Reviewed by Harriet Douty Dwinell

Here’s a verbal Rorschach test: Does your heart quicken or sink when you read the title, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith? It certainty leaves little room for other than a binary response. This age is coming, Sonia Arrison pronounces, and this is what it will look like.

Or might look like. Arrison’s extended life spans — or, as she prefers, health spans — of up to 150 years have not yet arrived, and her paragraphs are strewn with “mights” and “coulds” and “if-then” grammatical constructions. Arrison leaps from preliminary research often conducted on creatures or body parts far less complex than a human’s to the assumption that applying the research to human beings is a slam dunk. She moves from promise to reality and navigates slippery slopes like an Olympic luge competitor.

And yet, despite these flaws, her final chapter focuses the mind, suggesting that we are at a “tipping point,” on the verge of marshaling societal will to make these things happen.

Sonia Arrison is a senior fellow at Pacific Research Institute and an author and analyst whose works and opinions have appeared across the mainstream press and broadcast media. She is an associate founder (which means she provided $100,000 in startup funds) and a board member of Singularity University, described on its website as an “interdisciplinary university whose mission is to assemble, educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.” SU faculty members appear frequently in Arrison’s book. Arrison writes from inside the phenomena she reports on.

Arrison begins by chronicling the historic desire to live longer and then attempts to allay fears that life extension would lead to a crushing increase in world population and a drain on finite resources. She tackles head-on the issue of “nature,” giving voice to those on the right and left who feel increased life spans are “unnatural.” But what is “natural,” she asks, when as recently as the creation of Social Security, the average lifespan was 64.75 years, essentially 15 years less than now. Who is so cruel, she asks, to say it’s natural for an individual to suffer with Huntington’s disease, for example, if technologists can flip the gene that causes it?

Arrison makes little distinction between research to cure disease and research to extend life. Her survey of advances in medicine and biotechnology looks beyond the repair and replacement of worn-out body parts to regenerative medicine that can lead to growing new organisms and tissues, manipulating genes and arresting the aging process by turning parts of our DNA on and off, a process now foreseeable with the mapping of the human genome.

It’s hard to imagine what a 130-year-old man or woman, still healthy and vigorous, would look like, and Arrison is no help. She can postulate, using terms a sociologist might use. She can present charts and graphs, which she does. But no one can know what human beings such as she presents will be like, so we can only imagine, given our limited experience with aging people, the creatures she hypothesizes. The two most dramatic consequences of Arrison’s longevity are extended fertility, of both female and male, and expanded work spans. In today’s world, the occasional babies born to 70-year-old couples, Arrison says, are not biological offspring but the result of reproductive technologies and donated eggs and sperm. Future parents in advanced chronological years, Arrison says, may produce natural offspring, conceived through a variety of technologies.Young women may be able to freeze their ovaries along with their eggs for later use. Or they may be able to freeze pieces of ovarian tissue which, when later reintroduced into the body, will signal the ovaries to again produce eggs.

Men, too, are not overlooked, though their “biological clocks” do not tick as loudly. Pointing to a 2009 claim by British researchers that they could create human sperm cells from stem cells, Arrison extrapolates that it might be possible to create sperm in the lab.

In this new world, children may have natural siblings separated by as many as 20, 50 or 70 years, with age differences “of, say, eighty or ninety years, between parents.” However, not all couples will experience such an age gap, Arrison concludes, for the ability of a woman to bear children at an advanced age may stop her man’s eye from roving.

To support themselves during their extended life spans, free from disease and with the health and energy of much younger people, Arrison envisions people having serial careers. A person might be a doctor for the first 60 years, a businessman for the next 60. Training for new careers will not be a problem, for the added years will provide  time for further education. And with all those extra weekends — Arrison actually totes them up — today’s harassed people will have time for culture, hobbies and leisure. As for younger workers whose career path may be blocked by 101-year-old CEOs, Arrison suggests they start small companies and points to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates  and Sergey Brin as examples of people who did just that.

100 Plus is filled with such giddy assumptions and slippery slopes. Annotated footnotes provide much information about sources, but it is hard to know how authoritative the information is, because much of it comes from the mainstream press, not from working scientists. Wired Magazine and the New York Times seem to produce the most quotes. “Oprah,” “The Colbert Report,” “Sixty Minutes,” Dr. Oz, GQ and YouTube are also cited enthusiastically. Arrison seems particularly ecstatic when Time magazine includes as a top 2010 invention an “alternate organ-making method” whereby computers use stem cells in place of ink to create new organs.  (I was impressed by this, too, but it was the invention, not its validation by Time, that impressed me.)

There are glaring omissions. Arrison never mentions Africa, not even during her discussion of the world’s so-called abundant food supply. She mentions China only in terms of changes in religion, and only occasionally gives a nod to India. She does not explore the future of an extended life of manual laborers or those in dead-end jobs. Admitting that many avenues to life extension will initially benefit the rich, who can afford such paths, in the end, Arrison concludes, that the decreasing cost of mapping a person’s individual genetic pattern means that benefits will accrue to all. Even though Arrison ably counters the argument that extending life is against nature, she seems to ignore what we might call human nature, believing that people will use added time to better themselves in the most ennobling ways. No more vegging out in front of the TV or surfing the Internet for porn. Most amazingly, there is no mention of the death that will inevitably occur. Death is death, whether one is 50 or 150. Does Arrison think extended life will lessen its sting?

Nevertheless, the final chapter gives Arrison’s book a sense urgency. Leaning heavily on Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, she posits that these changes will not be brought about by democratic vote or the lumbering processes of government approval. Most changes will not come out of the science lab but the computer lab and will bypass the process of curing diseases in favor of flipping  switches on genetic codes to eliminate them.

The new wave, furthered by huge cash-incentive prizes, peopled by startups, and energized by the hopeful allure of venture capitalists, can change the face of longevity science, she says. However, making this change a reality requires the assent-and active participation — of what Arrison calls the “cool kids” on the block. They’re the ones who can make an idea seem unstoppable. Some of these, Arrison asserts, are already on board: Bill Gates (Microsoft); Jeff Bezos (Amazon); Larry Ellison (Oracle); Peter Thiel (PayPal co-founder, who authored the foreword to this book); Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google); and Paul Allen (Microsoft cofounder). These computer and Internet icons are joined by medical people with high visibility, such as Dr. Oz. The final chapter makes books such as Sonia Arrison’s 100 Plus must reading for anyone who wants to have a voice. You don’t have to be cool, but it helps.

Harriet Douty Dwinell, director of the Washington Independent Review of Books editorial board, is interested in issues of aging.