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Review: Mortal Coil by David Boyd Haycock
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826622.100&print=true

25 June 2008
Druin Burch

SUBTITLED "A short history of living longer", Mortal Coil is more a
compilation of fantasies than a story of science. It looks at the
fervent human desire to believe that eternal life is just around the
corner, attainable with some combination of elixirs, morals, diets
or drugs, a desire that has filled human history, pervaded
philosophy, literature and religion, and fuelled a 400-year
scientific quest for immortality.

Haycock presents some of those, from the 17th century to the present
day, who have taken up the quest for lives considerably longer than
three score years and ten. These are people dreaming of miracles,
whether summoned by alchemy and asparagus or testicle transplants
and vitamins. Even when the story moves into the 21st century, and
the trappings of technology become modern, the mindset remains the
same: experts confidently pronouncing that their remedies- from
mercury and tobacco through to telomerase inhibitors- are the ones
humanity has been waiting for. Haycock charts these shifting
suggestions for extending human lifespan, none of which seems to
have worked in the slightest.

Mortal Coil has a lively cast, from Benjamin Franklin and Sigmund
Freud through to today's supporters of cryonics and caloric
restriction. Credulity, in the end, betrays nearly all of them- and
the author too. Haycock makes little effort to determine which
theories turned out to be false, or even which ones, being neither
tested nor testable, were never theories at all. Explaining that a
17th-century physician helped his patients using "powerful
sympathetic medicines" made from dried toads is colourful and
evocative- and plain wrong.

Haycock has a historian's preference for reporting people's ideas as
they saw them, not exploring the extent to which they might have
been correct. He portrays science as a series of enthusiasms and
arguments, not a system for identifying and eliminating errors. When
he does try to provide factual contexts, he lacks a scientist's gift
for differentiating associations from causal links or good
experiments from bad. He presents four centuries of half-examined
myths that neither constitute a coherent narrative nor appear to
have added to human longevity.

What comes across most strongly from these stories is the way
health-beliefs mirror moral ideologies. Whether believing in
vegetables or meat, sex or abstinence, exercise or climate or
medicines, people have been content to let their values form their
prejudices, and then to accept their prejudices as truths. Haycock
could have done more to explore this idea, both when explaining the
present and when retelling the past.

Mortal Coil is an enjoyable book, full of fascinating oddities. But
its failure to give the reader any way of making sense of medical
history, or of distinguishing poisonous fads from lifesaving facts,
undermines the efforts of those who have laboured to separate truth
from fiction in the quest to bring us longer lives.

Death - Delve deeper into the riddle of human mortality in our
special report.

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Weblinks

Mortal Coil, Yale University Press
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300117783