Great stories from TED Blog

TED Blog

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• This college freshman is a cancer detective: A Q&A with Brittany Wenger
• An infographic cheat sheet for key concepts in “The Grazing Revolution”
• Let’s unite as Team Humanity to revive degraded land: A conversation with TED Books author Allan Savory and rancher Gail Steiger
• Sally Kohn’s talk, the “clean” version
• The immortality bias: Further reading on the 4 stories we tell ourselves about death

This college freshman is a cancer detective: A Q&A with Brittany Wenger Posted: 12 Dec 2013 01:54 PM PST When Brittany Wenger was a sophomore in high school, her cousin was diagnosed with breast cancer. She saw firsthand how the disease strikes a woman and her family, and she wanted to help. While some of us might offer to bake a casserole or lend a listening ear, Brittany went the extra mile: She created a breast cancer test that could someday help millions of women catch the disease early. Brittany, now a freshman at Duke, is an enthusiastic, articulate young woman who is so well versed in the science she studies that it can be tough to follow her rapid technical explanations. She may still be a teenager, but she’s been conducting impressive research for years. As early as the seventh grade, Wenger was experimenting with advanced computer science and artificial intelligence programs. (She of course taught herself to code.) From those early experiments, Wenger has gone on to write computer programs that improve the accuracy of tests for breast cancer and leukemia (below, she explains how they work). Her work has been honored by the Intel Science Talent Search, the Google Science Fair, and the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, and she was just named one of Time Magazine’s 30 under 30. Wenger’s breast cancer test, which has its own app, is now in beta tests with two cancer research centers. We chatted with Wenger about her first computer program, her impressive research, and some recent words of encouragement from President Barack Obama. Below is an edited version of our conversation. My first question: When did you first get excited about computer programming? Here’s Brittany – I had to write a final term paper on any aspect of the future, so I decided that I would write about technologies of the future. I Googled things that may happen fifty, a hundred years from now, and I came across the concept of artificial intelligence. I was just enamored by it. I went home, I bought a coding textbook, and started teaching myself how to code. What was your first program? An artificial intelligence program that learned to play soccer. I worked on that for three years. And were you successful? Did the program learn how to play soccer? Yeah, and it won about 95 percent of its games. How do you teach a computer to play the game? Basically, the program would look up scenarios that it had been in before. So there are x number of players in front of me; I am this far away from a corresponding player; I have the ball; I don’t have the ball. And based on [that information], it would come up with the best response in that situation. So it was learning as you ran it? Yeah. Exactly. It was really funny! At first, they played like 4-year-olds. They couldn’t do anything. They would just stand there the whole time. At what point did you decide to apply your interests in artificial intelligence and computer science to breast cancer? When my cousin got breast cancer, she was telling me about how difficult the diagnostic process was. I researched and found out about fine needle aspirates, which are the least invasive, quickest and cheapest [diagnostic] procedures that a woman can have. Right now, they’re wildly inconclusive, so a lot of doctors refuse to use them. Only about five hospitals in the United States still use the procedure. I was really interested in trying to revive them, and when I found out that the major problem was how difficult the patterns were for pathologists to diagnose, I wanted to create a tool to aid the doctors. I have to admit, I’m still a bit mystified about how this breast cancer detector works. Can you break it down for me? Based on cell morphology, which is how the cells look, the program will look for patterns and try to determine whether a person has cancer or not. For example, multi-layered cells are an indicator that a person may have cancer. It’s a little more complicated than that, though, because masses will exhibit both characteristics of non-cancerous masses and cancerous masses, even though clearly one mass can only be cancer or not cancer. And does the detector work for all different types of breast cancer? Right now, the detector is meant to be an initial screening mechanism—it’s trying to go through and determine whether the cells are cancerous or not. If it returns a diagnosis that the cells are cancerous, further testing would be required to determine the specific