Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension
448
Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension
448Overview
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, and Library Journal
An award-winning writer explores science’s boldest frontier—extension of the human life span—interviewing dozens of people involved in the quest to allow us to live longer, better lives.
Delving into topics from cancer to stem cells to cloning, Merchants of Immortality looks at humankind’s quest for longevity and tackles profound questions about our hopes for defeating health problems like heart attacks, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes. The story follows a close-knit but fractious band of scientists as well as entrepreneurs who work in the shadowy area between profit and the public good. The author tracks the science of aging back to the iconoclastic Leonard Hayflick—who was the first to show that cells age, and whose epic legal battles with the federal government cleared the path for today’s biotech visionaries.
Among those is the charismatic Michael West, a former creationist who founded the first biotech company devoted to aging research. West has won both ardent admirers and committed foes in his relentless quest to promote stem cells, therapeutic cloning, and other technologies of “practical immortality.” Merchants of Immortality breathes scintillating life into the most momentous science of our day, assesses the political and bioethical controversies it has spawned, and explores its potentially dramatic effect on the length and quality of our lives.
“Timely and engrossing . . . This is top-drawer journalism.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A carefully documented examination of how society deals with life-and-death matters.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“An important survey of the entire landscape of the science aimed at extending human life.” —Newsday
“[This] highly readable and important book . . . provide[s] new insights into the intersection of science and politics.” —The Washington Post
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547561578 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| Sales rank: | 475,161 |
| File size: | 774 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Hayflick Limit
The canisters stood in the corner of the garage, amid garbage cans and gardening tools, right next to Hayflick's champagne-colored Lexus. Battleship gray, 30 liters in capacity, the two Union Carbide liquid nitrogen containers looked so utilitarian that they might easily have been mistaken for a pair of wet-dry vacuum cleaners, but they have a slightly more exalted purpose than cleaning up messes: they are designed to keep biological materials frozen at a constant temperature of — 192 degrees centigrade. These particular containers were full of inch-long glass ampules, hand-filled and sealed with the flame of a Bunsen burner nearly forty years earlier. The ampules contained an unusual item for garage storage — human cells, and in particular a human cell line called WI-38.
We had been talking for the better part of the day, but inevitably the conversation kept circling back, as does Hayflick's hectic and remarkably eventful scientific career, to those cells. And as he stood there in the garage in the late afternoon December light, in his white shirt, tan sweater, and gray slacks, the sun easing into the Pacific Ocean just beyond the front of his Northern California home, there was a look of contentment, of sheer triumph, on Hayflick's face that went far beyond pride of ownership. Beyond smug, even. It was as if, not inappropriately, his face had been rejuvenated by the sheer adolescent thrill of what he had pulled off. After all these years, he still had the cells.
These are the cells from a famous colony he created from human fetal tissue in 1962, the very cultures that had overturned half a century of flawed dogma about the secret life of cells. These are the prototypes of the cells used to make vaccines that have educated the blood of virtually every American citizen under thirty years of age. These are the cells that traveled in the backseat of Hayflick's family sedan when he "absconded" with them and drove across the country from Philadelphia to California in 1968 to join the faculty at Stanford University. These are the cells that United States government investigators seized when they raided Hayflick's lab at Stanford in 1975, the cells that formed the crux of his career-crushing six-year lawsuit against the government (a lawsuit settled out of court in 1981, to Hayflick's evident satisfaction). Most important, these are the cells that changed modern biology's view of the aging process, the cells that, directly and indirectly, opened up several rich avenues of research and inadvertently led to the biotechnology of aging. "Those are the cells that I stole," Hayflick said, lifting a rod containing ampules out of the cylinder through a dramatic billow of supercooled condensation, like some Oz of the micro-verse. "And I'm proud of it."
For four decades, Hayflick has been schlepping the cells around wherever he goes. In fact, he's kept more than his famous WI-38 cell line on ice. He also has a cell strain in there called WISH, for Wistar Institute Susan Hayflick, because they were derived from the amniotic fluid surrounding his gestating daughter. He has the prostate cancer cells of his old boss, Charles Pomerat, a famous cell biologist who died of the disease. He has the Chinese hamster ovary cells in which the clot-busting drug "tissue plasminogen activator" (or TPA), a staple now in virtually every emergency room in the developed world, was first produced by genetic engineering. This may seem like a daft or even macabre variation on stamp collecting, but even in his seventies, Hayflick has never stopped being what he has always been: a cell biologist, a scientist fascinated by the life and care and well-being of interesting cell lines, each as different as children, each with different personalities and habits, each with different potentials. And after topping off the liquid nitrogen every couple of months for all these years, maintaining what he calls the longest continuous culture of human cells in the history of biology, he confessed to me that he's been trying to find someone else to look after them. "As you know," he said with a sly half-smile, "I'm not going to live forever."
