It seems that most people who die in old age die because of some organ failure or another. Assuming we had a person who lived very healthily, ate right all her life, didn’t smoke, could that person live forever with constant organ transplants at any sign of damage? If not, could they live at least 200 years? 150?
There are some things you can’t transplant. If you’ve got major peripheral vascular problems, the blood just isn’t flowing to the legs, for example. And if you’ve got poor blood flow to your brain, there is a limited amount that can be done. I can’t imagine transplanting a jugular vein. Cardiac bypasses are close to routine, now, but after a while you run out of blood vessels to use as grafts. A cardiac surgeon once explained to me that you need living connections, there is no artificial substitute.
And of course, transplants can’t help a lot of fatal diseases, like Parkinson’s and Lou Gerhig’s. Not to mention Alzheimer’s.
You can get nasty cancers and other fatal problems even if you do everything right.
We can’t transplant a brain, and that sucker can fail just like the other organs.
Organ transplants are major surgery and carry a risk of death every time. Even if everything else stays in tiptop shape at some point the odds will catch up to you.
I’m not a doctor, and I’m not necessarily up on the latest advances in transplants, but I think it’s safe to say that the answer is “no”. (Given how traumatic transplant surgery is, I doubt your hypothetical patient would even live to match naturally long-lived individuals–bear in mind that there are an estimated 450,000 centenarians in the world, and Jeanne Calment lived to be 122 years old.)
Here are some of the problems I see with the patchwork approach to longevity:
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There are things that simply can’t be replaced by a transplant–what are you going to do, replace our hypothetical patient’s brain with someone else’s when he gets senile? Even if the state of the art were up to the task, it wouldn’t be the same person any more. It would also be difficult, at best, to replace many parts of the skeletal system.
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While an organ transplant is certainly a healthier option than dying immediately, that doesn’t make it healthy. Even with the best possible match of rejection factors, transplant patients require ongoing immune suppression therapy to keep the immune system from attacking the new organ. This leaves them more vulnerable than normal to infections of all kinds. Your patchwork man would be acutely vulnerable to every bug he met, and with an infection spread throughout the body, what do you replace?
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Even cloning the organs wouldn’t necessarily make it work, although it would presumably help with rejection problems. You’d still have to deal with the brain issue. We’re far from having tech that would let you copy someone’s mind into a new brain, even if you could grow one. There has also been some evidence that clones don’t necessarily get their “clocks” reset when they’re created–shortened telomeres may have implications for their longevity (although I don’t know if this has since been debunked, or even how it would apply to cloned tissue as opposed to full clones).
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Medical issues aside, there are also legal and ethical issues to consider. Where are these donor organs coming from? Could they have saved multiple lives rather than prolonging the life of one increasingly fragile individual? Were they even obtained legally? (Larry Niven explored these issues in a number of his Known Space short stories, particularly the Gil the ARM stories. Advances in transplant medicine led to large-scale organlegging–murdering people for spare parts. The death sentence was also applied to increasingly minor crimes, for the same reason.)
My best friend is a kidney recipient, as is his father. While the possibility exists that he will outlive me (unlikely, but possible), I can state with absolute certainty that he will not enjoy it.
Even the most successful transplant (which his father is counted as) has difficulties with the new organ. A less-than-wholly-successful transplant is a ticking time bomb. My buddy is one of the latter. His transplant came with a latent disease that slipped through the screening procedures… and this happens all the time. The attitude seems to be “Well, you’re alive and you don’t need dialysis, quitcher bitchin”.
Even without this downside, there are other issues. The necessary drugs are hard on the body in and of themselves – unless you have a miraculously adaptive immune system, which will accept anything.
And all this is just for one organ, the kidneys. Others would be as, if not more, difficult.
So… to answer the question, no. You might get as far as three, maybe four replaced organs, and my opinion is they’ll drop dead from the toxicity of their own drug-laden blood at that point.
Unless you can clone their own cells into the appropriate organs, I suppose, in which case who knows? But as things stand now… no.
Hmmm…I wonder if you could more easily buy time by simply transplanting the head onto a new body, rather than plugging new guts into the original. Simpler, surgically, albeit with certain other…drawbacks. (Like turning the patient into a complete quadriplegic, and the fact that you’re still screwed if something happens to your brain. Or you throw a clot. Or get sepsis from a bedsore you didn’t feel.)