type. So it can’t necessarily tell the difference between a fast-growing malignant tumor versus a slow one. This is a step before that. Exactly. But the program would have the capacity to do that if I had data. For example, I extended the program to work with genetic expression programming and leukemia diagnostics. For that, I actually go through and identify which subtype of leukemia a person had, and then I’m able to infer how aggressive the cancer would be. What’s happened since you created the breast cancer program? So much. I think one of the most exciting things that’s happened is doctors have really started taking my research seriously. I’m beta-testing the breast cancer program with two hospitals, which has been incredible. I also got to go to the White House Science Fair and explain my research to President Obama! What did he say to you? He had an intense look of concentration on his face, showing me he really cared about [my research], and he said something along the lines of that he was really proud of me. This is the President of the country saying that, so I was really taken aback. I’ll always really treasure those words. And this was also the first election I got to vote in, so I think it made it even more special. There’s so much talk about the lack of women in science. What has your experience been as a young woman in science? I’ve always felt empowered to pursue [science]. I had a lot of strong female role models. For example, my computer science teacher in high school was a woman. I was really lucky to grow up in that sort of environment. Do you have any advice for inventors or entrepreneurs, especially young scientists? If you find your passion, just follow it and have the persistence to stick through it. I mean, for me, the breast cancer program failed completely two times before it succeeded. But what’s great about science is that you learn a lot from those experiments. They can really help you move forward.

An infographic cheat sheet for key concepts in “The Grazing Revolution” Posted: 12 Dec 2013 01:33 PM PST Allan Savory has spent decades studying the devastating effects of “desertification“: healthy land degrading into deserts all around the world and accelerating climate change in the process. On the TED2013 stage, Savory offered a fascinating idea for reclaiming degraded land — using livestock to mimic the behavior of herds that used to roam these lands. The idea is bold and counterintuitive, and sparked lively debate the minute Savory stepped off the stage. Savory returns today with the TED Book The Grazing Revolution, which digs much deeper into this idea. The process of desertification is complex, and Savory’s holistic solution requires many moving parts. So we’ve provided these handy visual Cliffs notes of key terms Savory uses in the book,  to help everyone get the footing to understand this fascinating read. Read much more in the new TED Book, The Grazing Revolution: A Radical Plan to Save the Earth, available for the Kindle or Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app to get access to this title — and the entire TED Books archive — for the duration of your subscription.

Let’s unite as Team Humanity to revive degraded land: A conversation with TED Books author Allan Savory and rancher Gail Steiger Posted: 12 Dec 2013 03:04 PM PST Allan Savory is a biologist who has spent a lifetime trying to save degraded land. Gail Steiger is a rancher and filmmaker who has long followed his work. Below, what happens when the two talk. Make sure to read to the end for the stab-you-in-the-heart final question. All over the world, land is turning into desert at an alarming rate. Biologist Allan Savory has dedicated a lifetime to figuring out what’s causing this “desertification.” Finally, after decades of work in the field, Savory discovered a radical solution—one that went against everything scientists had always thought. He used huge herds of livestock, managed to mimic the behavior of the natural herds that roamed grasslands centuries ago, and saw degraded land revert to robust ecosystems. Here, Savory talks with rancher, performer and acclaimed filmmaker Gail Steiger about his new TED Book The Grazing Revolution: A Radical Plan to Save the Earth, detailing his remarkable and often difficult journey to discovery—one that ultimately ends with great hope for the future. Gail Steiger: First of all, I’d just like to thank you for all that you’ve done for—actually, for the world. I’ve been familiar with your work since your book in ’88. Lots of my friends here in Arizona attended your school, and you’ve just made a great contribution to all of us. Can I ask you for some historical information? Tell me a little bit about the most valuable experiences that informed your thinking today. Allan Savory: Oh, gosh. That goes back a long way. Let me just start before I left university and joined the Game Department, in what was then Colonial Service, in Northern