Eternity Soup
Inside the Quest to End Aging
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- 39,00 kr
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- 39,00 kr
Publisher Description
Mix the latest and most rigorous scientific research, irrepressible old-fashioned entrepreneurship, and the ancient human desire to live forever (or at least a lot longer) and the result is today’s exploding multibillion-dollar antiaging industry. Its achievements are so far mostly marginal, but its promises flow with all the allure of a twenty-first-century fountain of youth. In Eternity Soup, acclaimed science writer Greg Critser takes us to every outpost of the antiaging landscape, home to zealots and skeptics, charlatans, and ingenious clinicians and academics.
We visit a conference of the Caloric Restriction Society, whose members—inspired by certain laboratory findings involving mice—live their lives in a state just above starvation. (“It’s only the first five years that are uncomfortable,” says one.) We meet the new wave of pharmacists who are reviving the erstwhile art of “compounding”—using mortar and pestle to mix extravagantly profitable potions for aging boomers seeking to recapture flagging sexual vitality. Here, too, are the theorists and researchers who are seeking to understand the cellular-level causes of senescence and aging and others who say, Why bother with that? Instead, we should just learn how to repair and replace organs and tissue that break down, like a vintage automobile collector who keeps a century-old Model T shining and running like new.
Eternity Soup is a simmering brew of testosterone patches, human growth hormone (so promising and so potentially dangerous), theories that view aging as a curable disease, laboratory-grown replacement organs (“I want to build a kidney,” says one proponent. “It is such a stup-eed organ!”), and bountiful other troubling, hilarious, and invigorating ingredients. Critser finds plenty of chicanery and credulousness in the antiaging realm but also a surprising degree of optimism, even among some formerly sober skeptics, that we may indeed be on the cusp of something big. And that elicits its own new set of concerns: How will our society cope with a projected new cohort of a million healthy centenarian Americans? How will they liberate themselves from the age segregation that shunts them off to “God’s Waiting Rooms” in the sunbelt? Where will they find joy and meaning to match the inevitable loss that comes with longevity? Eternity Soup is an illuminating, wry, and provocative consideration of a long-dreamed-about world that may now be becoming a reality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bringing his signature wit and insight to the field of biogerentology, Critser (Fat Land, Generation Rx) produces a vigorous report of frontier science, charlatanry, and hope for a new, much longer, way of life. Beginning with a discussion with his septuagenarian parents, who receive "compounded hormone" treatment from a "longevity doctor," Critser travels the U.S. to investigate the enterprises "forging onward into a brave new pro-longevist world." (Crister's own horse in the race-besides finding the natural aging process "cruel, capricious and unrelenting"-is a "form of accelerated brain aging" he suffers as a result of a concussion.) Crister's first stop is a gathering of the Caloric Restriction Society, which advocates minimal caloric intake as a way of slowing cell damage; a conference breakfast consists of five blueberries and three potato chips. More trendy, and pricey, is hormone treatment, which claims to "add thirty years to maximum life span," backed up by promising trials on mice (though more recent studies have called the science into question). Critser's own course of treatment turns out ambiguously, but sends him to an intriguing third line of research, bio-engineering replacement body parts and other tissues from a patient's own cells. A light and critical eye makes this excursion into front-end science an entertaining, enlightening trek.