Spring Chicken Page 28

  Then there were the economic aspects. Would all these new old people bleed the world dry? According to Kuhn, mega-longevity would actually be a net economic plus, as long as the retirement age was extended—say, to age 110. People would be far more productive, per capita. Unfortunately, due to the increased demand, food and energy prices would go “through the roof,” he said, with oil hitting $1,000 a barrel.

  “What about feeding all these people?” someone asked. Answer: If we have the technology to extend lifespan, we will probably also be able to grow or make enough food. Somehow. Perhaps we would live in the desert?

  I wasn’t so sure, and neither was Sundeep. He had seen war, and he was not at all sure he would want to live on a planet with ten or twenty billion other people and a finite amount of arable land (not to mention fossil fuels). What would happen to the oceans? To the climate? Neither one of us shared the faith that technology would be able to solve this particular problem in an acceptable way. I started to think that, as dreadful as aging is, maybe immortality wasn’t such a hot idea, either.

  And there was a bigger irony at play, as well. The meeting had celebrated the rebels of science, the obscure seekers striving for great, world-changing breakthroughs (extreme longevity would certainly qualify). But then I thought of the physicist Max Planck’s wry but true observation, “Science advances one funeral at a time.”

  Meaning that only when old scientists and their dogmas are retired does progress occur. If we figure out how to eliminate aging, then we’ll eliminate scientists’ funerals as well—actually, that will probably be one of the first things that happens. So how will science progress? What if Alexis Carrel had hung on for another fifty years? Would we still be celebrating his patently false dogma? Would Len Hayflick still be toiling in the basement of the Wistar Institute, grumbling that his cell cultures keep dying out?

  More to the point: What if your boss would never, ever have to retire? Do you feel like being stuck in the same job until you’re ninety-nine?

  When we arrived in London, Sundeep guided me to the proper Tube line, and then we said our good-byes. Saturday is Football Day in England, and the subways and trains were thronged with soccer fans in full regalia, well-lubricated with the life-enhancing, life-extending beverage known as beer. Death and dying was very far from their minds, however, as it should be from all of ours, most of the time. More important was whether Chelsea would top Arsenal. Or whether my old friend John, who I was going to visit, would slaughter me on the golf course (as usual).

  And I thought about something I’d read from the philosopher Ernest Becker: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity largely designed to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” It makes us do things.

  In other words, nearly everything we do is, on some level, motivated by the knowledge that someday we must die. It’s why we write books, go to church, have children, take up pole vaulting at sixty, or quit our jobs and go find ourselves on the Pacific Crest Trail. Or whatever. “Death,” as Steve Jobs famously and accurately said, “is life’s change agent.” It makes us do things.

  I was surprised to come away from a weekend with Aubrey de Grey feeling slightly ambivalent about life extension. In my previous encounters with him, I’d been if not wholly convinced, at least optimistically curious. This time, I felt a bit more wishy-washy about it. My conversation with Sundeep kept replaying in my mind. What kind of world would we create?

  Sure, I’d like to stay healthy for a long time, and enjoy my life the way I did when I was younger. That would be nice. But I want it much more for my surviving dog, Lizzy. I had always expected her to die well before Theo. She was a wild child, almost untrainable, always tearing off into the woods after deer and other critters. I figured that, sooner or later, she would be hit by a car, a common fate for hound dogs. It was okay: I had rescued her literally from death’s door. Her owner had brought her in to my veterinarian’s office (not Dr. Sane), to be put down for the high crime of chomping a Yorkie. I said I’d take her for a month, and that was twelve years ago. I’ve counted everything since then as bonus time.

  We’re all on bonus time, actually; think of our grandparents and great-grandparents’ generation, who died in their fifties and sixties. After Theo, though, I expected the worst—ample research has shown that when one spouse dies, the other often follows shortly thereafter, and they were practically an old married couple, anyway. So I had relaxed my rules, letting Lizzy eat from the table and teaching her to beg for pizza crusts. At least she’s eating, I told myself. She’ll be gone soon, anyway.

  It turns out she loves pizza crusts. And she is a very persistent and accomplished beggar. And she kept going. And going. And going.

