The longevity seekers : science, business, and the fountain of youth

202 Pages·2013·1.71 MB·English

by  Anton

Ted Anton is professor of English at DePaul University. He is the author, most recently, of Bold Science
and has written for Chicago magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and Publishers Weekly.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by Ted Anton
All rights reserved. Published 2013.
Printed in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02093-8 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02095-2 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anton, Ted.
The longevity seekers : science, business, and the fountain of youth / Ted Anton.
pages. cm.—(From obscurity, 1980–2005—“Greater than the double helix itself,” 1980–1990—The
grim reaper, 1991–1993—Sorcerer’s apprentices, 1991–1996—Race for a master switch, 1989–2000—
Money to burn, 2000–2003—Longevity noir, 2003–2004—Betting the trifecta, 2005–2006—Defying
gravity: the battle to find a drug for extending health, 2005–2013—Sex, power and the wild: the evolution
of aging, 2001–2008—The rush and crisis, 2008–2010—Live long and prosper, 2009–2011—Centenarians
in the making, 2011–2013—Fountains of youth, 2013—Reimagining age.) ISBN 978-0-226-02093-8 (alk.
paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-02095-2 (e-book) 1. Life expectancy—Economic aspects. 2. Longevity—
Economic aspects. 3. Life spans (Biology) 4. Old age—Economic aspects. I. Title.
HB1322.3.A58 2013
612.6′8—dc23
2012043340
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
THE LONGEVITY SEEKERS
Science, Business, and the Fountain of Youth
TED ANTON
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
For my parents, Bertha and Gus
Contents
A Note on Purpose
Preface
PART 1. FROM OBSCURITY, 1980–2005
1. “Greater Than the Double Helix Itself,” 1980–1990
2. The Grim Reaper, 1991–1993
3. Sorcerer’s Apprentices, 1991–1996
4. Race for a Master Switch, 1989–2000
5. Money to Burn, 2000–2003
6. Longevity Noir, 2003–2004
7. Betting the Trifecta, 2005–2006
PART 2. DEFYING GRAVITY: THE BATTLE TO FIND A DRUG FOR
EXTENDING HEALTH, 2005–2013
8. Sex, Power and the Wild: The Evolution of Aging, 2001–2008
9. The Rush and Crisis, 2008–2010
10. Live Long and Prosper, 2009–2011
11. Centenarians in the Making, 2011–2013
12. Fountains of Youth, 2013–
13. Reimagining Age
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Longevity Gene Timeline
List of Longevity Genes
Notes
About the Author
Index
A Note on Purpose
This story began with my interest in an article in the New York Times science
section. In January 2001, I called the article’s subject, MIT biologist Lenny
Guarente, who suggested I call the University of California at San Francisco’s
Cynthia Kenyon. Over the next eleven years I became hooked on their science of
longevity genes. I conducted more than two hundred interviews with scientists,
investors, and students in their offices and labs. I visited and worked in labs,
observed classes and conferences, and traveled from California to Crete to
research the story of the science behind the dream of extending healthful life.
To research the book, I attended conferences in Cold Spring Harbor, New
York (2002); Hersonnissos, Crete (2004); St. Louis, Missouri (2006); Boston,
Massachusetts (2008 and 2009); and Madison, Wisconsin (2010). I watched
scientists teach classes, run their labs, and conduct journal seminars. I was a
student for a day in the Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Genetics of Aging course.
The following pages explore the social history of a science idea. A researcher
grows up in a creative family, follows an obscure interest that appeals to them
and no one else, and stumbles onto an exciting insight that alters a mode of
thought. I am interested in the power of such ideas, revealing why some receive
attention at a given moment and others do not. This book proposes that in such
behind-the-scenes moments, one can discern crucial clues to the historical,
technological, and social forces driving an era.
Naturally, memories of such moments may vary. As much as possible I have
sought to square my interpretation with the recollections of the scientists. I have
been fortunate that the researchers themselves are recording the history of their
field in professional journals, online and print interviews, conferences, and in
their own books or oral histories. I consulted these works, talked to as many lab
members as possible, and tried to match recollections with the record and those
of other lab members. I went back to most researchers and checked the details of
a scene. What follows is my attempt to recount the unfolding of an absorbing
and disputed series of discoveries. If I quote a conversation, it is based on
interviews or public documents. Picking certain researchers and discoveries,
however, I leave others out. Ultimately, my goal is not to provide a
comprehensive text, but a dramatic record of the personal, economic, and
intellectual motivations shaping discovery in our time.
One of these discoveries could reshape the way we experience our lives. In the
race for longer, healthier lives, almost every discovery came under explosive
disagreement. What role did accident or personality play in their unfolding? To
what extent did public fascination and big money alter the course of science?
Which of these findings, if any, may lead to significant applications? This book
explores the relation of a unique science to its time and, in so doing, the relation
of any science to any time.
Preface
The Laboratory of Molecular Biology sat at the end of Hills Road on the
southern edge of Cambridge, England. In 1983 the weather had been so
miserable that twenty-nine-year-old Cynthia Kenyon taped a yellow sun on her
single window overlooking distant hedgerows and a lone traffic light. She was
checking her experiments in her tiny three feet of bench space in a room in one
of the leading institutions of molecular biology. The room was small and
crammed with equipment, with cream-colored walls. Upstairs was a cafeteria
strewn with newspapers and ashtrays. The laboratory smelled of coffee.
She worked with spectacular people mostly in their twenties who were
committed to science driven by ideas. Their main idea was that if you had a
biological question, you studied it in a living animal, not in single cells. Lanky
and tall, with short blond hair and freckles, Cynthia Kenyon had changed her
career to join this group. The oldest of three who grew up in New Jersey and
Georgia, she hated limits and disliked authority. In high school, she played jokes
on the band master even though she dreamed of a concert career playing French
horn. She hung a banner, “Know the truth and it shall make you free,” in her
bedroom, where she allowed a parakeet to fly free and taught it to pick playing
