Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
by: Ray Kurzweil, Terry Grossman
Topics include: silent inflammation, alkalinized water, vulnerable plaque formation, average daily nutrient intake level, predictive genomics, genomics testing, maintenance calorie level, your optimal weight, eicosapentaneoic acid, high glycemic load, defective methylation, genomics tests, calcium score, low glycemic load, elevated risk factors, starch blockers, soft plaque, calcified plaque, heavy metal toxins, abnormal methylation, hard plaque, virtual colonoscopy, heart scan, hard calcified, glycemic carbohydrates
The idea behind Kurzweil and Grossman's Fantastic Voyage is that if you can make it through the next 50 years, you might become immortal. How will that be possible? Through some rather science fictional steps, it turns out, including taking advantage of the latest in biotechnological breakthroughs and not-yet-invented nanotechnology. Is all this longing for immortality driven by an obsession with youth or a fear of death? Readers can judge for themselves, as both Kurzweil and Grossman reveal the personal histories that led them to develop this plan. Fantastic Voyage is written in an easy-to-understand tone, with lots of sidebars giving examples of what the future holds for medicine and health. Whether or not you think that science will find a way to keep our bodies or our disembodied minds alive forever, this book is full of diet and lifestyle tips. For instance, the authors suggest carefully controlling the body's overall pH at an alkaline level, meditating, eating a diet composed mostly of vegetables and protein, and taking loads of supplements (Kurzweil downs about 250 pills each day). The dietary options presented here will mostly only be practical for people whose income levels can support buying organic produce, fresh fish and meat, and top-shelf supplements. The authors cavalierly state that we are living in a "time of abundance," but it seems likely that most who are able to follow this regimen will be Americans of a fairly high socioeconomic class.
Reviews:
You won't live forever but
This is an excellent book, but it isn't all it promises to be. I am a non practicing MD, working in IT and a health book signed by Kurzweil was bound to attract my attention.
The book follows three lines, called "Bridges" by the authors. Bridge One is what you can and should do today to extend your life expectancy in order to maximize your chances to benefit from Bridge two drugs and devices who, in turn, should allow you to wait for the big prize: Bridge Three technologies.
Bridge one is definitely the best part of the book. The authors explain our current understanding of the mechanisms involved in atherosclerosis, cancer, inflammation, etc... and cover a tremendous amount of reliable, mostly peer reviewed, scientific litterature and large scale studies. This understanding is then used to derive the optimal diet and supplementation policy. The book doesn't break any new ground, but is remarkable in the way it synthetizes a large amount of information into understandable and directly usable recommendations. I was constantly telling myself: "yes, they are right, I know that! why am I not acting upon it?". True, there are some weak points: alkaline water comes to mind (check the many discussions on the net about this issue), stevia definitely hasn't been studied enough, it's hard to see how minerals would lose their properties in canned food (bioavailability??) but those blemishes are more than compensated by the careful research that went into other topics: for example, the authors rightly insist on inflammation's role but stop an inch short of recommending rofecoxib (Vioxx). They also shine on heart disease and myocardial infarction, clearly stating that heavy and expensive bypass surgery doesn't improve survival in many many cases.
Sound prevention is the key and you'll get a truckload of coherent tips.
Bridge two is less convincing, especially when it adresses drugs currently in development. These molecules may deliver what they promise, but there are many lessons to learn from the past... Do you remember those super antibiotics of the 60s and 70s? They were supposed to wipe out infectious disease. Do you remember those mood altering drugs. They should have defeated depression instead of becoming a health problem themselves? Do you remember how interferon would cure many cancers? We don't have any indication that those new drugs will perform better. True, they're interesting. True, we are pumping them out faster than in the past, but I am willing to bet a lot of them will have side effects, will reveal or trigger new mechanisms etc...
Bridge Three is mostly nanotechnology based science fiction. It is, I believe, the weakest part of the book. Hyper effective respirocytes sound like a good deal: they would tremendously boost our athletic abilities... but you'd tear your tendons and muscles as soon as you'd attempt a double efficiency sprint. Multiplying the efficiency by a factor of 100 - these are figures taken from the book - would lead to severe heat dissipation problems. Yes, this probably could be solved by some kind of radiator or sail. Whether you'd be bored enough by eternal life to fall in love with someone looking like a spinosaurus remains to be seen. Likewise, getting rid of the heart and using self-propelled blood cells may sound attractive, but it ignores the role of the heartbeat in growing and strengthening blood vessels. In many cases, the authors miss the forest for the tree.
These shortcomings aside, Fantastic Voyage is an incredibly useful resource. The voyage might not be the promised endless journey, I am willing to bet that Terry Grossman, Ray Kurzweil, you and I will die. But if we follow half of the book's suggestions, I am sure we'll be healthy corpses.