  For her thirteenth birthday, I went out and bought two juicy tenderloin steaks and grilled them up, one for her and one for me. Not long after, I took her in to Dr. Sane, the vet, for a checkup. “Thirteen!” he exclaimed, addressing her directly. “That’s an accomplishment, Lizzy. Congratulations, girl.”

  She checked out fine, her blood work totally normal. She seemed to be embodying Tom Kirkwood’s observation that the males drop dead while the females keep going. I wondered if I should get Nir Barzilai to start a centenarian-dog study, and look for her longevity genes, because she clearly had something protecting her from the cancer that kills most dogs by that age.

  She was, to coin a phrase, no spring chicken. Her face had turned almost totally white, so she looked like a ghost. People began stopping us on the street again, like they used to when she and Theo were younger. “How old is she?” Complete strangers would come up to her and scratch her whitened muzzle, and sometimes even bend down to kiss her on the head, without a word to me, then walk off, wet-eyed. I loved her more than I ever had.

  On a practical level, our life together slowed down considerably. It took us longer to negotiate the stairs up to our fifth-floor New York apartment, but she still managed. Some mornings she still trotted and pranced on our early walk, just like always; other days, she would just hobble a bit and do her business before turning for home. (She always dictated the route.) There was a scary episode, not long after she turned thirteen, when she basically lost her sense of balance, and staggered around like a drunk (neurological problem, cause unknown). I watched, helpless, until it eventually cleared up on its own.

  All along, she got lots and lots of pizza crusts, particularly during the later stages of this project. I would have cloned her, if I could have afforded it. But as my dog-cloning Silicon Valley friend had explained to me, that night at dinner, the cloned dog wouldn’t have been the same dog at all. If we could figure out how to make dogs live forever, I’d sign her right up.

  As for me, I needed some help, too. Which brought me back to Nate Lebowitz’s office, almost exactly a year after I’d first walked in. The waiting-room crowd was the same melting pot of New York–area immigrants and natives. My cholesterol numbers were not that much changed, either—down a few points on most things, up a good handful on HDL, the good stuff. That was okay. But Lebowitz was beaming. “Way to go!” he said. On my chart he’d written OUTSTANDING!

  Why was he so happy?

  A closer look revealed I had many fewer dangerous LDL-bomb-carrying mopeds zipping around in my arteries (the ApoB markers). Meanwhile, on the HDL side, I had somehow acquired more efficient arterial “sweepers,” carrying cholesterol and other junk back out of the artery wall and to the liver for reuse.

  Lebowitz wanted to know what I had done to make so much of an improvement: Had I taken Welchol, as he recommended? Nope. Fish oil? Sometimes. I’d also been more diligent about the bike riding, mostly trying to keep up with my dad. I had found a group of guys to ride with regularly, which helped a lot, though it would have helped more if our rides did not always end at a beer keg. Still, I had managed to give up burgers and French fries, two of my favorite food
s. (Well, pretty much.)

  Whatever I had done, it had worked: I’d also lost eight pounds, which is a pretty big deal. “Sometimes, just paying attention makes a difference,” he said. True that. “You’ve healthy,” was his parting verdict.

  So is Lizzy, somehow. It is now the late fall of 2014, a rainy December afternoon, and she is eyeballing the pizza crusts on my plate. (I need to give up pizza next.) Of course I’m going to give them to her. We recently marked her fourteenth birthday, which qualifies her as a bona fide canine centenarian—not bad, for a 70-pound hound. She can still make it up the stairs to our apartment, and even hop up onto the bed at 2 a.m.

  How did she get here? Perhaps she has dog centenarian genes, à la Irving Kahn, that have protected her (so far) from the cancer that killed her brother. Maybe it was the fact that, as I learned more about diet and aging, I started to feed her a bit less—always good, holistic foods, but never too much, sort of like the NIH/Whole Foods monkeys. Or perhaps it was the fact that, nearly every day of her life, we’ve gone for a run, or a hike, or a good long walk. She used it, and didn’t lose it.

  Or maybe none of these things explains her longevity, and it was just pure dumb luck. I’d pay almost any price for a pill that would keep her going for three or four more years. But if it does come, it will be too late.