cards from her hand. She wrote stories, played guitar, kept a huge aquarium, and
sewed her own clothes. She yearned to do something great.
That morning the rain had finally stopped. The lab emptied as people headed
out to enjoy the sunshine. An opera played on the radio. At her bench, Kenyon
noticed one of the petri dishes of tiny worms. She pulled over a microscope to
take a closer look. The tiny worms were called Caenorhabditis elegans,
“elegans” for their elegant, sinuous, near-transparent bodies. C. elegans lives in
the temperate soils and decaying fruits of the earth. It consists of almost every
tissue that a human body contains, but is only the size of a comma in a printed
sentence.
The worms in Kenyon’s dish barely moved. Their skin bunched in weedy,
menacing clumps. Their backs looked bloated and thick. They looked old and
near death. They looked, she thought suddenly, like people. They aged just like
humans. Then she realized she too was getting old, and someday she would die.
The mystery the lab studied was the molecular plan of growth, repeated
beautifully every time, that controlled the way nerve and other cells organized in
patterns to build an animal. It took tens of millions of steps to make an animal
from a one-celled embryo, each choreographed by a mysterious gene program.
The revolutionary discovery was that single genes, shared among species,
controlled many of key steps of the growth program. But the revolution was
over, and Kenyon had mostly missed it.
No one thought that a similar pattern might determine the rate of our decline.
Aging was random decay, and no one wanted to study that. Yet aging was one of
life’s most important processes, she thought, and all biological processes, they
were learning, were controlled by genes. If everything was in some way
controlled, then aging might be as well.
Some moments you feel or see something that sticks in the unconscious like a
dream. Outside her window the traffic light changed. She looked at the plate of
worms. They barely moved. She never forgot that moment. It was a beautiful
day and her heart was pounding.
This is the story of the race to understand the genes of healthful human
longevity. For years, researchers have extended the life of lab animals up to ten
times their normal span. Working on tiny worms, flies, fungi, and mice,
scientists discovered molecules that sense nutrient and energy levels and extend
fitness into late life.
The question was whether the same may be true for humans. Scientists’ new
insight was that the rate of aging may not be random and chaotic, but rather a
controlled and perhaps manipulable process. By changing the activity of only a
few genes, we may be able to live much longer, healthier lives. No science ever
received quite so much public fascination because few have offered such
immediate promise of potential social impact. We face an aging crisis. If current
trends continue, the numbers of people older than 60 years will more than double
by 2050. By that year, one in three people in the developed world will be older
than sixty. The intensity of this “silver tsunami” is even greater in the developing
world, where countries will have less time to adjust. Across the globe, the
number of centenarians will increase eighteen-fold in the next fifty years. Even
though we are living longer, we still suffer the tragedy of late-onset illness. By a
large margin, most health care costs are incurred at the end of life. A host of
policy makers today are arguing about what the aging world means and how to
address it.
This book tells the story of a potential science revolution and of the new
money changing the way scientific ideas emerge. It begins with geneticist
Cynthia Kenyon, 59, who found one of the world’s first longevity genes and
cofounded a company to find a drug to extend healthful human life, competing
with several new companies, many funded by the barons of the information age.
Rather than spending billions of dollars to battle the various diseases of aging,
these researchers argued, we might better spend our efforts on a new way of
thinking, at the level of molecular tipping points in the cell that make the
beautiful circuits and feedback loops that can either maintain or damage our
health. These tipping points come in small switches triggered by nutrients,
energy levels, and other changes in the environment. These switches can almost
miraculously calibrate the rate of aging in many species, from familiar lab
models to humans.
This is the biography of an idea. The idea is that the quality of aging could be
altered by tweaking single genes. It originated among a handful of outsiders,
working on tiny animals outside the mainstreams of traditional aging study.
There was no textbook or blueprint for pursuing that idea, but there was a culture
of small groups often at odds with each other. The early researchers fought for
money, and, if they got it from the super-rich, they worked without many of the
ties of conventional funding. In the scramble for scientific credit and financial
gain, the battle to survive required skills of control, cooperation, and competition
for resources, much like the genes themselves.
Aging remains one of life’s great unsolved riddles. For all our biological
knowledge, we still do not know exactly what aging is. Life can defy entropy,
the tendency of systems to wear down over time. Healthful life span may last as
long as it wants or needs to. Some organisms live centuries or longer. We now
know something of the gene, cell, and hormone signals that help them do so.
This book explores the mystery of those intricate cell signals and the battles of
scientific personalities to expose them. The discoveries offer deep insights, but
equally as illuminating was the confluence of dreams, personal crises, intense
work, altruism, and greed that made one of the most contentious science stories
of our time. Few recent scientific discoveries have moved from such an outlier
status to the pinnacle of business, while riling up more critics. Some ideas won,
and some of the biggest lost out.
We are all intrigued by the questions of life and death, the more so the older
we get. What are the proper stages of life? In ancient Rome, people lived twenty-
nine years. In the Middle Ages, the afterlife and current life were intimately
commingled because they had to be. In the last twenty-five years a technical
revolution made it possible to answer such questions as: What causes aging? Can
we alter its rate? Does life do so naturally? What would be the meaning of such
discoveries, and which are the ones most likely to affect the ways we live? This
book explores the attempts to answer these big questions. To do so could change
our definition of who we are and how we imagine ourselves.
The book’s main subjects are four genes and their molecular signaling