Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging » (Unabridged, 6 CDs, 6 hrs 30 min)

GREG CRITSER is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World and Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies. His work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, and he is a well-known commentator on medicine, health, and food, with regular appearances on public radio and television. His blog can be found at scientificblogging.com.

What happens when you mix modern medical entrepreneurship with one of the most ancient of human desires—the desire to live forever? The answer is today's multibillion-dollar antiaging industry, which promises everything from restoring lost vitality to actually turning back the hands of time for aging boomers. But who, exactly, makes up the antiaging movement, and what do they expect from the vast and growing antiaging apothecary? Who is simply manufacturing money from spurious claims and dubious products, and who is performing legitimate scientific research? One thing is clear: by the mid-twenty-first century, America will have one million centenarians. How much older, then, can (and should) we get?

Sharp, funny, fast-paced, and deeply informed, Eternity Soup is a full-course meal about our quest for immortality, spiced with human vanity, chicanery, and cutting-edge science.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review.

Bringing his signature wit and insight to the field of biogerentology, Critser (Fat Land, Generation Rx) produces a vigorous report of frontier science, charlatanry, and hope for a new, much longer, way of life. Beginning with a discussion with his septuagenarian parents, who receive "compounded hormone" treatment from a "longevity doctor," Critser travels the U.S. to investigate the enterprises "forging onward into a brave new pro-longevist world." (Crister's own horse in the race-besides finding the natural aging process "cruel, capricious and unrelenting"-is a "form of accelerated brain aging" he suffers as a result of a concussion.) Crister's first stop is a gathering of the Caloric Restriction Society, which advocates minimal caloric intake as a way of slowing cell damage; a conference breakfast consists of five blueberries and three potato chips. More trendy, and pricey, is hormone treatment, which claims to "add thirty years to maximum life span," backed up by promising trials on mice (though more recent studies have called the science into question). Critser's own course of treatment turns out ambiguously, but sends him to an intriguing third line of research, bio-engineering replacement body parts and other tissues from a patient's own cells. A light and critical eye makes this excursion into front-end science an entertaining, enlightening trek.
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Bk. 1 Calories 1

Bk. 2 Cash 53

Bk. 3 Engineering 115

Bk. 4 The New Longevity Bestiary 157

Bk. 5 One Million Centenarians 173

Recipes For Eternity 195

Notes 199

Select Bibliography 217

Acknowledgments 221

Credits 225

Index 227