DS: We exist for a brief instant in all of eternity, because the one inescapable consequence of living is to die. In death, not only are the mightiest and most humbled brought down to the same level, but we're no different from any other organism. But if we too must die, then nature wins. And our apparent control over it is just an illusion is death the one real phenomenon that lies outside the scope of scientific understanding that suggests there are limits to science? Or is it simply the ultimate challenge to be attacked and conquered?

DS: In the exuberance of life, there's an awareness that one day we will have to look to death.

DS: This is a funeral celebration at the southern tip of Madagascar.

DS: As human beings, we are by definition, mortal. And as far as we can tell, we are the only species that knows it must die. Yet in spite of observing it all around us in nature, it is difficult to reconcile ourselves to the idea of our own death. In our efforts to give meaning to it, we cling to light and give expression to our yearning for immortality.

DS: In the beginning, when the first forms of life appeared on this planet, immortality was the rule, cells simply split in two by a process known as binary fission. Death was not a biological property of organisms, it occurred by accident, or by one organism being eaten by another. Evolution took place slowly, since cells reproduced faithful replicas of themselves, and there was little variation, except for rare mutations. Death appeared as an evolutionary adaptation. Stephen J. Gould, evolutionary biologist at Harvard University,

Steven Gould: I don't often quote the Bible. But the old statement in the midst of life we are in death is certainly true and necessary, death is an essential part of life embryos are built by the differential death of cells. In part that's what produces power. The reason we have fingers is that we had an original web, in which cell death in between the digits allows the digits to differentiate on a larger theme if organisms didn't die, evolution would be impossible. Evolution is the gradual achievement of new adaptations which can only occur by the passage of genetic material from parents to offspring. If parents live forever and usurped all the space nothing would ever happen. So death is an essential component of evolutionary change.

DS: It's not clear when sexual reproduction arose, but it represented a giant evolutionary step. Now, two creatures, each with a different hereditary history could intermingle their genes. There are many ways for sexual reproduction to take place. But they all have the same end to shuffle genes, and thus generate a broad range of new combinations, new possibilities.

DS: Each offspring resulting from this union became unique, resembling yet differing from each other, and their parents. Evolution sped up new genetic combinations meant new biological experiments, testing new environments, adapting, changing, but for change to occur, one generation had to yield to another. So death came to be programmed into our very makeup. The close relationship between sex and death is striking in the Pacific salmon, whose four year odyssey ends in the spawning rivers, laying their eggs and fertilizing them is their last act before dying death of the individual perpetuating the species. But should their reproductive organs be removed while they are still young salmon would continue to grow and live for years after their generation has reproduced and died.

DS: In any complex community, death is an integral part. Here a decomposing tree becomes a garden for other species.

DS: Death makes new life possible. 10 years after this musk ox died high above the Arctic Circle. bleached bones still provide nutrition for a new generation of plants, insects and microorganisms. This is the tamarind a very special treat for the Malagasy people. The storytellers say that God gave the first man and woman a choice between two ways of dying. They could die like the moon, which waxes and wanes and so is reborn over and over. Or they could die like the tree, which produces new seeds, and while dying itself lives on through its offspring. It was a difficult decision. But the first man and women chose to have children even at the expense of their own deaths. And who among us, the storytellers ask wouldn't make the same choice today?

DS: So for the Malagasy, immortality comes through their children. This point of view closely parallels the scientific one. They have made the connection between sex and death and their funerals are a celebration of life.

DS: Nonetheless, the community as a whole has suffered a blow. Death has caused an imbalance that must be righted. Alliances are made. The bonds of kinship reaffirmed, old debts settled. Everything is done to restore the integrity of the group and help it survive the loss. And the last is a great one. The man who died was loved by everyone Aitimalika was a shaman, astrologer magician, healer. He led a simple life going from village to village on foot, a familiar figure as he brought his healing powers to those in need. He was in his 90s when he died. Mirrors are the windows on the shamans coffin so he can continue to look out on the light he has left behind.