  What does she feel like, inside that old body? I have no idea; I’m barely half her age, in dog years. Sometimes she romps like a puppy, flinging her squeaky toys around the room; other days, she’s so stiff she can barely walk. Most of the time, she sleeps. She sleeps an awful lot, and once in a while I’ll check to make sure she is still breathing.

  In the morning, she wakes up slowly, stretching and yawning—but at a certain point, usually when I’m drinking coffee, she’ll sidle up to me, tail gently wagging, her eyes telling me that it’s time for our walk. I’ll put down my coffee cup and get her leash, and out we’ll go, down to the river or out on her favorite trail, breathing in the smells of the waking world together. Every day is a gift.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without my parents, William Gifford, Jr., and Beverly Baker, who cultivated my love of reading, encouraged me to follow my heart, and also helped instill some fairly healthy habits. You are forgiven for not letting me drink Coke as a kid. My folks also both happen to be in magnificent health in their seventies, setting a high bar for the rest of us, so in a way they were the inspiration for this book.

  It also would not have happened without the generosity of Nir Barzilai of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, who with his colleague Ana Maria Cuervo invited me to sit in on their graduate course in the biology of aging in the fall of 2011. That gave me, an English major, the strong grounding in the science that I needed, but even after the course ended Nir proved to be an indispensable Virgil in the aging world, introducing me to the people I needed to meet and providing helpful guidance.

  I am grateful to the other busy scientists who gave me their time and let me tax their patience, including Rafael de Cabo, Mark Mattson, Luigi Ferrucci, and Felipe Sierra of the National Institute on Aging; David Sinclair, Amy Wagers, and Rich Lee at Harvard; Brian Kennedy, Judith Campisi, Gordon Lithgow, Simon Melov, and Pankaj Kapahi of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Marin County; Steven Austad, Veronica Galvan, Randy Strong, Jim Nelson, and Rochelle Buffenstein (the naked mole rat lady) at the Barshop Center for Aging Research in San Antonio; Valter Longo, Tuck Finch, and Pinchas Cohen of USC; James Kirkland and Nathan LeBrasseur of the Mayo Clinic; Saul Villeda at UCSF; Donald Ingram of LSU; Mark Tarnopolsky at McMaster; and Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois–Chicago. Also Leonard Hayflick, a great scientist and one-of-a-kind human being, who I feel fortunate to have met. And who can forget Aubrey de Grey, also sui generis.

  As any journalist knows, some of the most helpful people you ever meet on a story are the passionate amateurs, the hyper-informed observers sitting just on the sidelines, the ones who know who and what you need to know. For me, that role was played by the inexhaustible Bill Vaughan and the omnipresent John Furber, among others. Eleanor Simonsick of the NIA also helped guide my research and my thinking, and while she did not want to be quoted, she didn’t say I couldn’t thank her. Michael Rae was also quite helpful. Dr. Nate Lebowitz helped me navigate the bewildering world of practical cardiology, and Charles Ducker helped me make sense of the biochemistry, no easy task. It was an honor to meet Irving Kahn. Finally, I doff my hat in admiration of Ron Gray, Howard Booth, and Jeanne Daprano, extraordinary athletes for any age.

  My agents, Larry Weissman and Sascha Alper, provided encouragement, the occasional cattle-prodding, and a fantastic title. At Grand Central, Ben Greenberg took the chance that this would not be another sad, boring book about aging, and Maddie Caldwell, Yasmin Mathew, Liz Connor, and the rest of the hardworking GCP team kept things moving. Thanks also to the talented Oliver Munday for a terrific cover and fun illustrations.

  I shared the manuscript with trusted friends, including Jack Shafer, Weston Kosova, Alex Heard, Chris McDougall, David Howard, Jennifer Veser Besse, and Christine Hanna, who also offered her guest room in the Bay Area. Thanks also to my hosts Steve Rodrick and Jerry Hawke. Helpful commiseration was offered at various points by Jason Fagone, Carl Hoffman, Gabe Sherman, Brendan Koerner, Ben Wallace, Josh Dean, and Max Potter. Thanks also to editors who supported the project with aging-related assignments, including Glenda Bailey at Harper’s Bazaar, Chris Keyes and Alex Heard at Outside, Laura Helmuth at Slate, and Michael Schaffer at the New Republic.