Rhodesia. (It’s now Zambia.) I was very passionate about wildlife, elephants in particular, but also rhino and so on— the big game of Africa. And I had this new, shiny degree, and training as a botanist, zoologist and ecologist. But when I went into the field, I hit reality. What I’d been taught just simply wasn’t making sense. It didn’t match with what I was seeing. To give you an example: We were taught that overgrazing caused desertification. More specifically, that desertification was due to too many livestock, and that the answer was reducing the numbers of animals and burning the grass to keep it healthy. Well, I was soon engaged in burning massive areas of land to keep the grass healthy. This was land that was to become our future national parks. I couldn’t help but observe the fact that we were baring the soil, and that the bare soil was subsequently being carried away by the rainfall. And as I mention in my TED Book, I actually took to walking in the rain so that I could see what was happening for myself. And just found it was wrong, you know? Of course, I didn’t have answers, but I began very seriously looking for them. Then came one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Because the land degradation was so bad, but there wasn’t any livestock on it, I proved the problem must be that there were too many elephants. And the government, after investigating my book and approving, shot 40,000 elephants. But the desertification only got worse, and it’s still getting worse to this day. As I look back, one my biggest findings came from trying something, making a mistake and saying, “Well, why did it go wrong?” So actually some of the biggest findings came from the failures. Another big finding for me was when I happened to pick up a farming magazine off a coffee table in a farmer’s house and read an article by John Acocks. John was a botanist studying the extension of the Karoo Desert bushes taking over what had been grassland. He had concluded that the land was understocked—was carrying too few animals—but was overgrazed. So he said South Africa was deteriorating because of overgrazing and understocking. This caused a furor in the scientific community. Acocks was ridiculed, but to me it was brave new thinking. I actually drove all the way down to the Cape to go and see him personally and was able to visit some of the ranchers he was working with. Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate changeNow, I’m always looking for places where something different is happening. Some people call that “positive deviance.” I spotted one such deviance while I was visiting a ranch: A patch of land that was visibly much better than the rest. I got very excited and asked the rancher what had happened in that spot. He told me the sheep he was using had crowded there for a short time. That was a big moment for me, the moment when I suddenly realized connection between what I was seeing there, and what I had first observed with large wildlife herds. That’s when I realized we could possibly use livestock to mimic the wild animals. It was a big turning point. But the most difficult piece of the puzzle, the one I still believe we never could have discovered in Africa, was that the greatest single cause resulting in desertificaion is overresting the land. And I really believe we could only have discovered that in America. Because when I got here, I found such vast areas of land with nothing on them. I mean, it was almost like being at sea. There was not a sound — not a bird chirp, nothing. In Africa, India, South America, anywhere else I’d been, it was hard to find silence. There were birds, monkeys, something all around you. But when I struck national parks in America with not a sound, and still saw terrible desertification taking place, that was a big horror moment. GS: In Holistic Management, you talked a bit about your experiences trailing both humans and wildlife, and how that enabled you to see what was actually happening. I appreciate that. The ranch I’m on is pretty rough country, and sometimes we just can’t find our cattle. If you can’t trail, you’re not going to do much good out here.  AS: I spent a lot of my life—20 years of it—in war, training army trackers and commanding a tracker unit, and then in the Game Department, tracking lions, and elephants and poachers. So I’ve spent literally thousands of hours tracking people or animals, and training others to do it. And yes, that was an incredible opportunity; rarely do scientists have the opportunity to be trying to solve a problem on the land, and then spend so many thousands of hours tracking. I mean, we couldn’t dictate where guerrilla gangs would penetrate the country, but wherever they came, we had to go and track them down. And so we tracked in every imaginable sort of county. Then you have the long nights where you sit and think about it: Why the hell was it easy today? Why was it so difficult yesterday? What sort of