Prolong, farewell: The gruesome history of our efforts to live ‘forever’

It is considered the disease of civilisation. Why die when you can live?

Through history, humans have taken strange measures in attempts to postpone the end. They have invented elixirs, sipped on molten gold, drunk the blood of younger people.

When this was found not to work — when no amount of soothsaying, sacrificing or studying of omens could keep even the most powerful kings from dying — the ancients shifted focus to the hereafter. Pyramids were built and furnished; mummies were “laid to rest” in pyramids and caves.
Outside, the race continued, in strange ways.
China: Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, creator of the Great Wall and terracotta army, was so terrified of death that he outlawed discussion of the subject, during his reign in the 3rd century BCE. He also launched a nationwide search for the elixir of life.
The court sorcerer Xu Fu said it might be found on a certain island in the East China Sea, and offered to head there, on a well-funded expedition. He never returned.
Qin died at 49, from mercury poisoning. He was buried with this terracotta army.
Mercury, incidentally, was considered medicinal, and possibly life-lengthening, for centuries, including in Ancient Persia, China and Greece.
Fast-forward 500 years from the reign of Qin, and gold was fixed upon as the solution to eternal youth and life, in China. Ancient Egyptians had drunk gilded water too, in the belief that since the metal did not corrode, it would fortify those who consumed it.
It turned out that it did the opposite. The body cannot metabolise gold, and so in trace amounts, it passes through. But, as a beautiful young woman in 16th-century France would discover, in larger doses, it can kill.
The woman was Diane de Poitiers, mistress and adviser to King Henry II, and it was said that the secret to her beauty was an anti-ageing tonic that contained the yellow metal. Records indicate that she was drinking gold chloride mixed with diethyl ether. It is likely what killed her.
When French archaeologists exhumed her body in 2009, they found levels of gold poisoning so high that there were traces of the element in her hair.
Greece: Centuries before all this, the 6th-century BCE mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, ever a no-nonsense man, preached to his disciples that a vegetarian diet of fruit, acorns, vegetables and grains, with no meat, wine or beans, was the key to a long, healthy life. The Pythagorean diet was based also on a belief in reincarnation; if one did not eat meat, he believed, one would not be reborn a cow and slaughtered.
Italy, Germany: By the 15th century, blood was making a comeback. Sacrifices had long been used to appease the gods in attempts to buy more time. Now, it was being spilt in a different way. The Italian priest Marsilio Ficino recommended that older people suck the blood of an adolescent, to regain their vitality.
In 1615, the German doctor Andreas Libavius was one of the first physicians to propose blood transfusions for this purpose. He toyed with the idea of connecting the arteries of an old man with those of a young man, so that “the hot and spirituous blood of the young man will pour into the old one as if it were from a fountain of youth”.
In 1924, the physician Alexander Bogdanov injected himself with the blood of younger people. He reportedly felt stronger at first, but, over time, contracted diseases from the infusions.
The idea continues to hold sway. Entrepreneur and “body hacker” Bryan Johnson, 46, has been receiving infusions of blood plasma drawn from his teenaged son, Talmage Johnson. And a now defunct American start-up named Ambrosia, which operated from 2017 to 2019, offered “young plasma” for $8,000 a litre.
France: In the late-19th century, a strange set of experiments began here.
At the age of 72, a doctor named Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard began to inject himself with a fluid made from the ground-up testicles of dogs and guinea pigs. The experiment did not produce any evidence of retarded ageing, but it was the first attempt at endocrine therapy, and his ideas on hormones would mark the start of research that culminated in the hormone-replacement therapy administered medically today.
Not long after, in 1920s France, a surgeon named Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff would take the monkey fix a step further. He believed that Brown-Séquard had been on the right track, but had gone about it wrong. Human ageing could be halted and even reversed, he said, by transplanting monkey testicle tissue onto the testicles of a man.
About 45 surgeons used his technique to operate on more than 500 men around the world, including in India. Voronoff didn’t focus on men alone. He transplanted ovaries from female monkeys into women, and once ovaries from a woman into a monkey. He then inseminated the monkey with human sperm with, thankfully, no result.
Voronoff halted his experiments in 1930, as medicine made advances that included the isolation of testosterone. But he remained an advocate of the benefits until his death in 1951, aged 85.