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  I think the most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work for forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement! You go to college, you do drugs, alcohol, you party, you have sex, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating—and you finish off as a gleam in somebody’s eye.

  —Sean Morey

  For my parents

  Prologue

  THE ELIXIR

  You are never too old to become younger.

  —Mae West

  In his final moments of consciousness, as the young scientist crumpled to the laboratory floor, he may have realized that perhaps covering himself with varnish was not the best idea he had ever had, experiment-wise. But he was a man of science, and curiosity could be a cruel mistress.

  He had been wondering for a while about the function of human skin, so durable and yet so delicate, so sensitive to burns from sun and flame, and so easily sliced open by knives much less sharp than his surgeon’s blades. What would happen, he wondered, if you covered it all up?

  So, on what was otherwise a slow day at the lab, at the Medical College of Virginia in genteel Richmond, Virginia, in the spring of 1853, Professor Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard—native of Mauritius, citizen of Britain, late of Paris (via Harvard)—stripped off all his clothes and went to work on himself with a paintbrush and a pail of top-quality flypaper varnish. It didn’t take long before he had coated every square inch of his naked body with the sticky liquid.

  This was still an era when a scientist’s primary guinea pig was generally himself. In one experiment, the thirty-six-year-old Brown-Séquard had lowered a sponge into his own stomach to sample the digestive juices within, which caused him to suffer gastric reflux for the rest of his life. Such practices distinguished him as “by far the most picturesque member of our faculty,” as one of his students would later recall.

  The varnish episode would only add to his legend. By the time a random student happened to stumble across him, the professor was huddled in a corner of his lab, trembling and apparently near death. His body was so brown that it took a moment for the student to realize that he was not a wayward slave. Thinking quickly, the young man frantically began to scrape off the brown gunk, only to receive a tongue-lashing from the victim, who was furious that “some obtrusive individual [had] extracted him from the corner into which the varnish had tumbled him, and, just as he was fetching his last gasp, maliciously sandpapered him off.”

  Thanks to that quick-witted medical student, though, Brown-Séquard would go on to become one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century. Today he is remembered as a father of endocrinology, the study of glands and their hormones. As if that were not enough, he made major contributions to our understanding of the spinal cord; a particular type of paralysis is still called Brown-Séquard syndrome. Yet he was far from an ivory-tower academic. He once spent months battling a deadly cholera epidemic on his native Mauritius, a lonely archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean. True to form, he intentionally infected himself with the disease by swallowing the vomit of patients, in order to test a new treatment on himself. (That nearly killed him, too.)

  His Richmond professorship did not last the year; the Frenchman’s eccentric ways and darkish skin proved too much for the Southern capital, so he moved back to Paris, to spend the remainder of his career shuttling between France and the United States. All told, he spent six years of his life at sea, which would have made his late sea-captain father proud. Yet despite his near-constant state of motion, he could not outrace old age. By his sixties, Brown-Séquard had fetched up once more in Paris, as a professor at the Collège de France. His friends included Louis Pasteur, as in pasteurization, and Louis Agassiz, one of the forefathers of American medicine. The poor orphan from far Mauritius was inducted into the French Legion of Honor in 1880, followed by a slew of other prestigious prizes, culminating with his election as president of the Société de Biologie in 1887, confirming his status as one of the leading men in French science.

  He was seventy years old by then, and he was tired. Over the previous decade, he had noticed certain changes overtaking his body, none of them good. He had always buzzed with frenetic energy, bounding up and down stairs, talking a mile a minute, then interrupting himself to scribble down his latest brilliant idea on the nearest scrap of paper, which would vanish into a pocket. He slept just four or five hours a night, often beginning his workday at his writing desk at three in the morning. It has been suggested, by his biographer Michael Aminoff, that he may have been bipolar.

  But now his once-boundless vigor seemed to have abandoned him. He had evidence, too, because he had long kept track of his body, measuring things like the strength of his muscles and keeping careful records. In his forties, he had been able to lift a 110-pound weight with one arm. Now the best he could do was eighty-three pounds. He got tired quickly, yet he slept poorly if at all, and he was tormented by constipation. So naturally, being the scientist he was, he decided to try to fix the problem.

  On June 1, 1889, Professor Brown-Séquard stood before the Société de Biologie and delivered a keynote address that would forever change his career, his reputation, and popular attitudes toward aging. In the talk, he reported on a stunning experiment that he had performed: He had injected himself with a liquid made from the mashed-up testicles of young dogs and guinea pigs, which he had augmented with testicular blood and semen.

  His idea was simply that something in younger animals—specifically, in their genitals—seemed to give them their youthful vigor. Whatever that was, he wanted some. After a three-week cycle of injections, he reported a dramatic turnaround: “To the great astonishment of my principal assistants,” he claimed, “I was able to make experiments for several hours while standing up, feeling no need whatever to sit down.”