DS: You can listen to the eulogy of his works and good deeds. He can watch his six wives as they keep him company. They will cherish his memory as long as they live. A second death occurs when they die or forget. Biologically, through his wives, he has a genetic continuity that survives in his 80 odd children. Immortality in a very real sense, for each child, carries half of his genes.

DS: The wisdom accumulated in a lifetime will not die with the shaman. It has been passed on over the years to his successor, his son, a MiniFee.

DS: For the Malagasy people, eternity lies in the past, as well as the future. Immortality comes as a gift from the ancestors and is carried on into the future by the children.

DS: The ancestors are the source of fertility, and funerals are an ideal time to conceive. The revelry goes on five days, five nights.

DS: The fifth day dawns, the shaman will be buried before sunset. Even here on the last mile, the Malagasy people meet the challenge of their own mortality with an affirmation of light in all its sensuality.

DS: People who live close to nature, death never hovers on the periphery of life. It's an integral part of it. The recurring cycles of the seasons are a constant reminder of the transitory nature of our existence. For us in the West, death, like the rest of nature, is something to be tamed and dominated. Now that we are able to move mountains and change the course of river is, can the conquest of death be far behind?

DS: Throughout history, people have found comfort in the notion that they will live on to their children. Their works are in a spiritual afterlife. But a society dominated by faith and science has come to regard immortality as a goal that can literally be achieved. From this point of view, death is no longer a normal or acceptable experience. And we look to scientists to stave it off. And when it does occur, it's a shock and outrage that signals our failure to conquer it.

DS: Human beings, like all other species, have a built in finite lifespan, the maximum number of years it is possible to live. This has not changed in 100,000 years. What has changed, and only in the last century is our life expectancy. In the past, death was a constant visitor at every age. With the elimination of many causes of premature death, the average length of life in this century has increased from 47 to 73. Infant mortality, infectious diseases, lack of proper nutrition and sanitation made death a familiar presence throughout one's life. It's only in this century that we've begun to associate death with old age. We are outraged when a young person dies.

DS: In the past, home was the place for dying. A good death was something to strive for. Surrounded by family and beloved friends, one had a chance to settle one's affairs, to say goodbye, to die with dignity.

DS: Psychologist Herman Feifel.

Herman Feifel: I don't think we're so much desensitized to death as we're unfamiliar with it. Now, I think it's a rare thing for an average person to see an untreated dead body before the age of 30 years. I remember as an adolescent, when my uncle died, his body was spread out in the middle of the living room, and not anybody. But the privilege was given to pious people to prepare and wash the body for burial. Today, death as an experience has been carried out of our everyday existence. When we get sick, we go to the physician and when you get you don't do so well that incomes the nurse and you end up in a hospital and then if you're really not doing well, in comes the clergyman. And finally when you didn't do well at all, in comes a funeral director.

DS: The Funeral Parlor has become a substitute for the old family parlor. Our modern homes have grown to small. Today in North America, about 80% of all people die in hospitals. A funeral director takes care of everything, picking up the body and arranging the details of the funeral, making sure that we never have to come in contact with the body. It may not have been planned this way. But these changes, apparently brought about for practical and medical reasons coincide with our own response to death. We are uncomfortable with death. We don't know how to deal with it. We reject it.

DS: Perhaps a universal feeling, distaste for the dead. But in India, it is accepted. Guests arrive and share the pollution of death with the family.

DS: They also share the pain.

Herman Feifel: I think many of us have lost that sense of a life after death, and consequently, to our generation, at least to many of us, that has become a war. Death is the ultimate personal disaster we do everything we can to stay alive. Suicide is the act of a crazy mind. And therefore, it seems to me that because we have lost this capacity to transcend death doesn't become much more difficult.

DS: It's natural for a corpse to decompose. But in North America, most bodies are partially preserved by the process of embalming. It's not required, but it is said to be hygenic.

DS: Kitty Doswell, is an embalmer in Los Angeles, California.

