The crucial difference was that life extension had been achieved by developing vaccines and antibiotics that weren’t conceived with the aim of prolonging life, but rather, to help combat illnesses, an unarguably noble goal. The nuance was critical. And only recently had a paradigm shift occurred in the medical-research community’s attitude towards aging, from perceiving it as something inevitable and predestined, to considering it something far less draconian:
A disease.
A simple analogy was that, until recently, the term Alzheimer’s was only used when referring to sufferers of that form of dementia who were under a certain age — around sixty-five or so. Any older than that, and they didn’t have a disease — they were just senile, and there was no point in doing anything about it. It was part of growing old. This changed in the 1970s, when a demented ninety-year-old was treated no differently from a forty-year-old with Alzheimer’s — both were now equally considered to be suffering from a disease that medical researchers were working hard to understand and cure.
Much in the same way, “old age” was now, more and more, being viewed as an illness. A highly complex, multifaceted, perplexing illness. But an illness nevertheless.
And illnesses can be cured.
The key realization that triggered this new approach was a deceptively simple answer to the fundamental question “Why do we age?” The answer was, simply put, that we age because, in nature, nothing else did.
Or, more accurately, almost nothing ever did.
For thousands of years — throughout virtually all of human evolution — in the wild and away from the cosseting care and advances of the civilized world, humans and animals hardly ever reached old age. They were ravaged by predators, disease, starvation, and weather.
They didn’t get a chance to grow old.
And nature’s preoccupation has always been to make sure its organisms reproduce, to perpetuate the species — nothing more. All it asked of our bodies, all we were designed to do from an evolutionary point of view, was to reach reproductive age, have babies, and nurture them until they were old enough to survive in the wild on their own.
That’s it.
That was all nature cared about.
Beyond that, we were redundant — man and beast alike. All of the cells that made us up had no reason to keep us alive beyond that.
And since we didn’t stand a chance of surviving much beyond the age of reproduction, then nature’s efforts were — rightly — concentrated on stacking the odds for us to reach that age and replicate. Natural selection only cared about our reaching reproductive age, and — rightly, and again unfortunately for those of us who wanted to stick around a little longer — it chose a short life span for us to reproduce in because that was more efficient: It made for shorter time between generations, more mixing of genes, which gave greater adaptability to threatening environments. All of which meant that a process — aging — that never actually manifested itself in nature, in the wild, couldn’t have evolved genetically.
Nature, while it was evolving us, didn’t know what aging was.
In other words, aging wasn’t genetically programmed into us.
This had led to a radical new outlook on aging.
If we weren’t programmed to die, if we were killed by wear and tear — so the argument now went — then maybe, just maybe, we could be fixed.
Chapter 49
A burning twinge of smelling salts assaulted Corben’s senses and shook him back to life.
He was immediately aware of a sharp pain that throbbed at the back of his head, and he felt oddly uncomfortable. He realized that his hands and feet were all tied to each other behind his back, his legs bent all the way backwards in a reverse-fetal position. He was also still in his boxers. His mouth and cheek were pressed against something hard and prickly that felt like sandpaper, and his throat felt parched. Instinctively, he tried to lick his lips, but found dry soil instead. He spat the grit off and coughed.
His eyes darted around, rushing to process his surroundings, and he saw that he was lying on the ground, on his side, out in some kind of field. Somewhere quiet. The headlights of a parked car were beating down on him; beyond them, he could see that it was still night, although the faint glimmer of a morning sun was hinting from behind a mountain range to his right.
A mountain range. To the east. He archived the thought, guessing that he must be somewhere in the Bekáa Valley. And if it was almost dawn, it meant he’d been out for at least a couple of hours. Which tallied with how long it would take to drive there from Beirut, especially at that time of night when the roads were deserted.
As his nerves endings flickered awake, more pains and bruises announced themselves across his body. He tried to shift to a position that was less awkward, but his effort was rewarded with a sharp kick from a booted foot to his ribs that sent a searing pain through his side.
He coiled forward, straining against the nylon cuffs on his limbs, still on his side, his face and side digging into the rough soil. He turned upwards and saw the pockmarked man leering down at him.
“Khalas,” he heard a voice snap. Enough.
He sensed movement from the corner of his eye. The man who owned the voice was approaching through the glare of the headlights. From his low vantage point, Corben could only make out the shoes — leather moccasins, expensive-looking — and the dark slacks. The face towered far out of reach.
The man stepped right up to him until his feet were inches from Corben’s face. Corben tried to roll slowly, awkwardly, slightly more onto his back, but his bent legs blocked the move. The man just stood there, staring down at him as if he were an insect. Corben couldn’t really make out his features, but he could see that the man was slim, clean-shaven, and had longish silvery hair.
The feeling of vulnerability and helplessness was disconcerting. As if to confirm it, the man raised his foot and brought it over Corben’s face, then casually pressed down, slowly, resting the sole of his shoe on his nose, not really putting his weight into it at first, then gradually leaning down harder, crushing his nose and cheeks, sending an excruciating pain shooting across his face as his head was mashed into the ground.
Corben tried to wriggle free, but the man’s foot had him pinned down. He let out a tortured, half-muffled yell for him to stop.
The man didn’t, prolonging Corben’s agony a few more seconds before finally pulling his foot away. He glowered down at him, studying him. “You have something I want,” he said, his voice laced with a mocking disdain.
Corben spluttered the sand and grit out of his mouth. “And you’ve got something — someone — we want.”
The man raised his foot again, hovering it just above Corben’s face, threatening. Corben didn’t flinch. The man just held his foot there for a beat, as if he were about to squash a bug, before pulling it back. “I don’t think you’re in any position to play hardball,” he told him calmly. “I want the book. Where is it?”
“I don’t have it.” Through his daze, Corben registered the man’s accent. Southern European, for sure. Italian, possibly. He stored the thought.
The man nodded to someone behind Corben. Before he could see who it was, another sharp kick plowed into his side.
Corben screamed out with pain. “I’m telling you I don’t have it, God damn it.”
The man seemed surprised. “Of course you do. You have the Iraqi.”
“I don’t have it yet, alright? I’ll have it tomorrow.” Corben’s voice bristled with rage. He tried to get a clearer look at the man’s face, but his vision was still warped from the pressure of the man’s shoe, and the car’s headlights were blinding the little eyesight he had. “He didn’t have it on him,” he added angrily.