Review: Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying) by Bill Gifford

By Robert Bazell March 27 at 3:01 PM

Robert Bazellis adjunct professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale. For 38 years he was chief science correspondent for NBC News.

SPRING CHICKEN

Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying)

By Bill Gifford

Grand Central. 366 pp. $27

Tom Perls, an amiable, boyish-looking professor at Boston University, has earned a respectable place in the hierarchy of academic medicine. But measured by media attention, Perls is a contender for the top echelons. Hes given hundreds of interviews to newspapers, magazines and television I conducted a dozen myself. Perls studies aging, a subject few editors can resist. Since 1995, hes located hundreds of people who stayed healthy beyond their 100th birthday

Perls searched for common behaviors in the healthy centenarians. Some smoked and drank, others didnt. Some had been fat, some skinny. No pattern emerged. At one point he suggested dental flossing as a common denominator. He turned to genetics and in a 2011 paper identified slight changes in 130 genes that may help people live longer and healthier. Thats far too much complexity for any individual or drug company seeking a ticket to the fountain of youth.

Perls appears briefly in Bill Giffords Spring Chicken. So do other scientists well-regarded by their peers, along with a parade of hucksters. Gifford starts with Charles Edouard Brown-Squard, who at age 72 in 1889 told the Socit de Biologie in Paris that he had regained much of his vigorous youth with injections of the mashed testicles of young dogs and guinea pigs. Almost overnight, entrepreneurs were selling Squards Elixir of Life. The fad died along with Brown-Squard five years later.

Gifford, a journalist in his late 40s, wrote the book to hang on to his youth, or what was left of it, for as long as possible. Spoiler alert: He didnt find the elixir. Still, his survey of those who study aging and those who claim they can slow it down or stop it makes for a great read, even if other books, notably Stephen Halls Merchants of Immortality (2003), have covered much of the same material more thoroughly.

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Review: Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying) by Bill Gifford