Generosity: An Enhancement (12 page)

 

More expensive, high-tech antiaging breakthroughs will just produce even more horrendous differences between the haves and have-nots. If we really want to extend the average human life span, then let’s supply clean drinking water to the majority of the planet that doesn’t have it.

 

Cutaway, and the caption reads:
University of Tokyo conference, “The Future of Aging.”
Thomas Kurton stands behind a podium, covered in hazelnut curls, fifty-seven going on thirty-two, a Sarastro of the cult of antioxidants. He speaks from the hip:

 

The script that has kept us in gloom and dread is about to be rewritten. Labs across the globe are closing in on those ridiculous genetic errors that cause life to suicide. Aging is not just a disease; it’s the mother of all maladies. And humankind may finally have a shot at curing it.

 

Cut back to Oxford: Professor Harter questions the scientific basis to Kurton’s optimism. Back in Todai, Kurton cites the discovery of a single gene mutation that more than doubles the life span of
Caenorhabditis elegans
.

Oxford:

 

Aging is not the enemy; the enemy is despair.

 

Tokyo:

 

Cure age, and you beat a dozen ailments at once. You might even help depression.

 

The camera turns the scientist and ethicist into a bickering couple, airing their grievances in front of friends.

A quick jump to Maine, where keen Tonia Schiff asks Kurton:

 

What about those people who say society can’t survive more old people than it already has?

 

He can’t ratchet down that boyish smile.

 

Naysayers have always been around to challenge any human dream. And that’s good! But that objection just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m talking about a future where the aged aren’t
old
.

 

Back to Anne Harter, in Oxford:

 

Dr. Kurton might want to fund an association study for the wishful-thinking gene.

 

The match is as unfair as genetics. The scientist is brighter, more informed, and more relaxed. All Harter can do is sink her teeth into his ankle and hang on.

Kurton, back in the Maine cabin:

 

People want to live longer
and
better. When they can do both, they will. Ethics is just going to have to catch up.

 

Tonia Schiff sits, her knee to his, enjoying the ride:

 

How do you think the market will price the fountain of youth?

 

He does this funny little head-bow of concentration, like he’s never been asked this question and he wants to think about it, for the sheer pleasure of thought.

 

Well, the market seems to price food and water fairly effectively. It could use a little help pricing medications, I suppose.

 

Schiff, in something like awe at the man’s ingenuousness:

 

Do you really mean to live forever?

 

He rocks good-naturedly and squeezes the back of his neck.

 

We’ll see how far I get. I’m on calorie restriction, daily workout, and a few supplements, especially megadoses of resveratrol. If I can keep myself healthy for another twenty years, at our present rate of discovery . . .

 

The techno beat starts up again. Cross-fade to a slowly focusing midrange shot, and the genomicist floats twenty stories in the air over the apocalyptic dreamscape of Hachik
Crossing, Shibuya, Tokyo. Below him spreads Times Square squared—spectral neon blazes fringing a bank of LCD screens each several stories high, towering over seven major thoroughfares that converge in the world’s largest pedestrian scramble, which, from twenty stories up, looks like mitosis under the microscope. Multilevel train station, bass-thumping department stores, costume outlets, twisting warrens of mirror-lined game arcades . . . The streetlights stop all traffic, and the accumulated mounds of crowd disgorge into one another, massing into the intersection from all sides in an orderly, omnidirectional tsunami.

Thomas Kurton gazes down on this orgy of the urban dispossessed. The camera follows his gaze: kids as bowerbirds; kids as noble savages; kids as Kogal Californians; kids from the outer reaches of galaxies far, far away; kids as baggy, knee-socked, schoolgirl-sailor prostitutes; kids
as mutants—cosplay, Catgirl, GothLoli, maid-nurse-bunny—all in a gentle, frenzied, nightly theatrical performance of rebellion that will wander home at four in the morning to broom-closet apartments and wake up two hours later to head to classes or clerical jobs.

The scientist looks down into the costumed mass and smiles.

 

We’re trapped in a faulty design, stuck in a bad plot. We want to become something else. It’s what we’ve wanted since the story started. And now we can have it.

 

The camera follows him into a glass elevator and plunges down into the maelstrom. The transparent capsule opens, and Thomas Kurton disappears into the carnival of midnight Shibuya.

Tonia Schiff appears briefly out of character at the seven-minute mark in “The Genie and the Genome.” She’s seated near the front of that University of Tokyo auditorium, looking nothing like the show host who scampers through the interview segments. Her alert amusement disappears. For two seconds, her aura teeters, scared by the show onstage. Then the camera dives back into the sea of eager faces behind her in the auditorium.

She surfaces again ten seconds later, in the milling crowd. Even the way she stands and chats feels somehow experimental. Something in her hand movements hints at her childhood in New York and Washington, her adolescence in Brussels and Bonn. She speaks to one scientist in flowing German, but stops for a moment to greet a passing acquaintance with a few snippets of Japanese.

She turns to a couple next to her and says something that makes them bloom. She learned the trick from her father, a career diplomat: how to make everyone she meets feel like a conversational genius. From her mother, a medical policy adviser for international relief agencies, she’s learned how to turn a person’s worst impulses to good use. That is the secret of her edutainment fame: assure us all that we might still become the authors of our own lives. She’ll use the skill again, later, on a New York soundstage, filming the lead-in to this show’s segment. A flash of cosmopolitan charm undercut by a sardonic grin: “My kind of future would probably ask, ‘If I let
you have your way with me tonight, will you still respect me in the morning?’ ”

From childhood through the age of twenty, Tonia Schiff nurtured the belief (acquired in a series of elite international schools) that the deepest satisfaction available to anyone lay in those cultural works that survive the test of Long Time. But a collision with postcolonialism in her second semester studying art history at Brown shook her faith in masterpieces. A course in the Marxist interpretation of the Italian Renaissance left her furious. For a little while longer she soldiered on, fighting the good fight for artistic transcendence, until she realized that all the commanding officers had already negotiated safe passage away from the rout.

In her junior year, vulnerable now to the world’s corruption, she belatedly discovered (blindingly obvious to everyone else alive) the lock on human consciousness enjoyed by the medium that her parents always treated as a lethal pandemic that would one day be successfully eradicated. At the age of twenty, Tonia Schiff, fair-haired, blue-eyed heir of dying high culture, at last got roughed up by television, and loved every minute of it.

In short order, she discovered:

Broadcast was what Grimm’s fairy tales wanted to be when they grew up

Broadcast was an eight-lane autobahn into the amygdala

Broadcast was the only addiction that left you
more
socially functional

Broadcast was what
Homo ergaster
daydreamed about, on the shores of Lake Turkana, between meals

One semester of Modern Visual Media Studies taught her that she didn’t want to analyze the stuff; she wanted to
make
it. After graduation, she talked her way into a Manhattan production studio, reassuring them that the Ivy liberal-arts degree could be overcome. She served time as a fact-checker for local news, where she learned, to her astonishment, what her country really looked like. From there, she worked her way onto a team specializing in archival footage for the Hitler Channel.