Kitty Doswell: One of the reasons for embalming is to prepare the remains so that they can be viewed in order that the survivors can better accept the actuality of death. We, as we embark on we try to create a, what we call a memory picture, a an acceptable memory picture, to have a person look as nearly natural as one can look, to put back some of the color in the person, to have them looking the way they were looking, perhaps when they were well. It's very important in the case of people who are devastated by illness and the family perhaps may have seen them in a hospital or very emaciated and they bring us a picture of the way they may have looked when they were not as ill, and we can through our processes get them looking a little bit like they were looking when they were alive. Many times we have families who will comment well gee mother hasn't looked so haven't seen mother looking so well in many years. How did you do that?

DS: Would we be somehow different if we had been this close to death as children? When we turn away from the face of death, surely we deprive ourselves of a fundamental insight, a glimpse of our own mortality, a chance to get used to even learn to accept the reality of nature.

DS: Instead, we battled death with every technological weapon at our disposal.

DS: There is something heroic, bigger than life, about confronting an emergency and winning. To bring a person back from the brink of death is to give the illusion of victory. We have come to believe in the magical powers of our technology. Got a three year old German DSA.

Unknown Speaker: Okay. No, there's no district. Okay, let's transfer over here. This continuous CPR.

DS: On April 25 1984, my mother died in my father's arms have a massive heart attack. She was 74 and for several years had been showing the progressive memory loss of Alzheimer's disease. 15 minutes after her heart stopped beating, an ambulance crew started it up again and rushed her to an intensive care unit where she was put on a respirator. She had suffered irreparable brain damage. But when the respirator was turned off, all of the evolutionary survival mechanisms of her body kept going for another excruciating week. For seven days, this body, that was no longer our mother, lived and breathed, while we sat and watched. As my father said she had had a good death. So what was the point and postponing the inevitable for one more week? 

DS: He was essentially dead, and his courageous man's heart was turned off.

DS: But the mechanical heart was not to blame.

DS: Suddenly, his kidneys failed, and they lost the acid base regulation of his body. Next, his lungs failed. Next, his brain failed. And lastly, when the key was turned off, his heart failed. But he did a great thing. And if other people do get a quality of life that is more obviously satisfactory. They better thank Bernie Clark.

DS: This is David, known as the boy In the bubble. For 12 years he lived encased within a sterile plastic chamber. He grew up at home with his sister, toys, friends and teachers, a semblance of a normal life.

DS: David was born without an immune system, the fundamental defense against infection. This condition had claimed the life of his brother before him. For warned, doctors delivered him by cesarean and sealed him off in a sterile chamber until a cure could be found. Just as Barney Clark's world was delineated by a six foot hose to an air compressor, David's was circumscribed by the dimensions of his plastic cage.

DS: Once the immediate threat of infection was controlled, doctors found themselves with a new kind of human being, who had never lived before. They began to experiment. A spacesuit built by NASA gave him room to move, but he outgrew it. David was totally dependent on technology and experts, not only for survival, but his psychological and physical well being. His prison was built on faith, faith in the inexorable progress of science. At the age of 12, he agreed to have a bone marrow transplant, but the operation failed and dying, he chose to come out of his cage. His mother touched him for the first time after his death.

DS: High up in a remote part of the Himalayas, tucked into one of the valleys of northern Pakistan dweller people known as the Hunzacuts, or Hunza. For centuries, caravans following the trade routes between China and India brought back Tales of a mysterious country A Shangri La, whose inhabitants had found the secret of eternal youth. Like the peoples of Vilcabamba in Ecuador, and the highlands of Soviet Georgia, the Hunzacts are reputed to live to 135 years and more.

DS: Life here proceeds at a leisurely pace, work hard and never hurry goes a proverb. Agriculture is the mainstay of the Hunzacts. But the land is arid and people must work hard to rest a decent living from the rocky slopes.

DS: There seems to be an unusual number of vigorous elderly people, but it is their agility and their participation in every aspect of daily life, rather than their old age, that is impressive. They say that death seeks those who are no longer useful.