  There were other benefits. His strength seemed to have returned, as his tests confirmed: Now he could hoist a hundred-pound weight, a significant improvement, and he was once again able to write late into the evenings without fatigue. He even went so far as to measure his “jet of urine,” and found that it now traveled 25 percent farther than it had prior to the injections. With regard to his constipation issues, he noted proudly that “the power I long ago possessed had returned.”

  His colleagues in the audience were torn between horror and embarrassment. Extract of… dog testicles? Had he gone mad in his old age? Later, one of his colleagues sniped that Brown-Séquard’s outlandish experiment had proved only “the necessity of retiring professors who have attained their threescore and ten.”

  Undeterred, he made his magic mixture (now fashioned from the testes of bulls) available for free to other doctors and scientists, in the hope they could repeat his results, which some did. The reviews from his peers were still sc
athing. Harrumphed one Manhattan MD in the pages of the Boston Globe, “It is a return to the medical systems of the middle ages.”

  Outside the halls of academe, though, Brown-Séquard became an instant hero. Almost overnight, mail-order entrepreneurs began selling “Séquard’s Elixir Of Life”: twenty-five injections for $2.50, using the good doctor’s name but with no other connection to him. The newspapers, predictably, had a field day; at last, they could print the phrase testicular liquid. A professional baseball player, Jim “Pud” Galvin of Pittsburgh, openly used the elixir in the hope that it would help him pitch better against Boston—the first recorded modern use of a performance-enhancing substance by an athlete. The old professor was even feted in a popular song:

  The latest sensation’s the Séquard Elixir

  That’s making young kids of the withered and gray

  There’ll be no more pills or big doctor bills,

  Or planting of people in churchyard clay.

  Sadly, this last line proved to be wishful thinking: On April 2, 1894, five years after his address to the Société de Biologie, Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard was dead, six days shy of his seventy-seventh birthday. Despite his fame, he had not profited one franc from his elixir. And while his fellow scientists ultimately concluded that the miraculous revival that Brown-Séquard had attributed to his “orchitic liquid” was due to little more than a placebo effect, he had kicked off a rejuvenation craze that seemed to cause even the most rational men and women to lose their minds.

  The next fad was something called the Steinach operation, which promised to restore a man’s vitality but really amounted to nothing more than an ordinary vasectomy. It nevertheless became hugely popular among the male intelligentsia of Europe, including the poet William Butler Yeats, who at sixty-nine had married a twenty-seven-year-old; even Sigmund Freud, so attuned to phallic states, pronounced himself satisfied with the results.

  In the United States, rejuvenation fever exploded in the 1920s, when a patent-medicine salesman named John Brinkley popularized an operation that basically involved implanting fresh goat testicles into the scrota of worn-out middle-aged men. Brown-Séquard had actually tried similar experiments on dogs back in the 1870s, but even he hadn’t dared try a cross-species transplant. Brinkley had no such qualms, perhaps because he was unencumbered by an actual medical education. He did, however, own a radio station, and he broadcast nonstop testimonials about the wonders of the operation, in between performances by the Carter Family and even a young Elvis Presley.

  Over the decades, he operated on thousands of patients, making himself one of the richest men in America. Meanwhile, dozens of people died on his operating table, and hundreds more were left crippled or maimed by his clumsy surgeries. And still they kept flocking to him: the tired, the worn-out, the flagging, impotent, aging men of America, and even a few brave women, desperate for one more chance at youth.

  They had no idea how lucky they were, just to be alive.

  Chapter 1

  BROTHERS

  Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.

  —Philip Roth

  The wave reared up, green and foaming, and slammed into my grandfather. For a too-long instant, he disappeared under the water. I watched from the shore, holding my breath. I was ten years old. Finally, he staggered to his feet on the shallow sandbar, wiped the spray from his eyes, and turned to face the next rising wall of water.

  Lake Michigan has days when it thinks it’s an ocean, and that day was one of them. All morning long, it had been hurling five-foot swells at the beach in front of my family’s old frame cottage, which my great-grandfather had built with his own hands, cheap lumber, and sheer Anglo-Saxon will back in 1919. Bodysurfing on this beach was one of my favorite things on earth, and I prayed for wavy days. Unfortunately, on this day the waves were too big, and I had been forbidden to go in the water. So I sat on the porch, sulking.

  With me on the porch was my great-uncle Emerson, who was my grandfather’s older brother and, it’s fair to say, not my favorite relative just then. Stiff and somewhat humorless, he only spoke to us children to scold us for running around or making noise. He didn’t swim, so he couldn’t watch us on the beach, which rendered him pretty much useless to us. He never joked or played with us, either, the way the other uncles did. He just sat there, staring vacantly out at the lake. To my ten-year-old mind he just seemed ancient, and not in a good way like a fossil or a dinosaur.

