A growing number of scientists and self-proclaimed researchers are claiming that people will soon be living well past 100 years of age.
Death-Busters
Five years from now, if all goes well, Chadd A. Everone, Ph.D., of Berkeley, California, will be ready to announce the discovery that eluded Ponce de Leon some 500 years ago: the existence of a “fountain of youth.” But this fountain exists in a test tube and is unromantically called a “proteolytic enzyme inhibitor.” So far it has boosted the average life span of laboratory mice by 15 percent.
The significance of Everone’s finding isn’t that we might be able to live to an average of 85 years just by downing a pill or two every day or that the compound has been used as an arthritis treatment for 20 years, or that it retards cataracts, sore muscles and perhaps senility. Everone’s enzyme inhibitor represents just a small fraction of an explosion in research that could substantially extend the human life span.
“Even if there are no startling developments, we’ll extend the average life span by 30 years at the turn of the century,” says Everone, who in 1972 founded the Foundation for Infinite Survival, Inc. But John Mann, president of the MegaHealth Society in Manhattan Beach, California, insists: “We want immortality now!”
Infinite Survival and MegaHealth are just two organizations within a growing network of people from all walks of life who contend that an average life span of well past 100 years is possible. Some of these people are notable research scientists and doctors who may or may not subscribe to radical theories of how human life expectancy can be significantly increased. The backgrounds and reputations of others in the field are less certain.
“The life-extensionists include some good scientists who speculate about various hypotheses that are then tested,” says Edward L. Schneider, deputy director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA). “There are also people like me,” he continues, “who want to know why we age, so that the quality of life can be improved. Then there are a lot of people in this field who claim to be scientists but don’t have scientific credentials.”
Dr. Marott Sinex, former associate director of the Gerontological Society of America and the cofounder of the Gerontology Center of Boston University, thinks that many people involved in the life-extension movement have acquired a following because “they are telling the public what it wants to believe…. Their message is that if you read their book, you’ll live longer.”
Although today more people than ever before are interested in extending their natural life span, research into life extension is nothing new. One of the earliest theories of life extension — that the endocrine system, which controls our glands, is an important part of the puzzle — was tested in 1889 by Harvard University professor Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard. He claimed to have regained youthful strength after injecting himself with crushed dog testicles. However, nobody else could duplicate Brown-Sequard’s results, and he fell into disgrace.
A short time later, Russian physician Serge Voronoff built up a flourishing practice grafting the testicles of young monkeys onto his clients. He made more than $1 million from these treatments, but lost credibility when many of his patients contracted syphilis. Then there was Paul Niehans, a Swiss surgeon who in the 1930s began injecting sheep-embryo cells into such notables as Winston Churchill, Christian Dior, and Pope Pius XII. Niehans’s theories and techniques are still being argued today.
At the turn of the century, scientists also began wondering why the citizens of Bulgaria, who ate a lot of yogurt, lived so long. In 1904 French biologist Elie Metchnikoff suggested that aging may be related to toxins in the colon, and that eating yogurt would clean out “bad” bacteria. The colonic-irrigation theory has attracted a following. Mae West, who lived to 88, credited her excellent health to daily enemas, and musician Louis Armstrong, who died at 71, downed strong laxatives every night. But just as colonies have passed in and out of favor, so has more serious gerontological research.
How ultimately productive much of it will be remains to be seen, but currently such research is booming. Enter, for example, the quarters of the Foundation for Infinite Survival and you will find 100 healthy mice staring out of glass cages in a quiet and immaculate laboratory. Chadd Everone is using these mice to test one of gerontology’s current theories: that preservation of nonrenewable proteins can help keep the body young. Certain enzymes break down proteins within us, thereby promoting aging, since these proteins don’t renew themselves.
Remarkably, the enzyme inhibitor has not only been testing well in mice since 1980 but also in four humans since 1983. “They’re all clients in their sixties who will take it indefinitely,” says Everone.
Although its use as a treatment for arthritis and cataracts has been well documented, this is the first time that researchers have tried to test the drug as an age-retardant. “It’ll take five to ten years of testing in humans before we can be sure it will meet our expectations,” says Everone. “No side effects have been reported so far.”
