The Youth Pill
A new popular science book on the manipulation of metabolism to slow aging, the author inspired by the Longevity Dividend initiative: "No scientific advances inspire more media hype than ones in gerontology, the study of aging. Even the crustiest editors have been known to turn giddy when new light is shed on the topic and take to blowing raspberries at the Reaper with headlines suggesting immortality elixirs are just around the corner. Biologists aren't so easily wowed, though, and before the mid-1990s they generally saw gerontology as a dismal bog where once-promising peers sank out of sight, or worse, re-emerged clutching beakers of snake oil. ... Studying the details of this inexorable, chaotic decay seemed a waste of time to most life scientists. ... Then in 1988 a miracle happened - the University of Colorado's Thomas Johnson reported that a gene mutation in nematodes could more than double their life spans. Five years later, Cynthia Kenyon at the University of California, San Francisco, nailed a similar worm 'gerontogene' dubbed daf-2. These flabbergasting discoveries revealed that not everything about aging is intractable chaos - worms, at least, apparently possessed gene-encoded modules poised to oppose the ravages of advancing age when activated by a single mutation. Optimists soon speculated that similar modules exist in mammals."