  Meanwhile, out in the water, my grandfather was frolicking in the head-high waves. His name was Leonard, and even in his sixties, the old navy man still loved the rough surf. Enviously, I watched him plunge into one foaming breaker after another, emerging to wipe the water from his eyes before turning to face the next one. I adored him.

  The family had gathered to celebrate his birthday, which he had mock-grandiosely dubbed St. Leonard’s Day. A homemade banner proclaiming it as such fluttered from the porch railing, to the puzzlement of beach walkers. The house was a kind of landmark because it was so much older than its neighbors. It had survived the Great Depression and countless brutal winter storms, including a big one during the 1930s that had washed out the sand dune on which it had been built. Nearly all the neighboring cottages were completely destroyed. The family drove out from Chicago and repaired it by themselves, and after that it was known as The Ark.

  The adults gathered for cocktails at six. It may have been closer to five. Afterward the aunts fixed dinner in the downstairs kitchen, built to hold up the house after we lost the dune. When dinner was done, the men lit a bonfire on the beach, and we kids scorched marshmallow after marshmallow until we were sent to bed, to the sound of crashing waves. It was just another beautiful childhood day at the lake, and it would stay lodged in my memory for years before I recognized its true significance.

  Though they almost seemed like they came from different generations, my grandfather Leonard was a mere seventeen months younger than his brother Emerson, a slender gap bordering on scandalous for upright Midwestern Protestants circa 1914–15, when they were born. They were nearly twins, with the same genes and upbringing, and they remained very close throughout their adult lives. Yet their fates could hardly have been more different.

  Still that image haunts me: Emerson in his rocker on the porch while his only-slightly-younger brother is out there ducking major waves. Not too long after that day, Emerson began showing signs of the Alzheimer’s disease that would eventually devour his mind; he died in a nursing home at the age of seventy-four. Meanwhile, my grandfather’s idea of retirement was to buy a small citrus orchard in the mountains north of San Diego, where he toiled alongside the migrant farmhands until his mid-seventies. He was still going strong when a random infection felled him at age eighty-six.

  The difference between the two brothers was at least partly the result of one unlikely factor: religion. Like my great-grandparents, Emerson and his wife were devout believers in Christian Science, which is a misnamed faith if ever there was, because its followers actually reject medical science in the belief that human ailments can be healed through prayer. So they almost never went to the doctor, for anything. As a result, Emerson had piled up biological damage like a Cadillac in a demolition derby. A succession of skin cancers that he refused to treat had eaten away at his left ear, leaving it deformed and cauliflower-like. Later, he suffered a series of minor strokes that also went unattended. Every time he had an infection that could have been cleared with antibiotics, but wasn’t, that took a toll on him, too.

  My grandfather had shed his Christian Science beliefs early, at the insistence of his wife, and his most consistent religious observance was a steadfast devotion to the daily cocktail hour: one Scotch-based beverage on the rocks at 6 p.m. sharp every day. He availed himself of modern medical care, which had made crucial advances against infectious illnesses, and even heart disease and cancer. Just as importantly, he had quit smoking in 1957 (unlike his brother), and he got daily exercise in the form of vigorous and
often highly ambitious gardening projects, which he worked on every day before cocktails. The result was that he enjoyed a longer life—and a much longer healthy life—than his brother.

  Public-health experts now call this healthspan, one’s span of healthy years, and it will be an important concept in this book: While my grandfather’s lifespan was only about fourteen years longer than his brother’s, his healthspan was at least thirty years greater. If I’ve done my job, Spring Chicken will help you understand how to end up more like my grandfather, with his long healthy life, and less like his unfortunate brother.

  Decades later, on another perfect summer day, I found myself again sitting on the porch of The Ark. It had been a long time since I’d visited. My grandfather’s generation had moved on, and the house had been sold to a distant cousin. We didn’t go there much anymore, so this was a rare treat, a return to the site of some of my happiest childhood memories. Only now I was in my early forties, and naturally I had been thinking gloomy thoughts about getting older.

  This was in part thanks to my thoughtful work colleagues, who had marked my fortieth birthday by giving me a cake adorned with a single candle. Shaped like a tombstone, it read:

  RIP

  MY YOUTH

  Which was awfully kind of them. But it was also rather brutally true: In the media world in which I’ve worked all my professional life, forty is considered old. Even though you aren’t actually old—far from it—our culture nonetheless labels you middle-aged. Demographically undesirable. On the way out, career-wise. Possibly even an AOL user. My own mother had already pronounced me “no spring chicken.”

  She did have a point. Inside, I could tell something was changing. I’d been more or less athletic since college—sometimes more, sometimes less—but lately I’d noticed that it had become a lot more difficult to keep in shape. If I took a few days off from running or cycling or going to the gym, my muscles would turn to Jell-O, as though I’d been sitting on the couch for weeks. When I finally did get out for a jog, I’d feel the unmistakable bounce of nascent man-boobage.