Unknown Speaker: Got it really? This name is Kelvin. And how old is he? Guessing on that target. Printed in five What is the secret to his long life? Based on washer toner chrome ha jiggle kuasa to gmail pay they still do not do Mary Kay dynamic work they don't do not and we teach it to mica we don't noon. greylock.

Unknown Speaker: He says I don't know. God knows better. I don't know. Pretend you would love one that's to pass bla to trouble room would bhutesu amoeba on our Rapidash why? Our beloved of God mudra she says that water is good. And the climate is good, and the people are very happy, so they live long.

DS: The Hunzacts up found the secret to eternal youth. Modest diet, low in animal fat, constant activity at high altitudes, probably a genetic factor, and the stress free life that comes from knowing you're needed at every age, all elements that scientists tell us favor a long life.

DS: These mountains are laced with roadways and terraces that are built with a lot of backbreaking work, and technical know how, and the old men have a lot to contribute. There's no problem of the elderly here. Our solutions to social issues are determined by the way we perceive them to the Hunza elders are a valuable source of knowledge and experience. But our rapidly changing highly mobile society renders them out of place old fashioned, here, old age is considered to bring the benefits of wisdom and inner peace. But we think of it as a loss of function as a breakdown in systems, even as a disease. And if we define aging as a disease, then our scientists can attempt to correct something that Hunza would find inconceivable because it's a normal part of life. Hardly anybody ever reaches the maximum lifespan of our species, 120 years. Most of us don't even get as far as 85 or 90 and those that do are not always grateful.

DS: But already our science is researching the possibilities of extending this age limit. Surely it is not the number of years we live but the quality of that time that matters.

DS: No one knows how old the Hunza cuts really live to be. What is known is that the elderly here hold a privileged position. Certainly this prestige and authority gives aging an appeal that it lacks in the west and perhaps the Hunza exaggerate a bit. We lie about our ages to the other way around.

DS: There are some who find it impossible to accept a finite human lifespan. They call themselves immortals and believe that death is just a temporary failure of science, soon to be overcome. California immortalist Paul Segal.

Paul Segal: I'm gonna more or less because I personally would like to live forever, indeterminate. We don't want to have to worry about aging. We don't want to have to worry about accidents. We don't want to have to worry about disease. We think that science can move us very close to this potential. Forever is a long time. So I prefer not to talk in those kinds of terms. But essentially in a more at least as a person who seeks for an unlimited, indefinite lifespan.

DS: In a warehouse in San Francisco, a company specializes in freezing bodies to await a literal form of immortality, president of Trans Time, Art Quate.

Art Quate: We place people in suspension because of our hope and belief that eventually, most or all of the afflictions of which people are dying today will at some future date be treatable by medical science, we are preserving the individual and the genetic and genetic and psychological information that describes that individual as best we can, by preserving it at very low temperatures until such time as medical science is able to use it and restore the patient to life. All the people that are involved in cryonics and are signed up for finding suspension simply believe it's better to be alive and dead.

Art Quate: We consider these persons as patients, because we believe that they are still potentially alive, we believe that their condition is very analogous to a patient in a deep coma. There is no consciousness now, but there is the potential that the person might come out of the coma at a future time. And we consider persons in cryonic suspension to be in a very similar state.

Art Quate: I think that science can conquer death and aging. We have evidence for many, many different laboratory experiments, we have a very sophisticated scientific attack on death and aging. I think we can beat it. I think all we have to do is expressed our will in this direction.