The Foundation for Infinite Survival has no plans to go into the pill-pushing business. “Life extension is more than just selling products, most of which are garbage anyway,” says Everone, a man with serious eyes and a neatly clipped mustache, who feels most comfortable in jeans, a white shirt, and tennis shoes.
After studying philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Madrid, Everone began to seriously explore the meaning of life. He decided that “survival is the ultimate purpose of life” and set up the foundation. “Since my one ultimate goal is to live forever,” he changed his name to Everone.
Spending ten years offering “control-of-aging programs” at a cost to the client of $300-$500 a year has paid off. Everone’s clinic, which employs a general physician and cardiologist, serves 400 clients, most of whom were probably drawn to it by an ad in the Yellow Pages for a “health testing center” which listed such services as “weight counseling.” Once enrolled, they are told about the foundation.
For their money Infinite Survival clients, mostly 50-60-year-old professionals, get a thorough health exam, a 30-page computer analysis of the results, and an individualized program outlining what they should be doing to increase their longevity. “For most people, the program will take less than an hour a day,” says Everone. Infinite Survival’s recommendations may include nutritional supplements, exercise, yoga, massage, or experimental drug therapies.
Two of the most popular theories of life extension revolve around limiting two things everybody has: body weight and “free radicals.”
Free radicals are molecules with an extra or “free” electron. Millions of free radicals sail through our bodies and float in the air we breathe. Most of these are oxidants, that is, oxygen atoms with a loose electron. When loose electrons spin off to pair with other atoms, they start chain reactions that can damage cells. The damage becomes more extensive when there are too many free radicals present to begin with. Free radicals are present in rancid food, air pollution, cigarette smoke, radiation, and in white blood cells as they attack disease. Free “rads” have been linked to cancer, heart disease, arthritis, abnormal blood clotting, aging, and several other disorders.
Normally, various enzymes protect the body from free radicals. Also, antioxidants, which may be amino acids or other substances, guard against free radicals by breaking down or, in chemists’ language, “scavenging” the reactions promoted by free radicals.
Dr. Denham Harman, who stumbled on the free-rad idea in 1954, is convinced that inhibiting free radicals will promote a longer, happier life span. “All major diseases,” he believes, “involve free radicals. The point is that we can do something now.” That “now,” adds Harman, would require ten to 20 years of work screening various chemicals and testing their side effects.
In one sense Harman has already succeeded. He is one of the founders of the highly respected American Aging Association (AGE). Most of AGE’s 600 members, who pay $20 a year in dues, are personally involved in trying to retard aging. The association acts as a clearing-house of information, publishes a quarterly journal, and sponsors an annual meeting of gerontologists.
“Two popular writers contend that if a chemical food preservative can keep cooking oil from getting old, it should do the same for humans.”
Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, authors of the 1982 bestseller Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach, point out that since vitamins A, C, E, B, and B6 and the minerals zinc and selenium are antioxidants, downing huge doses of these could extend the average life span. They also contend that if butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), one of the most common chemical food preservatives, can keep cooking oil from getting old, then why can’t it do the same for humans? They each take two grams a day. Meanwhile, in a Los Angeles lab, Dr. Roy Walford is busy feeding his mice. Walford, a professor of pathology at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine and author of Maximum Life Span, is studying rates of aging and the relationship between genetics and nutrition in aging. He thinks how much we eat may be more important than what we eat.
Over the past 25 years, he and other scientists have noticed that mice on restricted diets live 20-50 percent longer than those left to eat all they want. Walford is the first to admit that he doesn’t know why weight reduction works. “But maybe it’s tied into our immunity system or endocrines. The important thing is that with normal eating, 35 percent of the energy you produce is used by your body. In a restricted program, the rate goes up to 50 percent. And the greater your metabolic efficiency, the fewer free radicals you probably generate.”
According to Walford, anybody wanting to live long should go on a gradual diet to drop to ten to 15 percent below their average weight. “If you’re 150, you should get down to 120-135.” In the past four years, Walford has carefully dieted and taken 12 pounds off his already lean frame and would like to drop ten pounds more from his current 140.
In considering dietary influences on aging, many life-extension researchers are quick to criticize Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, the glittering stars of the life-extension movement, who say they subsist on “gourmet food and dairy products” and spend “23 of every 24 hours on a water bed.”
