| ETERNITY SOUP Inside the Quest to End Aging Greg Critser New York: Harmony Books, January 2010 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-307-40790-0 | ||||
| ISBN 0-307-40790-X | 234pp. | HC/GSI | $26.00 | |
Here, as in other books on medical interventions against the deficits of aging I have read, Greg Critser explores various facets of the ongoing progress of research. The picture is decidedly mixed: some ideas work, others do not; and hucksterism is an ever-present threat to acceptance of genuine progress.
He divides the book into five categories, roughly according to differing aspects of the problem. The first is caloric restriction, or CR. Simply put, eating about three-fifths of your normal caloric intake while maintaining proper nutrition will extend your life. This was known intuitively in the sixteenth century by an Italian nobleman named Alvise 'Luigi' Cornaro. Critser devotes considerable space to his life, to the reader's benefit.
But most of his attention is focussed on the modern era. And there is a good deal to focus on: from Clive McCay's CR to Ron Rothenberg's hormone supplementation to the Vacanti-Langer team's custom-built replacement organs to Aubrey de Grey's audacious and still largely theoretical Strategically Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS.) The cast of characters is large; the road is long, and littered with broken dreams; the progress is mixed; and the story is fascinating.
Perhaps the only thing that prevented mass grave robberies was the singular invention, by Genentech in 1981, of a way to synthesize vast quantities of HGH using modern recombinant DNA technologies. By 1985, somatropin was on the market, approved by the FDA for use only in children with documented deficits in growth hormone. Lilly, Pfizer, and the rest followed with their own versions. Of course, everyone over forty or so runs low on growth hormone; as Neal Kaufman alluded, evolutionary biologists long believed this was an adaptation to long life spans—lack of growth hormone might be an evolutionary check on cancer, a form of unhealthy growth that happens more and more frequently as people live longer. Although that theory has been broadly challenged in recent years, it was one reason that many clinicians were wary of using the hormone, even when clearly warranted in borderline dwarf children. Then, in 1990, a physician and medical researcher at the University of Minnesota, Daniel Rudman, had a breakthrough. Rudman was interested in how elderly men, displaying all the signs of normal aging, might respond to HGH therapy. It was not a theoretical pursuit. Rudman had a long and abiding interest in how frailty in the elderly could be treated, or, better, prevented. For six months, three times a week, he had twelve "overly healthy" (not fat and not too skinny) men aged sixty to eighty years inject themselves with the hormone; these men, like an estimated one-third of all men, had less than 350 U/liter of blood of IGF-1, indicating a substantial lack of growth hormone. (Healthy men between twenty and forty average somewhere between 500 and 1500 U.) Nine other subjects in the control group received nothing. All followed the same diet. After six months, the results were striking. Although there was no substantial weight gain in either group, the men in Group One experienced two profound changes: an 8.8 percent increase in lean body mass, and a 14.4 percent loss of adipose tissue—exactly the opposite trend displayed in almost all aging human bodies. Shrinking livers and kidneys got bigger. The men also registered substantial thickening of their aged skin, and small but important gains in bone mass. Although Rudman had many reservations about the intervention, he could not help but phrase the findings in a way that would be . . . noted. "The effects of six months of human growth hormone on lean body mass and adipose-tissue mass," he wrote, "were equivalent to the changes incurred during 10 to 20 years of aging." – Pages 67-68 |
Critser's research is thorough and his writing is smooth, with very few typos. He does have a tendency to introduce terms without defining them; but continue reading and you will come to the definition — or use the excellent index to find it. I could wish for more detail, but this is an immense and fast-moving field. No single book can capture much of it. He does give a number of references for further investigation. I give this book full marks, and think anyone building a collection of books on the subject would consider it a keeper.
By the way: The "Eternity Soup" of the title is not a metaphor for the stew of approaches all bubbling up together; it refers to actual soup (or soups). You can find the five recipes at the end of the book, just ahead of the Notes and the Select Bibliography of 36 entries.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.