Never Say Die
Never Say Die
Groups that promise their members immortality are alive and well, and their charismatic leaders invite you to join—forever.
My Generation, Sept-Oct. 2001[Story no longer online? Read this]
"I'm mad at death," declares Jim Strole, holding a microphone and looking around at his congregation, People Unlimited, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Aside from his dyed hair, Strole, 52, has the look of a computer programmer or maybe a teacher. But to his followers—40 or 50 people who pay $10 to attend one of these twice-weekly meetings—Strole and his partners, Bernadeane and Charles Brown, are prophets heralding a new age. Their followers believe that the trio is physically immortal and will teach them the secret of everlasting life.
(...)
Strole walks around the room, laying hands on members—many of whom are gray-haired and frail. A pumped-up bodybuilder catches his eye, and for a long minute the two stare into each other's faces. When Strole finally moves away, another woman, painfully stooped with arthritis, holds out her gnarled hands to him. But he moves past her and passes the microphone on. One by one, the members stand and declare that they too will transcend cancer and arthritis. They will leave mere mortals behind—husbands, wives, children—without guilt.
(...)
Immortality clubs promote a dream that has been with us almost since the beginning of human consciousness. As scientists are advancing our understanding of aging and giving us hope for longer, fuller lives, these upstart immortality congregations and their charismatic leaders already offer us their version of Life Everlasting.
Their message can hold a special appeal for older people entering a new, inquisitive phase of life, says Ronald Enroth, an expert on new religious movements and a professor at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. "Most of these groups target eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds, but when people feel that they are getting near the end of the trail, some enter a phase not unlike the one many of us went through when we were young adults. They begin a kind of spiritual search. These groups know what those people are looking for."
Organizations promising their members immortality, experts say, can crop up anywhere from wilderness areas to boomtowns, but are especially prevalent in retirement areas of the South and the West, where people may feel isolated.
"If you believe, really believe, that someone could offer you physical immortality," says Gordon Melton, author of The Encyclopedia of American Religions , "you'd jump at it. I know I would."
A few hours before the People Unlimited revival meeting, I had the chance to speak with Bernadeane Brown, Charles Brown and Jim Strole. They grew increasingly, if politely, frustrated by my questions. They simply couldn't seem to make me understand how they have made themselves immortal. It was a transformation in their cells, they said. I must reject the "urge to age and die" they told me, and live forever. I felt a headache coming on. It was like reading one of those "Lose weight/earn money" ads. You know there's got to be a catch.
And here it is: It's impossible to be immortal on your own, Charles explained. You have to surround yourself with other immortals, specifically, People Unlimited. And that means going to lectures, buying tapes and paying $375 to attend the twice-yearly "convergences" (weeklong seminars). Most members also pay People Unlimited between $100 and $700 a month. Some people might call that a scam, but Bernadeane, 63, Charles—a former nightclub singer turned minister—65, and Strole, a one-time junkyard owner, see themselves as the ones being persecuted.
"If you tell people you're physically immortal, they think you're weird," frets Bernadeane, who, with her helmet of white hair and thick coating of makeup, appears very mortal indeed.
In 1991, while working under the name The Eternal Flame, the three jump-started their cause by facing off against Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwell on "Larry King Live." By suggesting that the Christian doctrine of life after death was killing people, "we made Falwell squirm," recalls Strole. Two years later, they ran afoul of former members of their group who accused the three immortals of breaking up marriages and splitting families. When those accusations hit the media, Charles, Bernadeane and Strole reconstituted under a new name, People Unlimited. They incorporated their for-profit "professional coaching" business in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1996, and their tax filings remain private under section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code.
One 86-year-old member, Drusilla, moved from St. Louis to join the group. "I feel alive to the possibility of living without death," she says, as if she is reciting a lesson. What happens when a member sickens or dies? Drusilla looks stunned. Then she shrugs. "I'm responsible for my own health," she replies mechanically.
(...)
For many people struggling to achieve earthly immortality, Dr. Roy Walford, 77, a pioneer of the Calorie-Restriction Anti-Aging Diet, is the nutritionist of choice. A respected gerontologist, pathologist and professor emeritus at UCLA, Walford has spent the last 20 years encouraging hundreds of people to all but give up food in order to live forever.