land are we on? What sort of climate are we in here? Am I in a national park or on communal land or on a commercial ranch? You’re thinking about it all every night, and the next day you’re tracking again all damn day. Only many years later did I read the book by Liebenberg, where he explains pretty logically that tracking was probably the origin of science. I think his argument was very good, because a good tracker is not just following tracks. A good tracker is interpreting all the time, from every little sign, you know? Not just interpreting the age of the tracks but also: Is it wounded? Is it hungry? A good tracker is interpreting a lot. Allan Savory gave a talk with a solution for land degradation that set TED2013 abuzz. Today, he releases the TED Book, The Grazing Revolution. GS: It certainly led to good work! Can you tell me a little bit about your TED Book? Your earlier works have been specifically targeted to land managers. But of course TED casts a much broader net, and I’m wondering what do you think urban dwellers can bring to the land-management table? What’s your intention there? AS: Urban dwellers are the only ones that can save the situation. Let me explain that: The bulk of the populations of almost every country have moved to the cities, or are moving there. That’s where the voting power is — the mass of public opinion is. Now the stuff I talked about at TED, we’ve talked about for years. Now you might ask: Well, why did nothing change? At first, I too could not understand. It did not seem logical. But as I grappled with it, I went back to researching other fields to see if there was any reason for this, and I found there was. Hard systems are everything we’re using right now — computers, phones, planes, the clothes you’re wearing, the room you’re in. Everything there involves 100% use of technology and expertise to make it, and nothing we make — including space exploration vehicles and so on — is complex. Everything we make is complicated. Nothing is self-renewing. If the computer is missing a part, it doesn’t work, or the plane is missing a part, it doesn’t work. It can’t self-organize. But if we look at human organizations, they are complex. In other words, they do what they’re designed to do, and can be very efficient, be they a university, a hospital, etc. But they—because they’re complex, self-organizing, composed of hundreds of individual humans all interacting—they have what are called emergent properties, things that emerge that weren’t planned or intended. And these can result in what system science calls “wicked problems.” This doesn’t mean they’re amoral — just that they’re extremely difficult to solve. There are two wicked problems of human organizations. One is that they cannot—they simply cannot—accept new scientific insights ahead of society in general. And so that is why my TED Talk in 20 minutes did more than 50 years of struggle within the scientific community. Because it was seen by—as far as I can make out— over a million people. And so the information is now getting to society. And already organizations that have been aloof or blocked us or resisted are beginning to collaborate with us and change. So it’s only the people in the cities that can begin to change public opinion or societal view. When there’s a sufficient groundswell, then our institutions can change. We’re not going to be able to stop the desertification of the United States when so much of the land is federal-owned land under government agencies that are trying to save the wildflowers or the horses or stop the terrible droughts and floods that are occurring in America. We’re not going to be able to stop those until the public opinion is deeper, until people understand that there is no option but livestock over most of that land, and that these policies need to be developed holistically. GS: It would seem like a holistic approach would require us to rethink the entire scientific method. I mean, if you look at education in this day and age, there’s ever more pressure to specialize. The higher level you attain, the more it requires you to focus on ever-narrower subjects, and it seems like we would really have to rework everything. AS: That’s very much part of the problem. John Ralston Saul points out — after studying what’s happened since Voltaire’s time, the Age of Enlightenment, where we were no longer going to have massive blunders because organizations would be headed by professional-trained people and you could no longer buy or inherit your position — that following that period in history, the blunders increased. He notes that no matter how brilliant the people, no matter how well-meaning and caring, if they’re in an institution or organization, because of complexity, what emerges very often lacks common sense and humanity. So you can—as I’ve done—talk to city audiences almost anywhere and say: Does it make sense for the United States to produce oil to grow corn to produce fuel? And