The title of our film did not come easy. The film was born with an imperfect name (The Methuselah Generation: The Science of Living Forever), in an imperfect format (3D!). After finding our subjects and story, we canned the 3D for the more practical and cheaper Canon 7D (and later the 5D), and changed the title to Long for this World. We never fully committed to the title because of the book, by the same name, penned by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner.

After temporarily calling the film Live Forever or Die Trying (a riff on Bill Andrews’s motto at Sierra Sciences, which sounds a little too much like a Die Hard or James Bond flick), we settled into the title The Immortalists. This is the lesser of many evils. The title has its flaws (for one, it isn’t a real word) and it shares the name of at least two books and a short film.

Aubrey de Grey isn’t a fan of the title. This is an excerpt from an interview where he explains that calling the film The Immortalists trivializes the seriousness of the science and the urgency of curing aging. He fears that it will make the quest to cure aging more about entertainment, jeopardizing his ability to raise money and be taken seriously. Aubrey says as much in an article on Slate (which is publishing an on-going series on longevity),

“I do not like to use the word immortality. It gives a very bad, a wrong impression about my work. I work on health. I am interested in ensuring that people will stay completely youthful, like young adults, for as long as they live.”

There is a fundamental difference between aging and mortality and we don’t want our film to confuse and conflate. Obviously cellular immortality won’t stop a visit from the reaper if you wander in front of a bus. We thought long and hard about this, but stuck with the title because it captures the essence of the story we wanted to tell. We want to make the subjects seem like mythological larger-than-life figures on a timeless quest to slay a mortal enemy: aging. Which is why we titled the subjects as “The Crusader,” “The Marathon Man,” and “The Alchemist.” We want to treat the science with elements that recall the human interest across culture in stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh . This is what science fiction always strives to do– and we wanted to apply that idea to the craft of documentary. One of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” lurked in our minds when animating the science portion of the film.

We set out to make a timeless film that is not just about the science of curing aging, but about the personal lives of the scientists. In doing so, we hope Bill Andrews and Aubrey de Grey become immortalized.

Since Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was yesterday (Monday 1/21/14), it seems appropriate to examine the effects of racism on aging. Perhaps not surprisingly, racism has biological consequences. In an article posted by PBS Newshour, researchers believe there is a link between racism and the shortening of telomeres. The Immortalists goes into great detail on this topic of telomeres: the division of cells leads to the shortening of telomeres, which leads to age-related health problems like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. As Bill Andrews says, “When telomeres get short, bad things happen.”

The article sites research  indicating that stress causes the release of a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol causes cellular damage and thus results in critically shortened telomeres.

“Dr. Chae [a social epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Public Health] found that men who experienced more frequent discrimination and internalized an anti-black bias had shorter telomeres than men who faced prejudice and still had positive views of their race. Even when controlling for other factors — chronologic age, socioeconomic status, overall health — those who internalized the experience were one to three years older biologically than those who had not.”

While racial prejudice takes a more visible toll on society in the form of police brutality and workplace discrimination, it’s also wreaking havoc on a cellular level as well.

It should be noted that the co-directors of The Immortalists are runners, not in the hope of living forever but for health and recreation. In fact, a lot of the brainstorming for the film happened on foggy jogs through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and sweltering runs through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

Our lazy jogs are child’s play compared to Bill Andrews’s epic 100+ mile monthly ultramarathons. The film covers one such 126-mile ultramarathon (I wrote about it at the time) that takes place in the most extreme conditions, including running over two passes greater than 18,000 ft in elevation.

Bill runs not merely as sport, but to combat aging. There has been several recent studies to back up Bill’s claim that endurance exercise increases the lengths of our telomeres. In fact, popular running magazines are taking notice of the length of telomeres in ultrarunners and its relationship to aging too.

While Bill Andrews runs to slow the aging process down by increasing the chance of having longer telomeres, there are nasty health consequences of running ultramarathons, as the New York Times pointed out, but the reduced risk of cancer and diabetes might outweigh the odds of getting a foot injury or hay fever attack.

Welcome to the blog for “The Immortalists.” Stay tuned for information about the film, screenings, observations, news about our documentary subjects and other musings…