DS: Author Germaine Greer,

Germaine Greer: Oh God, I do hope we never conquered death. I mean, death is the mechanism by which natural selection is carried out, it would be the same as death. In fact, if the world was suddenly populated by people who would live forever, the world would be dead. Certainly the human race would be dead. I suspect that we already live too long. Our interference with the ecological duty of dying means that we do outlive our bodies. And for many of us the last 20 years or so it will be a constant battle with pain and confusion. And the biggest irony of all, of course, is that we have no use socially speaking, for the old people we already have, we forced them to retire at 60. We make them politically and socially and economically marginal. We forced them to play silly games to return to childhood. To become alcoholics, to hasten their own demise by any means they can. And at the same time, we want to prolong this operation at tremendous cost. None of that makes any sense to me. We should be doing our best in my view, to help the vast mass of the world's population to realize its genetic potential to arrive at adulthood to live a reasonable human life and then to die.

DS: At 8:16 am August 6 1945 there was a bright blue sky over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. By 8:17, the city had been obliterated. Its people lay beneath it dead and dying. The sky was turning black. These films were taken by an American film crew sent to the city several weeks after the bomb. Psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton is interested in how the existence of nuclear weapons affects our psyche.

Unknown Speaker: There is nothing in our lives that is not potentially affected by the nuclear threat. What is taking shape now is a terrible image and it's taking shape with varying degrees of intensity or amorphousness. In all of our minds, the image of the nuclear end. The nuclear end is quite different from war, or some kind of devastation. We don't know quite how to bring our imaginations to bear on it. But one way is to look again at nature. Because we're used to thinking, we have to think of nature as some kind of primal source. First of all, we are animals in the end, and we come from nature. It's a disturbing and almost unmanageable thought, to imagine Nature being as vulnerable, the great source of life being as vulnerable to destruction as everything else. We have intimations that our technology can destroy nature. 

DS: A rumor spread through Hiroshima after the bomb had been dropped, and people started to come slowly back into the city. There were various rumors that swept the city. But the rumor that was most intense and most disturbing to people was that trees, grass, and flowers would never get growing, Rocha erosion would be unable to sustain vegetation of any kind. And what that rumor symbolizes was that nature was drying up, life was drying up at its source. And that was the kind of imagery and symbols ation people felt from that relatively small, tiny first bomb.

DS: Today's hydrogen bomb is 1600 times as powerful as the one dropped in 1945. What happened in Hiroshima was less than a million part of a holocaust that would occur today, with the present star of weapons in the world's nuclear arsenal.

DS: I think that it's a much greater burden to imagine extinction of the entire planet, even then extinction of our species. Again, these are such vast and cosmic concepts that we don't yet have much experience in formulating them. We're used to thinking that something goes on no matter how much harm we do, and we're fairly destructive animal, it seems that something will continue. It's a new idea that nothing will continue because of something we do with our own hand, and by our own technology. Even biblical imagery of the apocalypse doesn't answer we invoke it, but doesn't quite meet those criteria of dealing with our own hand and with our own technology, the place we have for the other animals and for the ecology of the earth outside of the human species is as our source, we have to look at it through human eyes again, we have to recreate the birds and the non human habitat. But I think we sense that in destroying all of that we are destroying not only ourselves, but the very source of life.

DS: The only place in the universe where we know life exists is Earth. Life, in Darwin's words, most beautiful and most wonderful.

DS: In Japan, the living have a sacred trust from their ancestors, that they will perpetuate their memory and ensure the survival of the people into future generations. Here in one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world, the endless cycle of death and renewal in nature is acknowledged annually in the rituals of Oban.

DS: But nuclear war could brutally alter the cycle of renewal, not only for humankind, but for much of nature. There is a death we must come to terms with and learn to accept. That is our own death as individuals. However, we have no choice but to reject the other absurd death, a mass suicide, which would take much of the planet with us. It's paradoxical, how much of our technical ingenuity, we dedicate simultaneously to the war against individual death and to the means of obliteration. But the two are not entirely in conflict in a very real way. Both can be seen as crimes against nature.

DS: Our culture's striving for immortality is part of our ongoing reach for control. It's just one of our battles with the natural world. In the final program of this series, we'll be looking for a new perspective on the human place in nature. What kinds of problems lie beyond the reach of science? As many of our leading scientists are beginning to wonder, are we asking more of science than it can possibly deliver? 