people just laugh and say: No, that’s stupid and it’s inhumane. Well, thousands of scientists employed and paid salaries by organizations signed off on that. I was in Australia recently and I found it’s a greater crime with heavier penalties for a farmer to sell you fresh, clean raw milk than it is to sell drugs. See, it doesn’t make sense. Saul attributed that to the education system. And quoting Saul here, he said, “The reality is that the division of knowledge into feudal fiefdoms of expertise has made general understanding and coordinated action not simply impossible but despised and distrusted.” GS: I remember back in the ‘80s, as ranchers we were under a lot of pressure from environmental groups—they really wanted to remove all livestock from public lands. AS: Yeah, “cattle-free by ’93.” GS: Exactly. The idea that industrial agriculture could somehow save us: Could you comment on that at all? AS: Those environmentalists, they’re trained in the same universities. I understand them, because I also once believed that if we could get rid of the livestock and return to just wildlife, we might be able to stop the degradation of the land. But again, I was wrong, because that became a major multi-billion dollar industry, mainly in places like Texas and South Africa. But every single game ranch without exception that I’ve been on, the land is still deteriorating. I held those same beliefs — that we just had to get rid of livestock — so I understand those environmentalists. In my case, I just saw that I was wrong. And I loved the land and wildlife more than I hated livestock. So I changed. GS: I have a personal question to ask. Most of us who are involved in agriculture, who are not landowners, have kind of resigned ourselves to the fact that the rewards come in other than financial ways. It seems to me like the best thing about being able to manage livestock on a big piece of land is that every day you get a chance to appreciate just what a gift it is to get to come and live on this planet, you know? And it seems like we operate under this economic system that measures everything in terms of dollars and cents. I mean, most economic theory would say we could measure all goods in those terms, and that doesn’t appear to be a defensible assumption. And the other assumption is that all growth is good, the more the better. It seems like a holistic approach would require that we rethink those things, particularly the one that equates happiness with dollars and cents. AS: You’re absolutely right. But again, we will not solve this by just taking a holistic approach, although that is necessary. We’ll only solve it by actually developing policies holistically. The things you mentioned just cannot go on. I mean, constant growth in a finite world is just simply not scientific. The use of fiat money — where money makes money—and wealth is accumulating ever more in the 1% — that’s inevitable with the monetary system we have. And then the development, or the measurement of growth on gross domestic product, is just ridiculous. For example, how can it possibly be holistically sound, or scientifically sound, or even common sense to measure your economic growth where you value building jails at the same level as you value building hospitals or schools? What we’re doing lacks humanity. GS: In a broader sense, what assumptions does our culture make that are most damaging to our planet? It seems that more materialistic we get, and the more we do urbanize, the greater the threats are. AS: I’ve thought about this for many, many years. For me, it was best summed up at a conference my wife and I attended long ago in Sweden in an address by Gro Harlem Brundtland. She was appealing to the scientists there to see the problems as interconnected. She pointed out that international agencies that she was dealing with at the time were spending many, many millions of dollars on many things: Droughts, floods, locust invasions, poverty, violence, weeds, etc. And everywhere, it’s failing. We’re not succeeding. If we could see the interconnections between these—what’s in common—maybe we could be more successful. I did a lot of thinking after that, and have continued to over the years. We’re blaming many things. We’re blaming politicians; we’re blaming greed, capitalism. But it’s not that. Because I looked at all the things we were blaming for the situation in Africa: Overstocking, communal land tenure, people not loving the land, the tragedy of the commons, overpopulation, inadequate access to capital. And then I looked at the situation in West Texas and I found the opposite of every one of these things: Private land, people loved it, they weren’t abusing it. No overstocking with livestock, they’d been de-stocking for over a century, consistently. No overpopulation, very low and falling population. Great access to capital wealth. Good universities. But the same problem. Clearly, there was something else causing all this, and I think