Christopher Reeve, Man of Steel, RIP

Progenitor of a transhumanist future?

It's hard to convey how dreadful I felt upon reading my Yahoo news, 10/12/04, that this wonderful man had suffered cardiac failure and death following rampant infection from a routine skin abrasion.

"NO, NO, NO, NO, especially not him!"

Not the man so courageously leading the charge for therapeutic stem-cell cloning, a revolutionary technology that promises imminently to restore and rejuvenate damaged cells in anyone's diseased/wounded body.  Therapeutic "embryonic" cloning also promises to extend the meaningful, vigorous human lifespan by decades if not centuries.

Reeve, once a 6'4" Adonis, introduced to American film audiences in the 1978 blockbuster Superman, became a world-class actor—including, my guilty-pleasure favorite, an outstanding performance in the romantic period piece, Somewhere in Time, with the stunningly beautiful Jane Seymour (1980).  Like Clint Eastwood or Tom Selleck in their prime, and perhaps Hugh Jackman today, he was our ideal of a man's man and a woman's man.

An accomplished horseman, in May 1995 he went on a short vacation to ride in Virginia.  His horse shied from a jump and hurled Reeve headfirst to the ground, breaking his top vertebrae and paralyzing him from the neck down.

This was not an injury from which he was expected to live, much less live long.  "…of 11,000 people with spinal cord injuries, only 250 patients with Reeve's sort of catastrophic broken vertebrae survive, and those who do survive live an average of seven years."—People Magazine, 10/25/04.  So, Christopher Reeve beat the odds many times over.

And, after a period of understandable depression and grieving, he boldly started life anew as an activist for life enhancement.

Life enhancement is my term.  He would not have characterized his work in that general manner.  His concern, particularly, was for those suffering major, traumatic spinal cord injuries like his own.  He sought to improve research on paralysis and to alleviate the suffering of victims through technology, insurance reform, and intelligent care.  He founded the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation.

He dictated letters, telephoned, and personally lobbied lawmakers incessantly.  Largely because of his efforts, in 2002, a bill that would have entirely banned therapeutic embryonic cloning (TEC)—incredibly, the bill passed the House 265-162 and George Bush indicated he would sign it!—died in the Senate.

TEC is the technology mentioned above that will soon cure Parkinson's, diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, and all the rest.  It has multibillion-dollar enterprise potential.  It is resisted by a frenzied mob of superstitious pseudo-moralists—an exact literal description—who believe a clump of cells constitutes an identity to a human being and/or hold the notion that if God wanted man to be cured of disease and made better, by golly, God would do so without all that messy science.

For Christopher Reeve, in his condition—through his many painful subailments and unimaginable discomforts—to have contended with this Immoral Minority, while maintaining his civility and sense of humor, is beyond heroic.  He is Superman.  He continued writing and directing, and even acted (in a TV remake of Rear Window and the WB series Smallville).

He touched the lives of many who suffer paralysis.  Through his unyielding support and enthusiasm, Reeve inspired many other victims to keep the flame of life burning.  Beneficiaries of his attention include Cody Unser (Al Unser's daughter who became stricken by a disease that destroys spinal cord nerve cells), Sean Graves (and other young victims of spinal injury from the Columbine HS shootings), and Brooke Ellison.

Brooke Ellison became a quadriplegic when a car hit her in 1990.  Christopher Reeve contacted Brooke soon after she graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 2000, seeking to do a movie of her remarkable life.  Sure enough, on October 25, 2004—the day this column is being written—The Brooke Ellison Story premieres on A&E; Christopher Reeve, midst the rigors of a New Orleans summer, directed it.

Through his words and deeds, through the living force of his benevolence, Christopher Reeve has shown all of us, abled and disabled alike, that we can and should transcend any affliction of the human condition.  His affliction was worse than most.  But the lesson of his life must be taken universally: to resist and conquer all disease… including the disease of aging that relentlessly lays waste to the species without discrimination.

Christopher Reeve, whether he used the term or not, was a living apostle of life enhancement.  He believed technology could and should be developed to make him whole again.  To repair the damage.  To return him to full, physical manhood.  He sought in research a cure for his paralysis in his lifetime, and by extension a cure for others suffering devastating physical handicaps.  He held forth against the traditional handicapped philosophy of fatalistic acceptance.

Though the price has gone up considerably in 30 years, Reeve would have happily volunteered to be the Six Million Dollar Man.  "We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make [him] better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster."  It's a shame Chris died before the enhancement technology fully came on line.

But make no mistake about it.  We will have the technology.  The only question is should we use it.  A transhumanist is one who says, "Yes, we should..." use every shred of medical knowledge and technology that enhances the quality of our lives and eliminates disease.  Technology that keeps us young, makes us smarter, "better, stronger, and faster."  Technology that blows away the ignorance and decadence of centuries like a horrible nightmare.

Transhumanist and proud!  (More on transhumanism in a future column.)

That is the legacy of Christopher Reeve, for me personally.  I think he would approve.

His spirit makes us—many of us, anyway—want to move to the next step in human evolution, to reshuffle by conscious intention and medical science the cards not-so-Motherly Nature deals to us.  I believe he would say, "Go for it!  Never accept physical limitation as an inexorable attribute of the human condition."

But it is the quality of Christopher Reeve's character to which we forever aspire the most.  We miss him enormously already, and we ride on with him always in our hearts.