But they must be doing something right. Their 1982 best-seller has sold 1.4 million copies; their just-out Life Extension Companion has sold 200,000 copies; they run a thriving $100,000-a-year consulting business; and they earn $5,000 per lecture. The couple owns three homes in Manhattan Beach.
Nobody is sure why they’ve succeeded so resoundingly. Maybe it’s because of their frequent appearances on “The Merv Griffin Show,” or the feeling you get from them that you don’t have to work hard to live long, or the fact that nobody has read the book that made them famous. Life Extension is 858 pages long, enough to make most readers skim rather than carefully read its humorously titled chapters. Reason 4 in Chapter 10 (“Why Some People Prefer to Die”) is “they aren’t having any fun”; Reason 12 is “all their friends want to.”
According to Pearson, an M.I.T. graduate with a degree in physics, the antioxidants they take counteract their sedentary lifestyle. “Besides, we’d rather give up a few years than give up the food we eat.” While life-extensionists and fitness experts agree that exercising is crucial, Pearson contends that ten minutes of peak exercise every other day is all you need to keep your heart in shape. “But you could,” he adds, “get by with less than a minute of exercise a day. Neither sex nor jogging are vigorous enough but dancing to heavy-metal music is perfect.” As for the couple’s critics, Shaw says, “Jealousy is a powerful force.”
The NIA’s Edward L. Schneider says of Pearson and Shaw: “They’re fun, but I wish they weren’t in aging.” Dr. Walford labels them “sensationalists who serve a shallow hodgepodge of half-truths.”
You won’t find Dr. Marott Sinex, Ellen Orbach, or Dr. Robert J. Morin dancing to heavy-metal music to stop aging. They represent the mainstream of modern gerontology, and would like to see the government and private sector pour millions of dollars into efforts that would come up with completely new ways to better understand and battle aging.
What the federal government contributes to aging research — $82 million in 1984 — is deemed minuscule by Ellen Orbach, executive director of the Aging Research Council, a privately run fundraising organization. “Reagan wants to encourage the private sector to supplement the money,” she says. “It’s out there, but it isn’t enough.” She and another fundraiser, Dr. Robert Morin, a gerontologist and president of the 750-member American Longevity Association in Beverly Hills, California, grumble that their private contributions, totaling less than $1 million a year, are paltry compared to donations to the American Heart Association, which totaled $129 million in 1983.
Several scientists have charged that if the government or private sector wanted to do something about aging, they could. “Determination of biological causes of aging could be achieved this decade,” Dr. Bernard Strehler, of the National Institute of Health, said in 1966. “The enormous power of American science might uncover the secrets of aging within a decade if sufficient energy were devoted to the task,” adds Dr. Alex Comfort (of Joy of Sex fame), director of London’s University College Medical Research Council and author of A Good Age.
But the National Institute on Aging has little use for theorists who contend that life expectancy can be lengthened through any one procedure, and that it will be discovered and perfected any day now. Research programs funded by the NIA concentrate on illnesses of the elderly and how manipulation of bodily systems (such as the immune system) can prevent disease. As an NIA spokesperson says, “We’re working to extend the productive years, to keep people healthier longer.”
The drug industry’s role in pursuing life-extending drugs has been almost non-existent in recent years. “Huge vested interests hold their power by servicing rather than eliminating [those] problems,” says Dr. Everone. According to Everone, the medical director of the pharmaceutical firm Sandoz Corporation told him in 1977 that the company is “not interested in controlling aging but in compensating for deficiencies associated with senility.” Repeated calls to Sandoz were not returned.
Merck Sharp & Dahme and Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc., two of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies, are studying possible drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, a cause of senility. Hoffmann-La Roche “is in the very early clinical stage” of testing Aniracetam, a drug that may help patients think more clearly, according to a company spokesperson. “But we’re worried about overpromising anything, so we haven’t issued any press releases.” Merck says it could be ten years before anything conclusive comes out of its labs, where work on Alzheimer’s began in 1983.