DS: We look to science not for knowledge, but for power. For control of the natural world, and of all it contains in a process that began in ritual and magic, we've taken over, rebuilt the world, but it can't go on indefinitely. Next week, the Runaway Brain.

Unknown Speaker: Let's go. Okay, let's get a quick look on a patient. Okay, if you said VF, let's defibrillator 200. Can you defibulate? Hands off? Claire. Okay, continue CPR. Continue CPR. Okay, he's in VF. Let's defibrillator again. Okay, turn that up to max. Okay. Good. Okay, he's in VF continue CPR please. Soon as the IV goes in, good I'd like one milligram of adrenaline followed by two amps of bicarb. He has a pulse. Let's get...

DS: We lose perspective. If we confuse the rescue of a dying person with the defeat of death, for no doctor has ever conquered death, only postponed it. We have lost the moment of death. Technology prolongs, it blurs it we have an illusion of conquest, because machines take over for failed body functions. We now have several silent deaths: social death, brain death, cellular death. The threshold is no longer clear. The stages of death can be prolonged for hours, days, even months, and prolonging these stages has become an end in itself. To determine legally, when death finally occurs, we have to rely on machines. The dying patient is left in the hands of experts who up to the very last minute, maintain the sense that they are beating death. Today, we need permission to die to refuse the application of heroic measures.

DS: Barney Clark was a very sick man in the final stages of life. Doctors focused on his defective heart as the cause and replaced it with a mechanical pump an artificial heart. To the doctors, he was not so much a failing human being as an aggregate of treatable organs, an opportunity. For 112 days assemblance of victory was maintained, a triumph for doctors. In the end, his body let them down.

Unknown Speaker: He was essentially dead, and his courageous man's heart was turned off. But the mechanical heart was not to blame. Suddenly, his kidneys failed, and they lost the acid base regulation of his body. Next, his lungs failed. Next, his brain failed. And lastly, when the key was turned off, his heart failed. But he did a great thing. And if other people do get a quality of life that is more obviously satisfactory. They better thank Bernie Clark.

DS: This is David, known as the boy In the bubble. For 12 years he lived encased within a sterile plastic chamber. He grew up at home with his sister, toys, friends and teachers, a semblance of a normal life.

DS: David was born without an immune system, the fundamental defense against infection. This condition had claimed the life of his brother before him. For warned, doctors delivered him by cesarean and sealed him off in a sterile chamber until a cure could be found. Just as Barney Clark's world was delineated by a six foot hose to an air compressor, David's was circumscribed by the dimensions of his plastic cage.

DS: Once the immediate threat of infection was controlled, doctors found themselves with a new kind of human being, who had never lived before. They began to experiment. A spacesuit built by NASA gave him room to move, but he outgrew it. David was totally dependent on technology and experts, not only for survival, but his psychological and physical well being. His prison was built on faith, faith in the inexorable progress of science. At the age of 12, he agreed to have a bone marrow transplant, but the operation failed and dying, he chose to come out of his cage. His mother touched him for the first time after his death.

DS: High up in a remote part of the Himalayas, tucked into one of the valleys of northern Pakistan dweller people known as the Hunzacuts, or Hunza. For centuries, caravans following the trade routes between China and India brought back Tales of a mysterious country A Shangri La, whose inhabitants had found the secret of eternal youth. Like the peoples of Vilcabamba in Ecuador, and the highlands of Soviet Georgia, the Hunzacts are reputed to live to 135 years and more.

DS: Life here proceeds at a leisurely pace, work hard and never hurry goes a proverb. Agriculture is the mainstay of the Hunzacts. But the land is arid and people must work hard to rest a decent living from the rocky slopes.

DS: There seems to be an unusual number of vigorous elderly people, but it is their agility and their participation in every aspect of daily life, rather than their old age, that is impressive. They say that death seeks those who are no longer useful.

