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Inside the Quest to End Aging
Harmony
February 2010
On Sale: January 26, 2010
256 pages
ISBN: 030740790X
EAN: 9780307407900
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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