Sandoz markets Hydergine, which, according to Pearson and Shaw, “slows aging.” Others in the field alternately see it as helping senile people think somewhat clearer, or as having no effect at all. Outside the United States, where doses of up to 12 milligrams a day are used (the Food and Drug Administration recommends only three milligrams), Hydergine is the fifth most frequently prescribed drug in the world.
The experience of Dr. Donner Denckla, a Harvard-trained research scientist, illustrates the halfhearted commitment of drug companies to life extension. In the 1970s he was working for Hoffmann-La Roche, researching what has been called a “death hormone” he uncovered. Denckla found that if the pituitary gland was removed from the brain of a lab animal and several hormones were then injected into the creature, aging was retarded in 20 of the bodily systems tested. Denckla contended that as we get old the brain tells the pituitary to make an unknown “death” hormone; without the pituitary, the hormone can’t be secreted. Hoffmann-La Roche, however, was not interested in pursuing further research.
‘Aging research, “says an expert, “hasn’t even started yet. Everything in this article will be obsolete in ten years.”’
Denckla confides that “I just want to mind my own business now.” Reached in Washington, D.C., he talks of being turned down by other leading pharmaceutical houses and fending off an offer by some wealthy Saudi Arabians (“I couldn’t be sure they weren’t terrorists”).
Probably the strangest notion to come out of the life-extension movement is that you can just think death away. “Most people want something to pop in their mouth, but the power’s been with us all the time,” preaches A. Stuart Otto, who runs the Affiliated Christian Emortalists (ACE) out of a post office box near San Diego.
In 1968, Otto hit upon the idea that if “Jesus Christ came to teach man how to overcome physical death,” then ordinary people can learn it, too. “A fundamental principle of this,” explains Otto, “is the Principle of Center Outflow. Christ’s spirit is within us. You can get his energy by drawing that presence outward.”
The key to Center Outflow is meditation. If you want to wish death away, says Otto, you’ve got to meditate an hour a day. But that’s not all members of ACE have to do to attain perpetual youth. The church’s Master Thought binder lists various phrases that are to be memorized every week. “The Voice of Life” phone number (a recorded message) is to be dialed weekly. There are monthly “prayer requests,” an annual dinner, seminars, progress reports, and the “continuous recitation of affirmations”; to live longer, “speaking the affirmation aloud has greater effect, and of course the more feeling one puts into it, the better.”
If that sounds like an ordeal, consider the problems Otto himself has faced. Other churches want their flocks to prepare for the hereafter instead of avoid it — so he had to become an independent pastor. By 1978 he had 500 subscribers to his Immortality Newsletter, enough for him to form the Committee for the Elimination of Death. But the name turned off so many people that he soon changed it to the more optimistic Committee for Extended Lifespan, and then turned the directorship over to a man “who wanted to make money from it.” Six months later, after the group grossed $10,000, Otto took back the reins.
Along the way, the committee lost most of its following. “More than ten but less than 100” members pay “nominal,” unspecified dues. “Nine out of ten people aren’t willing to put this first in their lives,” says Otto. “If your uncle comes to visit from Chicago and you can’t do your disciplines for two days, it isn’t enough. To make sure you’re committed, you have to write to me three or four times before I’ll even send anything encouraging about joining.”
Attacking death by thinking the right thoughts? When it comes right down to it, the 40,000 centenarians alive in the United States today who never had a drop of Hydergine, a shot of an enzyme inhibitor, or a capsule of BHT would probably say, “Why not?” The Chinese religion of Taoism teaches that men should meditate instead of ejaculate during sex so that their life forces will not become depleted.
It” all depends on whether you want to live as you choose or live to live longer. There are those who believe you can do both, and those who say it doesn’t matter. Life-extensionists today are going on educated guesswork. “We’ll know ten times more about aging in the year 2000,” says Sandy Shaw. Marott Sinex is even more modest. “Aging research,” he says, “hasn’t even started yet. This article will be obsolete in ten years.”
For the record, everyone here considers death as déclasseé. Also for the record, five years from the initial publication of this article was 1990, and even when we asked people around here who were alive then, nobody could remember any fountain of youth announcement from back then – or even yet. People — well, science people — remain fascinated with protease inhibitors, however, and even though folks still do not live forever, we do live much longer and have made wonderful progress using these things. … For our part, we’re just generatlly pro tease. … Different kind of science, though.