it’s this: When you look at agriculture overall, it’s the biggest single problem facing humanity, even bigger than the oil one. Agriculture in its broader sense, you know, the production of food and fiber from the world’s land and waters. Because even after we discover benign sources of energy, climate change and poverty and drought—all these problems will continue because they’re manmade. And they’re causing the climate change. When I look at this and see that so many millions of people who are much, much brighter than I am — far more highly trained than I am — doing their best, and it’s still going so wrong, then you have to, I believe, realize it’s a systemic problem. Now, when we’re managing holistically — doing holistic land grazing, trying to help the government develop a policy — we begin by looking at exactly what is it that we’re managing, get that clear first, and then define the holistic context though tying people’s deepest cultural, societal values and needs to a life-supporting environment. Once we have a holistic context, and we can then look at the objectives and the actions to be taken, and see if they are in context. And that’s the way that we are able now to insure that they’re much more likely to achieve our objectives, because we’re not dealing with symptoms only, but dealing with the systematic problem and making sure our solutions don’t lead to unintended consequences. And just as soon as governments and city folks start insisting that all policies and projects be developed holistically, you’ll see that the same people, the exact same people that are producing dismal results today will astound us. They’ve got so much knowledge. It’s just a systemic problem. And most people are good. Most people are trying to do the right thing. And just like when the Wright brothers discovered how to fly, on a certain day, we had no barriers in the way after that. A whole new society believed in technology. No government, no organization put any barriers in the way. We released human creativity, and within 70 years we were on the moon. If you look at centuries of civilizations using agricultural practices that have culminated in climate change, it’s the same story. Now that we’ve discovered how to actually develop policies and projects holistically, if we can get the barriers out of the way, and release the creativity that’s in our universities, our farming organizations, amongst our farmers and land managers, we’ll be astounded. As I’d like to express it, the human spirit will fly. GS: So are you optimistic about the future now? Where’s the trend going since you began? AS: The mainstream trend is going the wrong way. I mean, you know that. But I’m more optimistic now than I ever could have been at any period in history because if we’d been having this discussion, say in the Roman times when North Africa was turning to desert, we couldn’t have done anything about it. We didn’t know what was causing it. Now we do. And even if we’d known the causes, we still were lacking the ability to communicate and network around the world. It’s the social networking that is now allowing me, for instance, to spread this to millions of people. Now there’s one other thing that’s lacking that we haven’t quite got yet. The last thing we need is something to unite all humans. If we look throughout history, we unite in times of war against a human enemy. And we’ll unite for a long time, but the moment the war is over, we’re back to squabbling. So we need something to unite us as team humanity— something that is not a war. The only thing I could see doing that would be the overall acceptance of the seriousness of climate change. Climate change is desperately serious, but we’ve still got people deliberately causing confusion, spending millions to do that. We’ve doubters. But the moment that humans accept the seriousness of climate change, then we can unite as team humanity, whether you’re American or Chinese or African or from any other part of the world. We’re humans, and we’re not going to survive if we don’t deal with this. All the talk about adapting to climate change is like telling the frog in a slowly boiling pot of water to adapt. We have to actually address it. GS: Well, thank you for doing more than your part to bring this to the attention to many folks. Is there something that we haven’t touched on that you would like to address? AS: Well, I think I’ve rambled across the whole field, because this is what I live with in my mind year in and year out. I’m so worried about the future. I mean, at my age, I’m in the departure lounge. But young people are going to have to face this, and I’m desperate to give them a chance. Read much more in the new TED Book, The Grazing Revolution: A Radical Plan to Save the Earth, available for the Kindle or Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app to get access to this title — and the entire TED Books archive — for the duration of your subscription.

