Science and Health—Possibilities, Probabilities, and Limitations

up until just a few years ago, a tour of the exhibition of art works now on display at the Museum of Natural History would have left the impression, in most minds, of events very remote in time, pieces of very ancient history, a strange and disturbing world now well behind us. For the modern mind, especially the everyday modern mind now so adept at dismissing the memories of the great wars of this century with all those deaths, the notion that great numbers of human beings can die all at once from a single cause is as far away and alien as the pyramids. Even more strange is the notion that human death could ever be so visible, so out in the open. Our idea about death is that it takes place privately, in the dark, away from other people. There is something faintly indecent, wrong, about dying in full view of the public.

This is understandable, at least for those of us who live in the Western, industrialized world and have grown to adulthood in the last half of this century. Dying is now the exceptional thing to do, almost an aberration, in our culture. We concede the possibility, even in our bad moments the inevitability, but never before its time. Moreover, that time, the appropriate and acceptable moment, is being pushed further and further into the distance ahead. When the century began, the average life expectancy for Americans and Europeans was around 46 years; now the life span for a great many of us to bet on will be nearly double that number. Excluding war, of course, in which case all bets are off.

Indeed, the nearest equivalent to the plagues that afflicted human populations in earlier centuries has become, for our own kind of society, dying itself. We know in our bones that we will all die, sooner or later, but we find it harder and harder to put up with the idea; we want the later to be later still. We think of dying as though it were failure, humiliation, losing a game in which there ought to be winners. Many of us take the view that it can indeed be put off, stalled off anyway, by changing the way we live. "Lifestyle" moved into the language by way of its connection with getting sick and dying. We jog, skip, attend aerobic classes, eat certain "food groups" as though food itself was a new kind of medicine, even try to change our thoughts to make our cells sit up and behave like healthy cells; meditation is taken as medication by some of the most ardent meditators. We do these things not so much to keep fit, which is a healthy exercise and good for the mind, but to fend off dying, which is an effort not so good for the mind, maybe in the long run bad for the mind.

A certain worry about death is, of course, nothing new; it is the oldest of normal emotions. But it does seem to me strange that the anxiety has acquired more urgency, and plagued us more in the last years of this peculiar century than ever before, during the very years when most of us have had a good shot at living longer lives than any previous human population.

Partly, I suppose, we fear death more acutely because of this very fact. It never occurred to us, until quite recently, that we had any say at all in the matter; death just came. But now, when it seems that we can put it off, for at least as long as we have in recent decades, why not still longer? If instead of surviving for an average lifetime of three or four decades, as used to be the rule, we can stretch it out to eight or nine, why not fix things so that we keep running for 12 or 15, and even then why stop?

But now, at the moment of such high expectations, we are being brought up short, with a glimpse—a brief and early one, to be sure—of what...