Unknow Speaker: Got it really? This name is Kelvin. And how old is he? Guessing on that target. Printed in five What is the secret to his long life? Based on washer toner chrome ha jiggle kuasa to gmail pay they still do not do Mary Kay dynamic work they don't do not and we teach it to mica we don't noon. greylock. He says I don't know. God knows better. I don't know. Pretend you would love one that's to pass bla to trouble room would bhutesu amoeba on our Rapidash why? Our beloved of God mudra she says that water is good. And the climate is good, and the people are very happy, so they live long.

DS: The Hunzacts up found the secret to eternal youth. Modest diet, low in animal fat, constant activity at high altitudes, probably a genetic factor, and the stress free life that comes from knowing you're needed at every age, all elements that scientists tell us favor a long life.

DS: These mountains are laced with roadways and terraces that are built with a lot of backbreaking work, and technical know how, and the old men have a lot to contribute. There's no problem of the elderly here. Our solutions to social issues are determined by the way we perceive them to the Hunza elders are a valuable source of knowledge and experience. But our rapidly changing highly mobile society renders them out of place old fashioned, here, old age is considered to bring the benefits of wisdom and inner peace. But we think of it as a loss of function as a breakdown in systems, even as a disease. And if we define aging as a disease, then our scientists can attempt to correct something that Hunza would find inconceivable because it's a normal part of life. Hardly anybody ever reaches the maximum lifespan of our species, 120 years. Most of us don't even get as far as 85 or 90 and those that do are not always grateful.

DS: But already our science is researching the possibilities of extending this age limit. Surely it is not the number of years we live but the quality of that time that matters.

DS: No one knows how old the Hunza cuts really live to be. What is known is that the elderly here hold a privileged position. Certainly this prestige and authority gives aging an appeal that it lacks in the west and perhaps the Hunza exaggerate a bit. We lie about our ages to the other way around.

DS: There are some who find it impossible to accept a finite human lifespan. They call themselves immortals and believe that death is just a temporary failure of science, soon to be overcome. California immortalist Paul Segal.

Paul Segal: I'm gonna more or less because I personally would like to live forever, indeterminate. We don't want to have to worry about aging. We don't want to have to worry about accidents. We don't want to have to worry about disease. We think that science can move us very close to this potential. Forever is a long time. So I prefer not to talk in those kinds of terms. But essentially in a more at least as a person who seeks for an unlimited, indefinite lifespan.

DS: In a warehouse in San Francisco, a company specializes in freezing bodies to await a literal form of immortality, president of Trans Time, Art Quate.

Art Quate: We place people in suspension because of our hope and belief that eventually, most or all of the afflictions of which people are dying today will at some future date be treatable by medical science, we are preserving the individual and the genetic and genetic and psychological information that describes that individual as best we can, by preserving it at very low temperatures until such time as medical science is able to use it and restore the patient to life. All the people that are involved in cryonics and are signed up for finding suspension simply believe it's better to be alive and dead.

Art Quate: We consider these persons as patients, because we believe that they are still potentially alive, we believe that their condition is very analogous to a patient in a deep coma. There is no consciousness now, but there is the potential that the person might come out of the coma at a future time. And we consider persons in cryonic suspension to be in a very similar state.

Art Quate: I think that science can conquer death and aging. We have evidence for many, many different laboratory experiments, we have a very sophisticated scientific attack on death and aging. I think we can beat it. I think all we have to do is expressed our will in this direction.

DS: Author Germaine Greer,

Germaine Greer: Oh God, I do hope we never conquered death. I mean, death is the mechanism by which natural selection is carried out, it would be the same as death. In fact, if the world was suddenly populated by people who would live forever, the world would be dead. Certainly the human race would be dead. I suspect that we already live too long. Our interference with the ecological duty of dying means that we do outlive our bodies. And for many of us the last 20 years or so it will be a constant battle with pain and confusion. And the biggest irony of all, of course, is that we have no use socially speaking, for the old people we already have, we forced them to retire at 60. We make them politically and socially and economically marginal. We forced them to play silly games to return to childhood. To become alcoholics, to hasten their own demise by any means they can. And at the same time, we want to prolong this operation at tremendous cost. None of that makes any sense to me. We should be doing our best in my view, to help the vast mass of the world's population to realize its genetic potential to arrive at adulthood to live a reasonable human life and then to die.

