Review: Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

Published: 2020
Read: December 2020

Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever
by Chip Walter

Next school year I am going to be co-teaching a class on the science and science fiction of life-extension technologies (e.g., cryonics, mind uploading, and so on); this is one of the books we are thinking of assigning. The book covers a number of Silicon Valley-associated figures who are working on how to cure aging; it's framed by a discussion of Alcor and cryonic preservation of corpses, but Walter's main focus is on those people who are trying to stop interventions like that from every being necessary in the first place.

To me, the most interesting part was Walter's thesis about why research into these technologies have take off now; basically, he argues that the baby boomers are the first generation to see most people actually die of aging, and they're also the first generation where you can see a doctor and get cured of most things, thanks to widespread vaccination and the use of antibiotics. So they would also be the first generation to think of aging itself as a problem that can be medically solved, as opposed to an inevitability.

The focus of the book is on the people funding and doing this research; I found this kind of interesting, but maybe not interesting enough in proportion to the amount of time spent on the bios of a bunch of (frequently obnoxious sounding) venture capitalists. He also discusses some of the science behind it all. If there's a weakness to this book, it's that it's all a bit breathless and credulous; it felt to me like it was repeating these people's talking points instead of, say, interrogating them. I would have appreciated an outside scientific voice in the narrative, someone who could say if these people were actually pursuing viable lines of research, or if it was all an incredibly expensive vanity project.

 

It's very well researched (Walter did a lot of original interviews) and it gives you a lot to chew on, but I do wish the book had done some of this chewing for you, so to speak. (Okay, that's a bad metaphor.) I don't know enough about the science to know if I should believe in these technologies as they are presented. But maybe that's asking too much for what is clearly meant to be an easy-read pop science book. I think it will be very useful to teach, and with some good framing, I think our students will get a lot out of it.