We meet at his loft near Venice Beach in California, a comfortable, book-lined apartment. The author of The Anti-Aging Plan and Beyond the 120 Year Diet, Walford bases his Calorie-Restriction Diet on his 1960s research that showed that laboratory mice fed an extremely low-calorie diet lived to be the human equivalent of 165.
"We can't be certain yet how it works," admits Walford, but he points to studies that show semi-starvation caused mice's bodies to shift into "repair mode" rather than "growth mode."
Walford and others who follow his Calorie-Restriction (CR) diet believe that by living just a click on the bathroom scale above starvation they can extend their life span to at least 120 years, and maybe indefinitely. Some hard-core "CRonies," as they call themselves, complain in Internet chat rooms that in this pursuit they've grown morbidly thin, snappish, oversensitive to cold, uninterested in sex and very, very nervous about the dessert menu. They also trade recipes, discuss their fear of Thanksgiving and their loathing of death ("It is a horror beyond imagining") and dissect Walford's life and work in the reverential tones usually reserved for a deity.
Walford, who, at 5 feet 7 inches tall and 135 pounds, looks frail, wears a red bandanna knotted over his balding head and a rakish Fu Manchu mustache. For a man who plans to live forever, he's alarmingly feeble and cannot walk unaided. He moves around his kitchen by hanging from a series of straps slung overhead. In explaining his infirmity, Walford says he suffered brain damage during a biosphere experiment back in 1991. He had volunteered to be locked into Biosphere 2, a three-acre, nine-story terrarium built by Texas billionaire Ed Bass. During the two years he spent inside, Walford claims, he was exposed to toxins that damaged his nervous system.
(...)
Extremists actually may be shortening their lives by endangering their health, counters Barbara C. Hansen, a prominent physiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who has performed calorie-restriction experiments on primates for 19 years. Undernutrition can cause thinning of the bones and compromising of the immune system, she explains, adding, "I'm not even going to comment on what that kind of diet would do to your mental state."
(...)
In contrast to Walford, futurist Max More believes that computers, not food rationing, hold the key to eternal life. More is the president of the Extropy Institute, a Southern California group with about 1,700 members (called Extropians) who pay up to $300 in yearly dues and from $245 to $375 to attend More's lectures.
A fitness buff who monitors scientific breakthroughs feverishly, More (he changed his name from O'Connor in 1990 after graduating from Oxford University) lives in a modest bungalow in Southern California with his wife, longtime futurist artist and lecturer Natasha Vita-More. He preaches that our intelligence should be augmented by computer circuitry, our emotions refined by drugs and our lives extended by having tiny robots (called "nanobots") injected into our veins. Struck down by a terminal disease? Have your personality uploaded onto a computer so you can live on—good-looking, prosperous and cheerful for eternity.
(...)
What about people who think it's too darn creepy to live on a hard drive? More looks as if the notion offends him. "People who are opposed to this kind of life extension tend to be unhappy with the life they have now. They don't want it to continue." He pauses for a beat. "Eventually they will come to be regarded like the Amish."
If all else fails, there's always Alcor, a nonprofit company in Scottsdale, Arizona, which will freeze you in the hope that a future generation will thaw you out.
I am standing in the storage deck of one of the largest "life-enhancement" facilities in the world. It's a cheaply constructed building in a warehouse district near a small dusty airport, but inside, the view is arresting. There are five 25-foot aluminum silos packed with 44 human bodies, human brains and the odd cat and dog—all frozen solid at negative 320 degrees Fahrenheit.
In the distant future they will all be revived—with memory and personality intact—and will be given a chance to live again in a utopian world of plenty, says Alcor's president, Linda Chamberlain, whose mother, father-in-law and cat are all frozen in the silos. Exactly how this will be accomplished is still unknown.
"Most people aren't aware of how science is going to change the future," says Chamberlain, a former property manager who's been involved with cryonics for 30 years. But some share her optimism. About 500 other yet-living people have already ponied up $50,000 to have their brains frozen, or $120,000 for the full monty. "Most of the people who sign up are men in the computer fields," she explains. "They see the body as a machine that can be fixed." Alcor has frozen people who have died of cancer, heart attacks and old age. One man was frozen after he was shot in the head at close range. Famed tripster Timothy Leary was talked out of the idea at the last minute, much to the dismay of Alcor staff.
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My Generation is a publication of the AARP
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