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Title details for Eternity Soup by Greg Critser - Available

Eternity Soup

Inside the Quest to End Aging

by Greg Critser
Erik Synnestvedt
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 26, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400195619
      • File size: 182410 KB
      • Duration: 06:20:01

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Talking to researchers and entrepreneurs in the field, Greg Critser takes a look at the ways people are trying to slow down the aging process, including calorie restriction, hormone replacement, organ replacement, and nano materials. Erik Synnestvedt gives a lively reading, mixing excitement over the new developments with amusement at the absurd excesses of the anti-aging industry. He also brings home the personal angle for Critser, who used anti-aging medicine to fight the effects of a concussion. This is an entertaining and informative look at the latest in science--and at human foibles. Even listeners who aren't particularly worried about approaching old age will be drawn into Critser's engaging book. J.A.S. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from January 25, 2010
      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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