Precisely the point of those cells, you might say. For all the fame and grief they brought Len Hayflick, they told the world of biology that life — at least the life of the normal cells that make up the tissues and organs of our mortal bodies — may have built-in limitations on longevity; specifically, they told biologists that normal human cells growing in a dish can replicate only a finite number of times and no more. They hit a wall. They simply lose the biological vigor for life and stop dividing. And that simple fact, rippling through molecular biology and boardrooms (and, perhaps, through every cell in each of our bodies), began to change the way scientists think about the process of aging.
* * *
Sitting in the living room of his home at Sea Ranch, speaking in the gruffly authoritative but precise rhythms with which he had recounted this same story so many times before, Leonard Hayflick still conveyed timeless excitement and ageless pain in his voice. He is a courteous, even courtly, septuagenarian, a little heavyset these days, hair salt-and-pepper and close-cropped; his dark eyes, guarded by large heavy-rimmed glasses, have the wet attentiveness of an animal that has been mistreated. And yet there is also something physically pugnacious about him, an almost ballistic geometry to his head. By turns he expresses humility (and, occasionally, insecurity) about his modest, blue-collar upbringing and then the deep knowledge and genial arrogance of someone who has not just stood on the shoulders of twentieth-century giants of science but has rubbed shoulders with many of them and butted heads with a few. His most prominent physical feature, however, may be the permanent chip on his shoulder, almost a bone spur of bitterness and resentment, about the way he has been treated during his scientific career. Much of that woe can be directly traced to those cells in the garage. He has had an amazingly productive career — he discovered the cause of a prominent human disease, pioneered the isolation of cell strains that have been used to create an estimated one billion doses of vaccine, accidentally founded an industry based on the creation of the powdered substances used by laboratories throughout the world to nourish growing cells, served as president of the Gerontological Society of America, and fought a celebrated but personally devastating lawsuit against the federal government in the 1970s that, Hayflick claims, made entrepreneurial biology safe for academic researchers. If he doesn't exactly go looking for a fight, he seems to have bumped into them all along the way. "Len has a real bullheaded streak," said one old friend. "Always has."
To understand how Hayflick reached this point of advanced dissatisfaction, and at the same time to understand why he persists as an important figure even in the age of stem cells and cloning and life-extending genes, it helps to consider how he came to science in the first place. Born in May 1928, he grew up in West Philadelphia; his mother was a typist and bookkeeper, his father a "dental mechanic," constructing prosthetic devices for the mouth. As an eight-year-old, he became fascinated with chemistry ("I still have the instruction booklet that came with my Gilbert chemistry set," he volunteered at one point in our conversation), and he ultimately built what he describes as a college-grade laboratory in his basement. With a friend from the neighborhood, he would ride his bike on the hour-long trip to the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, where a venerable chemical supply house called Dolby's had been providing research materials to the university for more than a century. Hayflick and his friend routinely purchased dangerous and volatile chemicals, like metallic sodium, and then, of course, played with them ("We did a lot of work with explosives" is the way Hayflick put it).
Childhood science is a rarefied kind of troublemaking, however, because mixed in with the mischief is a precocious, self-preserving reverence for materials, for ingredients, for stuff, and it's a lesson Hayflick has never forgotten. The boys were granted access to the basement of Dolby's, for example, where they retrieved one-of-a-kind nineteenth-century handblown glassware. "In fact, I still have some pieces in the house here," Hayflick said. And as we continued talking, he walked over to a cabinet in the dining room and returned with a strikingly beautiful four-chambered handblown retort from the 1800s. "This is the kind of stuff that turned us on, okay?" So it wasn't just the cells in the garage; he has carted around with him a museum of all his formative interests, a portable archive of his own intellectual passions.
By the time Hayflick went to high school, his reputation as a chemistry whiz had preceded him. He began to correct his teachers during class, and after one such remedial episode, his chemistry instructor shrewdly arranged for him to work in the chemistry department stockroom instead. Hayflick graduated from John Bartram High School with honors. Although he received a full four-year scholarship to Temple University, he longed to go to Penn — even though he would have to pay (and he still remembers the tuition to the dollar, a sure fingerprint of lower-class strivers: $250 a semester). So he came up with a clever strategy — he registered at Penn in January of 1946, then immediately took a leave of absence and enlisted in the army, thus qualifying for the GI Bill. In 1947, when his eighteen-month tour was over and he returned to Penn, his entire tuition was paid by the government. These were more than simple economic decisions; they reflected a kind of lifelong tension between the financial and intellectual modesty of Hayflick's upbringing and the high-flying careerism of the scientific circles in which he began to travel, between feelings of personal insecurity and the confidence that one needed to flourish in Ivy League classrooms and, later, on the gridiron of science.
