Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 439 pages
• Published by: Mariner Books January 20, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0618492216
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0618492213
• Book Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 1.2 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
Drawing on scores of original interviews and contemporary source material, Hall, a contributing writer and editor at the New York Times Magazine (Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene), gives a timely and engrossing account of the high-stakes science of life extension. The author kicks off with the ‚minence grise of the field, Leonard Hayflick, and his human cell line called WI-38, which opened the gates for biotech research and showed that our cells may have built-in limitations on longevity. His WI-38 strain, taken from aborted fetus cells used to develop a polio vaccine, also became an ethical flash point that, as the author shows, has steered the course of biomedical research in aging, cancer, stem cells and cloning. Here, too, are the repeated rise and fall of entrepreneur Michael West, the idiosyncratic "lapsed creationist, born-again Darwinist," who merges his spiritual belief in immortality with big money science. Hall aims to show how the Clinton administration's decision not to support therapeutic cloning and regenerative medicine represented government held hostage by "heavy-handed, ideological fundamentalism, enforced by anonymous thuggery." The book wraps with President George W. Bush's decision in 2001 to allow stem-cell research to proceed, but only using already existing cell lines. Among Hall's conclusions: distrust of science is the subtext of the debate over embryonic stem cells and research cloning, and regenerative medicine is inevitably yoked to health-care limitations in access, affordability, timeliness and, Hall writes, "simply, good medicine." He says the notion of "victory over mortality" is a canard, but we may be able to slow the aging process. This is top-drawer journalism.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Review
"A timely and engrossing account of the high-stakes science of life extension.This is top-drawer journalism." (Publishers Weekly, Starred )

"An important survey of the entire landscape of the science aimed at extending human life.we all owe [Hall] a vote of thanks." --JoAnn C. Gutin (Newsday )

"A fascinating, accurate and accessible account of some of [the] contemporary efforts to combat aging." --Robert H. Binstock (The New York Times )

"[C]ompelling . . . Merchants of Immortality is a highly readable and important book." --Shannon Brownlee (The Washington Post ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension (Hardcover) (**** 1/2) Stephen Hall has chosen a title that represents his book very well. What he sets forth, in supple, thoughtful, smoothly readable prose, is the saga of recent advances in "life extension" - both longevity research and research into the healing and regeneration of tissues with the aid of stem cells. As his title suggests, the emphasis is on the scientists involved, and on the public face of that science. Along the way, he clarifies a good deal of the science itself: the discovery of the Hayflick limit, the finite limit to the number of times a normal cell can divide; the connection of that limit to the telomeres, the shoelace-tips on the ends of chromosomes; the chimerical enzyme telomerase, two parts protein and one part RNA, which repairs the telomeres and helps make cancer cells immortal; the sir-1 gene and its congeners which can double or sextuple your lifespan, if you happen to be a roundworm. And so on. Little of this will be news to those laymen who follow the science pages closely, but even for us it's good to have the timeline neatly laid out. The bulk of Hall's attention, though, goes to the rivalries between laboratories to be first to publish and patent each of these breakthroughs; to the lineages of the biotech startups bankrolling the races; to the contrast between the solid if limited gains made by the biologists and the fairy dust sprinkled on investors; and to the enormous ferment surrounding all these new technologies as they began to impinge on embryonic stem cells and thereapeutic cloning. Wandering through the scene from chapter to chapter, popping up repeatedly whenever the action gets hot, is the energetic true believer Michael West, the ousted founder of the premiere telomere outfit Geron, and the leading light of Advanced Cell Technology, which set the country on its ear two years ago with a premature announcement that it had cloned a human embryo. In his infectious zeal for abolishing the tyranny of old age, West serves not only as a central figure in the unfolding commercial and political saga, but as a stand-in for the insistent voice in all of us, whispering that all men may be mortal, but hey, maybe *you* can beat the rap. Hall's conclusion, offered with a full appreciation of the fact that "It's hard to predict things, especially the future," is that a dramatic cure for aging is not likely to be in the cards. Just as cancer turned out to be a whole class of diseases with a host of different causes, so aging is turning out to be more complex than the discipline's pioneers imagined. What we can reasonably expect is a steady advancement of the average life span over the coming century, by another decade or two. How long we have to wait for breakthroughs in tissue regeneration in particular will likely depend less on science than on politics. Two intriguing lines of lifespan research, the one tracking the sir family of genes, and the one investigating the effects of free radicals, are not ignored but, perhaps because they haven't caught the public fancy sharply, get relatively short shrift. Less than halfway through the book, the spotlight shifts from the study of aging to the study of stem cells. Because the U.S. for the last quarter century has enjoyed an effective moratorium on experimentation with aborted fetuses or discarded IVC embryos, American scientists' attention has focused more and more on the other theoretical way of obtaining human embryos: inserting the nucleus of an adult cell into an enucleated human egg. If anyone were to succeed in doing that, and coaxing the result to divide until it reached the blastocyst stage - that would be "therapeutic cloning." So far, no one's done it, or at any rate no one who's done it has felt like advertising it. In a political squaring of the circle, President Bush managed to permit NIH to fund limited therapeutic cloning in a way that ended up outlawing funding in practical terms. As a result, scientists in the field face the classic NRA nightmare: when federal stem cells are outlawed, only maverick venture capitalists will have stem cells. At press time, no one knows what's really happening, what kind of ethical oversight private companies are bothering to put in place, or how restricted access to resulting medical breakthroughs will be when it's all proprietary, with no NIH ownership at all. For the moment, the U.S. is stuck with the worst of the "pro-life" and the "mad scientist" worlds, while the rest of the world does its research in the sunlight and steals a technical march on us. All the players on both sides of that circle-squaring, and the principal shakers, movers and move-blockers in the relevant research, are profiled here, some in full screen 3-d and some in fetching thumbnails. The field is unlikely to be surveyed by a more complete or more even handed chronicler for some while.