Sally Kohn’s talk, the “clean” version Posted: 12 Dec 2013 09:31 AM PST Sally Kohn had a point to make in her TED Talk. During her career as a progressive lesbian talking head at Fox News, she’d get letters from people who really, really didn’t like what she said, or objected to her very existence. To make this attitude crystal-clear, onstage at TED@NYC Kohn read out the kind of letter she received during the course of a typical day. The hate-filled letter contained one of the last really untouchable curse words. Point made. We wanted to make sure that Kohn’s message was heard with its full force. But as we’ve encountered in the past with other talks containing strong language or graphic imagery, not all TEDsters were equally happy with this choice. So at the request of several fans, we’ve created a “clean” edit of the talk. If you’d like to share Kohn’s message of tolerance and emotional correctness with an audience that might be sensitive to profanity, please use this version: Other talks where the language or images have proven to be a hot topic include Rose George: Let’s talk crap. Seriously. (George herself uses a stronger word); Peter Singer: The why and how of effective altruism (which opens with a violent image that prompted us to put a note in the talk description); and Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story (containing a joke that’s quite deliberately in questionable taste). Cases like these always provoke the question: Preserve the speaker’s original form or edit to reach more viewers? We’re hoping we’ve accomplished the best of both by providing an alternate version. Let us know what you think in this TED Conversation »

The immortality bias: Further reading on the 4 stories we tell ourselves about death Posted: 12 Dec 2013 09:07 AM PST At TEDxBratislava, I shared 4 stories about death that have circulated over and over again, across cultures and time. Below, notes on where you can see each story reflected. Photo: TEDxBratislava We each live in the shadow of a personal apocalypse: the knowledge that — someday, somehow — we will die. It’s a terrifying thought, and so we look for a way out. In my talk from TEDxBratislava (and in my book Immortality)Stephen Cave: The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death, I walk through four stories that people have told throughout cultures and time, as a way to manage this very real fear. Here, some of the myths, books, movies and articles where you can see each of these stories reflected. I’ll end with a fifth story — I call it the “wisdom narrative” — an alternative to these oft-repeated tales. 1. The Elixir story Almost every known culture has legends of a magic pill or potion that can ward off ageing and disease. Alchemists in both East and West, for example, believed they could brew an elixir of life, while the Spaniard Juan Ponce de León believed he would find the fountain of youth in Florida. Jorge Luis Borges wonderfully satirises this quest in his short story ‘The Immortal’, which details the terrible consequences of finding the water “that cleanses men of death.” The idea of being immune to death is one that fills us with hope and dread in equal measure. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift gives us the Struldbrugs, who never die but continue to age, so becoming shriveled and senile. This is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Tithonus, the tragic prince granted immortality by Zeus, but not eternal youth. The most popular recent exploration of the elixir myth is in the Harry Potter books and films. From the Philosopher’s Stone to the Horcruxes, the series asks whether we should accept death or rebel against it. Despite warnings from myth and literature, the quest for the elixir continues. The historian David Boyd Haycock chronicles the many attempts of serious science to defeat aging and disease in his book The Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer, or you can watch one of the leading advocates of a modern day elixir, Aubrey de Grey, in his TED Talk. 2. The Resurrection story Given the success rate of the average elixir, it is a good idea to have a back up plan — and that is just what the Resurrection Story offers: it promises that if you die, you can nonetheless physically rise to live again. The most influential story of resurrection can of course be found in the Gospels. If you’ve not read them for a while, you might be surprised — for example, by the passage that tries to explain away rumours that the disciples themselves took Jesus’s body (Matthew 28:11-15). But the story of Jesus was by no means the first legend of a god-figure who died and rose again, so defeating death for himself and the rest of us. The ancient Egyptian god Osiris, for example, did the same as the first mummy. Spectacular artifacts from the three thousand year cult he inspired can be seen in museums across the world, especially the British Museum in London, the Neues Museum in Berlin, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or of course Cairo’s own Egyptian Museum. Whereas some hope the gods will resurrect them to live again, others hope that scientists will do it. Like the Elixir Story, this theme has inspired classic works of fiction, such as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, in which we read how the eponymous young scientist “on a dreary night of November,” manages to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing” that lies in front of him. Like modern day mummies, those hoping to be resurrected by science go to great lengths to preserve as much as possible of their bodies. Their preferred method though is not balms and bandages, but the deep freeze — a process known as cryonics. A wonderful exploration of the troubles this can lead to can be found in Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper. Or for an account of one man’s determination to be frozen, read my Aeon magazine article, “Frozen Dead Guys,” on cryonics.  