And then Hayflick discovered biology. Although he was still interested in chemistry, a chance occurrence in a bacteriology class made a profound, oddly aesthetic impact around the time he had to declare his major. A laboratory assistant walked into the classroom one day with a tray of test tubes known as "slants"— so-called because agar, the yellow jelly-like biological growth medium, had been allowed to solidify at a slant. "She gave me this tray of slants, and I looked at it, and of course I'd never seen agar slants before," Hayflick said, as if describing a Matisse he had stumbled upon in a museum. "And on them were these wiggly lines. Each had a wiggly line. And they were different colors. Brilliant colors. White, yellow, purple, green — all the colors of the rainbow." The colorful scribbles had been produced by nature's microscopic palette; they were simply different strains of bacteria, growing on the nutrient-rich agar. "That hit me like a bomb. And turned me on to bacteriology." Microbiology became his major.
Following his graduation from Penn, Hayflick did drug company research at Sharp and Dohme (a division of Merck), returned to Penn to get a master's and a Ph.D., worked briefly at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, got married, and went to do a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, in the lab of the prominent cell culturist Charles Pomerat (it is Pomerat's cancer cells that Hayflick still carts around). But during these peregrinations, Hayflick battled the feeling that he didn't quite belong in the company he was keeping. "I had an inferiority complex, I suppose, and never thought I had the brains to get a Ph.D." was the way he put it. It was a revealing remark: the need to prove himself, combined with a stubborn, tenaciously independent cast of mind, set the stage for all the scientific triumphs and personal disasters that were destined to unfold.
While he was still in Texas, Hayflick learned that a forceful, charismatic figure named Hilary Koprowski had been hired to reorganize and reinvigorate the venerable Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, and that there was a job for him if he wanted it. So in 1958, Hayflick, with his wife and two children, moved back to Philadelphia.
* * *
In August 2001, exactly one week after George W. Bush announced his policy on embryonic stem cells, I met Leonard Hayflick at his old stomping grounds. The Wistar Institute occupies several buildings in Philadelphia, most notably its original, three-story structure, built of a muddy-mustard brick in 1894. Located on Spruce Street, the complex is tucked into a corner of the Penn campus but is independent of the university. The central atrium of the original building, where Hayflick met me, features an ornate open-lattice iron staircase, painted white, beneath a large and airy skylight, but what Hayflick vividly recalled from the 1950s — and what made this visit not unrelated to the political passions animating the stem cell debate half a century later — was the parade of beaming mothers carrying newborn babies up those stairs to thank the institute's then director, Edmond J. Farris, for helping them get pregnant. In addition to being the oldest private biological research institution in the United States, the Wistar was also one of the earliest (albeit unofficial and indeed somewhat surreptitious) centers for assisted reproduction. As a Penn student working at the institute in the early 1950s, Hayflick had on occasion donated sperm for the artificial inseminations that Farris performed with a turkey baster. "We had to make money to get through school," Hayflick said with a shrug, "and that's how we did it."
The reproductive assistance was particularly successful at the Wistar because Farris had developed an extremely accurate test, using the Wistar's albino rat colony, to determine when his patients were ovulating. Unfortunately, the women technically were not his patients, because Farris was not a doctor, and that was his undoing. An enterprising reporter got wind of the business, Hayflick told me, and wrote an exposé in one of the local newspapers; the archdiocese of Philadelphia became involved and "just shut them down." It may sound like an amusing anecdote, but the incident in fact represents one of earliest clashes between organized religion and reproductive technology in this country — a conflict that since Hayflick's first sojourn at the Wistar has influenced, and in many ways shaped, the direction of scientific research, from the early days of artificial insemination through research on fetal tissue (of which Hayflick became an early and infamous practitioner) to in vitro fertilization and, most recently, stem cell research.
When Hayflick returned to Philadelphia in the late 1950s, he found the Wistar to be a "ghostly" place. It retained the nineteenth-century, naturalist feel of its founder, Isaac Wistar, whose ashes, along with those of Philadelphia's scientific elite, filled brass urns lining the entryway. Generations of Philadelphia teenagers had sneaked onto the premises to ogle the collection of Siamese twins, a cyclops, and other grotesques of human development, sealed in jars of formaldehyde and housed in the first-floor museum. Hayflick at first occupied an elegant, bay-windowed lab on the second floor, which he later shared briefly with Stanley Plotkin, to whom he provided a critically important cell line for the development of a vaccine for rubella. Soon he ran a large cell culture facility in the middle of the second floor and became an expert in that arcane craft — the art of cultivating and maintaining living cultures of cells in glassware (literally, in vitro) so that the cells can be studied. At the time, cell culturists often seemed to provide little more than a supplementary technical support service, like sous chefs to the executive chefs of science. The ascendant science of the day was virology, and virologists required vast amounts of living cells grown in vitro as fodder for their rapacious viruses. That Hayflick also was in charge of cleaning glassware and preparing growth media suggests that he was a kind of supertechnician. But cell biology also represented the wave of the future, and any time Hayflick needed to console himself, he could recall the view from the railing outside his lab, which in the early 1950s took in the enormous, sixty-foot skeleton of a finback whale suspended from the ceiling and, down below in the museum, those large jars containing a cyclops and Siamese twins and other human abnormalities. That was the old biology, nature viewed with the naked eye. But things were changing.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Merchants of Immortality"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Stephen S. Hall.
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