High-tech hope: escape from the sands of time
Life-extension movement gains momentum as baby boomers push to live longer
Ray Kurzweil plans to live forever. To that end, he carefully chooses what he eats and drinks. On top of that he keeps his weight down, exercises, and takes dietary supplements - about 250 a day.
He feels his strategy is working. Though he was born 56 years ago, a recent exhaustive physical examination revealed that his body is that of a 40-year-old, he says.
So far, so good.
Mr. Kurzweil, a successful inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist, knows even his most rigorous efforts to preserve his body won't by themselves lead to physical immortality. But his plan is to live in good health long enough, perhaps another 30 years, that future scientific advancements can take him the rest of the way.
It's a vision with extraordinary appeal. As the nation's 76 million baby boomers march toward retirement - the first boomers turn 65 in 2011 - many are beginning to cast sidelong glances at what's come to be known as the life-extension movement.
Already in 2002, Americans spent about $43 billion on antiaging products and treatments - and that figure may rise to $64 billion by 2007, according to the market research company FIND/SVP. The bodies of more than 70 people in the United States, including baseball great Ted Williams, have been frozen in anticipation of future life-reviving technology.
There's little evidence so far that any of these strategies and treatments will work, scientists point out. Even the breakthroughs of the 20th century have done little to allow seniors to live longer.Still, skeptics admit that life- extension technologies will eventually emerge. And recent advances in genetics have generated a growing faith that such technologies will appear in decades rather than centuries.
Some observers call this faith a new religion.
"These people are saying, 'I don't want to die, and I'm going to do something about it,' " says Brian Alexander, author of "Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion." They were raised in the post-World War II era of a booming economy, grew up watching the wonders of science fiction, and were told they lived in a world where everything was going to be possible. "And then they're faced with death," he says. "That makes them angry."
There's a sense that they may be the last generation that is going to have to die, that they might just miss out on immortality, Mr. Alexander adds. "And that's going to be enormously frustrating."
Big advances in biotechnology in recent years, such as deciphering the human genome, may have also inflated expectations, says S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Chicago and an internationally recognized expert on aging.
In some ways, the current movement echoes the early 20th-century eugenics movement, he says, which followed scientific advances in the understanding of genetics and also sought to perfect humans through genetic manipulation."When we acquire the ability to modify something that kills us, we become giddy and begin to believe that if we can modify this, we can modify that," says Dr. Olshansky, coauthor of the book "The Quest for Immortality." "And that has always been the belief that we can modify aging."
