The value of life: reflections on technology, health and mortality

Greetings! I hope your new year is off to a great start and you are looking forward to what’s to come. Here’s a few random news tidbits this week: As you may have heard, NBC News reported Dec. 17 that a 53-year-old grandmother from Alabama is hopeful for a “new chance of life” after undergoing a kidney transplant using a gene-edited pig kidney. Looney’s one and only human kidney was failing, making her a candidate for the procedure. She is the fifth living person to receive a genetically modified pig organ. The previous four recipients died shortly after surgery, but Looney is in a better state than they were and is recovering well.

The kidney that Looney received had to receive a combination of gene edits to make it compatible with the human body and keep the immune system from attacking the foreign tissue. Multiple companies are already “engineering pigs to be more humanlike” for transplant suitability, reported AP News.

According to NPR, these bioengineered pigs could “someday provide an unlimited supply of kidneys, livers, hearts, and other organs” for human transplantation, alleviating the current chronic shortage and saving “thousands of patients every year.”

“It would change everything,” Dr Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone’s Transplant Institute, and the lead surgeon in Looney’s operation, told NPR. “I think it would revolutionize medicine, for sure.”

The issue of transplanting animal organs into humans is still experimental and controversial, reports Abby Wilson in writing for The Week. While there are no U.S. laws on the books prohibiting xenotransplantation, there are animal welfare laws that relate to the issue. The FDA has not yet approved clinical trials but allows “compassionate use” xenotransplants for patients who would not receive a human donor organ in time to save their life.

There has been discussion on the FDA approving the world’s first clinical trials yet this year. If approved, the trials would take place over the course of several years, and if successful, companies are prepared to create large “porcine technology” facilities that could produce up to 2,000 organs per year, reports AP News. -As much as technology has advanced to prevent disease and perhaps even allow us to replace failing organs, we still are not able to escape death. Furthermore, a couple of recent studies suggest human beings may have capped out the number of years we can live on this planet. A study published this past October in the journal Nature Aging found that, barring a transformative breakthrough in medical science, people will top out at a maximum age of about 87 — specifically, 90 for women and 84 for men.

“We’re basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we’re going to live,” said the lead study author S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, to The New York Times. “We’re squeezing less and less life out of these life-extending technologies.”

The U.S. life expectancy has largely stalled out since 2010, with a stagnating decline in cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality being the main culprit, determined a 2020 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.

One other study published Dec. 5, 2024, in The Lancet also found that U.S. life expectancy was only supposed to improve minimally over the next 25 years, increasing from 78.3 years in 2022 to 80.4 years in 2050. The study suggested that, based on current trajectories, the U.S. would lag behind other countries in life expectancy gains, putting it behind most other high-income nations and some middle-income nations. The U.S. is expected to fall to 66th out of 204 countries assessed in 2050, down from 49th in 2022.

There are a few takeaways from these findings. One, considering our declining rank globally, as a country we need to take a closer look at our health, particularly the foods and drugs we consume. On an individual level, we can and should take steps to live healthy lives, including eating well, exercising, getting enough sleep, reducing stress and all of those things that help a person live longer. If you don’t have your health, it’s very difficult to achieve any of your personal goals and dreams, or be actively involved in family members’ and friends’ lives.

On the flip side, a person can only prolong his or her life so much. Our human bodies eventually wear out. And, even though these studies give the average life expectancy, we all know people who have died well before then. Our number could be called at any time. It just takes one car accident, cancer diagnosis or deranged act of violence and that could be it. Are you ready? Have you made peace with God and others? Do your actions line up with how you want to live your life and how you want to be remembered? Perhaps these are strange questions to think about at the beginning of another year, but on another level, perhaps not. After all, as the saying goes, begin with the end in mind.

Being reminded of our own immortality through an encounter with death has the ability to shake us out of our stupor. So explains Steve Taylor, psychology lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, in a story from his book “Out of the Darkness.”

“Tony, a man from Manchester, had a heart attack aged 52, at a time when he was a successful businessman, working 60 hours a week,” Taylor wrote. “When he recovered, he felt like he had awoken from a dream. All of a sudden, he was aware of the value of things that he had always taken for granted, such as the people in his life… As a result of this transformation, Tony decided to sell his business and to use part of the money to buy a launderette. In the local area, he was known as the ‘launderette guru’ because he used to tell his customers about his transformational experience and remind them not to take anything in their lives for granted. As he told me, ‘I know what it means to be alive, how wonderful it is. And I want to share that with as many other people as I can.’”