DS: At 8:16 am August 6 1945 there was a bright blue sky over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. By 8:17, the city had been obliterated. Its people lay beneath it dead and dying. The sky was turning black. These films were taken by an American film crew sent to the city several weeks after the bomb. Psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton is interested in how the existence of nuclear weapons affects our psyche.

Unknown Speaker: There is nothing in our lives that is not potentially affected by the nuclear threat. What is taking shape now is a terrible image and it's taking shape with varying degrees of intensity or amorphousness. In all of our minds, the image of the nuclear end. The nuclear end is quite different from war, or some kind of devastation. We don't know quite how to bring our imaginations to bear on it. But one way is to look again at nature. Because we're used to thinking, we have to think of nature as some kind of primal source. First of all, we are animals in the end, and we come from nature. It's a disturbing and almost unmanageable thought, to imagine Nature being as vulnerable, the great source of life being as vulnerable to destruction as everything else. We have intimations that our technology can destroy nature. 

Unknown Speaker: A rumor spread through Hiroshima after the bomb had been dropped, and people started to come slowly back into the city. There were various rumors that swept the city. But the rumor that was most intense and most disturbing to people was that trees, grass, and flowers would never get growing, Rocha erosion would be unable to sustain vegetation of any kind. And what that rumor symbolizes was that nature was drying up, life was drying up at its source. And that was the kind of imagery and symbols ation people felt from that relatively small, tiny first bomb.

DS: Today's hydrogen bomb is 1600 times as powerful as the one dropped in 1945. What happened in Hiroshima was less than a million part of a holocaust that would occur today, with the present star of weapons in the world's nuclear arsenal.

Unknown Speaker: I think that it's a much greater burden to imagine extinction of the entire planet, even then extinction of our species. Again, these are such vast and cosmic concepts that we don't yet have much experience in formulating them. We're used to thinking that something goes on no matter how much harm we do, and we're fairly destructive animal, it seems that something will continue. It's a new idea that nothing will continue because of something we do with our own hand, and by our own technology. Even biblical imagery of the apocalypse doesn't answer we invoke it, but doesn't quite meet those criteria of dealing with our own hand and with our own technology, the place we have for the other animals and for the ecology of the earth outside of the human species is as our source, we have to look at it through human eyes again, we have to recreate the birds and the non human habitat. But I think we sense that in destroying all of that we are destroying not only ourselves, but the very source of life.

DS: The only place in the universe where we know life exists is Earth. Life, in Darwin's words, most beautiful and most wonderful.

DS: In Japan, the living have a sacred trust from their ancestors, that they will perpetuate their memory and ensure the survival of the people into future generations. Here in one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world, the endless cycle of death and renewal in nature is acknowledged annually in the rituals of Oban.

DS: But nuclear war could brutally alter the cycle of renewal, not only for humankind, but for much of nature. There is a death we must come to terms with and learn to accept. That is our own death as individuals. However, we have no choice but to reject the other absurd death, a mass suicide, which would take much of the planet with us. It's paradoxical, how much of our technical ingenuity, we dedicate simultaneously to the war against individual death and to the means of obliteration. But the two are not entirely in conflict in a very real way. Both can be seen as crimes against nature.

DS: Our culture's striving for immortality is part of our ongoing reach for control. It's just one of our battles with the natural world. In the final program of this series, we'll be looking for a new perspective on the human place in nature. What kinds of problems lie beyond the reach of science? As many of our leading scientists are beginning to wonder, are we asking more of science than it can possibly deliver? 

DS: We look to science not for knowledge, but for power. For control of the natural world, and of all it contains in a process that began in ritual and magic, we've taken over, rebuilt the world, but it can't go on indefinitely. Next week, the Runaway Brain.