3. The Soul Story The majority of people on earth believe that they have one, and this belief plays a central role in most religions. One of the earliest attempts to prove the existence of the soul can be found in Plato’s account of the death of Socrates in the Phaedo, in which the philosopher explains his belief in the afterlife before calmly drinking deadly poison. Early Christians preferred to believe they would attain immortality by being physically resurrected, but as time went by and the Last Judgement failed to materialise, more and more turned to the Platonic doctrine of the soul. The Christian version of what happens to this soul once it departs the body is most vividly expressed in Dante’s Divine Comedy, recently newly translated into English by Clive James. Many other religious and cultural traditions subscribe to some idea of a soul — for example, Hinduism. In the short, powerful text the Bhagavad Gita, the god Krishna tells us how, “Just as a man casts off worn out clothing and accepts new ones, even so the embodied soul discards worn out bodies and enters into different ones.” Buddhism has a similar belief in reincarnation — the movement of the soul from one body to another — although it confusingly also teaches that there is no permanent soul or self. The film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, is a charming exploration of these themes. The dark side of the Soul Story is when these spirits of the departed come back to haunt us. Ghost stories come close to being a human universal, found in every culture. One of the most enjoyable — and appropriate to this time of year — is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. 4. The Legacy Story The Legacy Story is about living on through the echo you leave in the world, like the great hero Achilles, who sacrificed his life at Troy in order to win immortal fame. The film Troy with Brad Pitt in the lead role nicely captures Achilles’ yearning to be the most renowned of heroes. Or you could read Homer’s original The Iliad and The Odyssey, which contains a more nuanced assessment of the quest for fame. But nowhere is the futility of this quest more pithily expressed than in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem Ozymandias, which contains these lines about a traveller finding a ruined colossus in the desert: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. There are, however, other ways of leaving a legacy than becoming famous — for example, by leaving a biological legacy. In his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins describes how the real immortals are our genes, whose lifespans can be measured in millions of years. Or our legacy might be our contribution to a much greater whole — for example, Gaia, the entire web of life. This is the view taken by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in their excellent book What is Life?. An Alternative: The Wisdom Story None of these immortality stories is entirely convincing — that is why there are four, as the flaws in each lead people, or sometimes entire civilisations, from one to the next. But there is an alternative — a fifth story that can also be found weaving its way through history. Its oldest expression is in the fantastic Epic of Gilgamesh, a dramatic story of one king’s pursuit of immortality and ultimate reconciliation with death. Coming to terms with mortality isn’t easy. It helps if we first recognise that immortality probably isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — as Borges’s short story The Immortal, mentioned above, expresses. This theme is also at the heart of Karel Čapek’s play The Makropulos Affair, which can also be enjoyed as an opera (with the same name) by Leoš Janáček. The next step is to realise that we need not fear death — something first expressed by the Greek philosopher Epicurus, whose few surviving writings are well worth reading. “While we are, death is not; when death is come, we are not,” he wrote. “Death is thus of no concern either to the living or to the dead.” The final step is to cultivate those virtues that help us to appreciate the time we have, rather than worry about it being finite. It can help, for example, to focus on the present, a theme common to many wisdom traditions; or to focus on other people, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell put it: “the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it — so at least it seems to me — is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” (from his essay ‘How to Grow Old’ in Portraits From Memory And Other Essays). And the third virtue is gratitude, expressed beautifully in this TED talk by the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast. We shouldn’t waste our time worrying about our time being limited, but should rather, as the Greek Epicurean Philodemus put it, “receive each additional moment of time in a manner appropriate to its value; as if one were having an incredible stroke of luck.” Stephen Cave is a philosopher and writer. Read much more about him »