  Lastly, this would have been a much worse book, with a much less happy author, without my wonderful, supportive, and insightful girlfriend, Elizabeth Hummer, who put up with my frequent absences and more frequent grumpy moods.

  And of course thanks to Lizzy the magical coonhound, who teaches me to love each day.

  Appendix

  THINGS THAT MIGHT WORK

  Is there a magic bullet for aging? Not yet. But the following supplements and medications have been touted as “interventions” that might help ameliorate some aspects of the aging process. Some of them might even work. So, to satisfy your curiosity (and mine), I took a close look at the data on a handful of the most interesting possibilities.

  Resveratrol

  When David Sinclair’s resveratrol-in-fat-mice study made the front page of the New York Times, in 2006, demand for resveratrol supplements hit the roof. The only problem: There were hardly any resveratrol supplements on the market. One of the few existing brands, called Longevinex, saw its orders skyrocket by 2,400-fold. While the hype has died down, resveratrol remains one of the biggest-selling “anti-aging” supplements on the market.

  Certainly, resveratrol has amassed an impressive résumé of lab results, going back to before anyone ever heard of David Sinclair. When he “discovered” it, it was already well known for its ability to whack certain kinds of cancer cells, in experiments. Subsequently, it has been shown to improve liver function, reduce inflammation, prevent insulin resistance, and beat back some of the other effects of obesity. It also seems to improve cardiovascular function, such as in monkeys who were fed a brauts-and-funnel cake kind of diet. Yet despite the immense media hype it has attracted, for nearly a decade now, there have been only a handful of human clinical trials on resveratrol—versus more than 5,000 published papers on mice, worms, flies, monkeys, and yeast. Most of the human studies have been quite small, with just a dozen or two subjects, because nobody has seen fit to fund a large, well-run clinical trial of a non-patented supplement.

  Worse, out of these small trials, very few have reported significant positive effects. Nir Barzilai found that it improved glucose tolerance slightly in older prediabetic adults. A couple of other small studies have shown slight beneficial effects on cardiac function. It appears to work best in animals and in humans that are obese or metabolically compromised; in them, it comes close to mimicking the effects of calorie restriction, witho
ut the restricted calories. But other studies have found no effect on insulin sensitivity, or cognition, or on blood pressure and other parameters, even in obese patients.

  The reason for these disappointing results may have to do with the way humans metabolize the stuff. Even at very high doses, very little resveratrol actually makes it into our bloodstream, because our bodies think it is a poison, and it gets pretty much annihilated in the liver. Mice handle it differently, but in the human body, resveratrol does not last long; its half-life is around two and a half hours, or shorter than a baseball game. Another caution: Not all supplements labeled as resveratrol actually contain much resveratrol. Barzilai tested a dozen before he found one that was adequate for his study; a 2012 analysis of fourteen resveratrol supplements on the market found that five of them contained half or less the amount that was claimed on the label, and two had none at all.

  This will not come as good news to whoever (besides my dad) buys the estimated $75 million worth of resveratrol supplements that are sold in the United States each year. But it will also not come as a surprise when you consider that the entire supplement market is left essentially unregulated by the federal government, thanks to the Orwellianly titled Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994—which neither educates nor promotes a science-based approach to health. Under the act, the FDA does not test or approve dietary supplements, so as a consumer, you are basically on your own. So you might want to start with the next entry on this list.

  Alcohol/Red Wine

  Here’s a paradox: If drinking too much is bad for you, then why is it unhealthy to not drink? That seems to be the case: While excessive drinking is bad, an avalanche of studies has found that, overall, light to moderate drinkers are far better off than teetotalers, particularly in terms of cardiovascular health. A number of reasons have been suggested for this, but as we drill down into the data, we find that what you drink could be as important as how much. Oh, and in some cases, the more you drink, the better (up to a point, anyway). And the best thing to drink seems to be red wine.