Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension

Scientists, politicians, business people, and reporters are the protagonists and supporting characters in Stephen S. Hall's true tales of discovery, intrigue, pathos, wealth, and power. Who could have expected biology to become a field of such struggle and promise? Chromosomes, stem cells, cloning, national and international law, bioethics...this book is a page-turner.

Hall is a fabulous writer, given to wonderful turns of phrase. He's also a meticulous researcher -- the "Notes" section of the book is gigantic, citing sources for even the most off-hand of remarks. This is really two books in one It begins discussing Leonard Hayflick and the discovery of programmed cell death, and the resulting search for the telomerase enzyme, then it takes a pretty sharp right turn into being a book about stem-cell research. Although some of the players are the same, they're really two different stories. Hall's conclusion is that no rolling back of the clock is likely, and that "immortality," or even profound life extension, is probably not in the cards. But it's a fascinating journey nonetheless, and well worth reading.

So, when will stem cells come into widespread medical use? If you answer twenty years from now, you'd be wrong by about 60 years--they first became widely used in the 1960's! Only they were called "bone marrow transplants." Today thousands of them are done every year. Hall has written a dozen so excellent books on medicine, biotechnology and molecular biology, and this is one of the best. Here he recounts the development of the idea that aging in humans can be scientifically understood and modified. He starts off with the wonderful story of the Hayflick limit with an account of his first interview with him and brings this maverick character to life. How often are the big ideas discovered by rogues and rebels--fearless men? He covers a very wide swath of current developments in the cutting edge of biology and medicine--telomeres, stem cells, transplants, cloning, and aging--all told in enough depth that you can't help but learn something, even if you are pretty well informed. The history, the personalities, and the ideas are all here. One thing I appreciated is that Hall makes no pretense about being disinterested in the subject--he takes some of it personally, and is not afraid to relate what his gut is telling him. He is partisan in the best sense of the word. He unflinchingly challenges the idealistic "bioethicists" who have lately ejected such nonsense into the public space, pretending to a certainty only a bishop could appreciate. Hall also relates in some detail the evolution of the stem cell/cloning debate that has resulted in the policy that federal money can go to research only on the 70 embryonic stem cell lines already in existence, now known to be more like 6. And none of them suitable for therapeutic for humans because they are grown on a substrate of mouse cells and their viruses. The yokels and theologians have managed to set back this important avenue for improving human health by who knows how many decades... Sad to think we'll be looking for progress to the South Koreans, who recently generated human embryonic cell lines by nuclear transfer. Americans have yet to duplicate this The quality of Hall's prose, and the nature of the subject itself, conspire to produce a book that I found very hard to put down. A terrific read!

(**** 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 be