we can solve death or aging once and for all.
But what happens when you search for immortality and find death instead?
Alexander Bogdanov was a Russian doctor later specializing in hematology who also wrote science fiction books and poetry in his spare time. He was one of those Renaissance Souls that asked too many questions and consequently disturbed too many people and was praised by others as well. Inflamed by the hope of rejuvenation through self-administering of blood transfusions, he left aside precautions and one day got infected with malaria and tuberculosis from one such blood bag.
Roy Walford was an American physician and scientist bringing forth calorie restriction to the lay public. Calorie restriction prolonged the life of many different species and many volunteers today embrace it as a lifestyle, although it is not yet recommended by the clinical guides. He died at the age of 79 (quite advanced for an American) because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), provoking discussions of whether CR worsened the progression of this killer disease. Further research on transgenic mice suffering from ALS showed that CR may hasten the death, while data from people indicate a link between low energy intake and the prevalence of this disease.
Sometimes the cause of death is too ironic like in the case of Alexis Carrel, the Nobel laureate doctor who developed the technique of suturing blood vessels together by taking previous classes from French seamstresses and created the field we now call transplantation medicine. During his work at the Rockefeller Institute in New York he immersed the heart of a chicken in nutrients keeping it alive until his death, when the tissue was intentionally left to die. This famous experiment influenced the mainstream community at large into believing the individual cells of an individual are immortal – that was until Hayflick showed the de facto limits of the experiment and of our own cells. Neither we are immortal, nor are our cells. Alexis Carrel died of heart failure at the age of 71 – it seems like his heart cells were not immortal either.
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