The last virtue of this book is to be thought provoking. One can't help wondering what large scale, well planned, preventive medicine could achieve. Social security budgets would certainly be easier to balance. Also, one can't ignore the cost of the full program: very few people could pay for it today. Ray K. believes that the cost will go down in the near future and/or that computing and data processing power will soon make your own private human genome project a $20 issue. He may be right, but the pharmaceutical industry will definitely milk the fancy drugs it develops for a while, twenty years, possibly more (see the Hatch Waxman Act loopholes in the US, similar legislation elsewhere), add these twenty years to the already long phase 1 through 3 studies and tomorrow suddenly sounds a bit distant. Bridge 2 will not be cheap: if it actually works, it will have huge social implications. But that's beyond the scope of this review...
If you are still there ;-) - thank you, buy the book.
Here is a book I can wholeheartedly recommend to everyone without any hesitation. For those who are interested in attaining and maintaining good health in all its aspects, I would even go so far as to say this book is essential reading and a necessary resource to keep close at hand. If you even entertain the possibility of living forever, then this book is a must for you. The authors are, without a doubt, knowledgeable about the topics of which they write and provide literally hundreds of facts, proposals, insights, suggestions, and recommendations regarding everything from developments in medical nanotechnology and biotechnology to disease prevention, nutrition, food preparation, living a healthful lifestyle, and, in fact, more information than you will assimilate during a first reading. The authors are well-known within their fields of expertise. Ray Kurzweil, a recipient of the National Medal of Technology and an inductee into the Inventors Hall of Fame, is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists and the author of three previous books on technology. Terry Grossman M.D., the founder and medical director of the Frontier Medical Institute in Denver, Colorado, a leading longevity clinic, is certified in anti-aging medicine and lectures internationally on matters related to longevity and anti-aging strategies. These two experts, one in technology and one in medical science, have joined together to write about how you can "live long enough to live forever." While I endorse and highly recommend "Fantastic Voyage," the subtitle of the book presents a problem for me. The very idea of "living forever" is a proposition with which I am not entirely comfortable. I am philosophically oriented both by training and by disposition and I have to wrestle with this question: "Is living forever a suitable and desirable goal for any human being?" I believe this is fundamentally an ethical question and at this moment I cannot answer it, at least for myself, because I haven't had time to consider it in depth and in all its possible ramifications. To be frank, I haven't really given any thought to it until reading this book. So now, thanks to the authors, I'll have to explore this problem. But I think it's an important issue to raise and debate, particularly considering that, while we may be able to prolong life indefinitely in a physical sense, there are psychological, sociological, and political factors which must also be considered. Once we put this matter aside for further thought and discussion, the authors do indeed take us on a fantastic voyage into the world of cutting-edge technology, a place where modern biology, information science, and what is called "nanotechnology" intersect and impact each other. Their discussion of "nanobots" is especially interesting. These are robots, the size of blood cells, built from molecules placed in our bodies and bloodstream to enhance every aspect of our lives. Nanobots, suggest the authors, will even be used for surgery. For example, teams "of millions of nanobots will be able to restructure bones and muscles, destroy unwanted growths such as tumors on a cell-by-cell basis, and clear arteries while restructuring them out of healthy tissue." This especially caught my attention, as one who suffered a heart attack a couple of years ago and had to undergo an emergency angioplasty. If a nanobot could continually keep my arteries clear, I'd be more than happy to let it do so! But correcting a medical problem after the damage has been done is not the major thrust of this book. I would guess that more than ninety-five percent of "Fantastic Voyage" is devoted to preventing disease, promoting good health, and dealing with the aging process. (I should warn the reader that there is some discussion of chemistry involved here, but I found that one can skip through the various chemical formulas discussed and not miss anything vital to understanding the point being made.) In line with the major thrusts of the book, the authors present "Three Bridges" which are "emerging transformations in technology that will usher in powerful new tools to expand your health and human powers." The First Bridge is "Ray & Terry's Longevity Program" which includes "present-day therapies and guidance that will enable you to remain healthy long enough to take full advantage of the construction of the Second Bridge." The reader will learn about carbohydrates and the glycemic load, the importance of fat and protein, why the modern diet is out of balance, how to eat nutritionally, why sugar is the "white Satan," the real cause of heart disease and how to prevent it, and much, much more. The Second Bridge is the "Biotechnology Revolution" where "we learn the genetic and protein codes of our biology" and "the means of turning off disease and aging while we turn on our full human potential." The reader will learn about gene expression, somatic gene therapy, recombinant technology, therapeutic cloning, and how human aging can be reversed. The Third Bridge is the "Nanotechnology-Artificial Intelligence Revolution" which will "enable us to rebuild our bodies and brains at the molecular level." The reader will learn about programmable blood, nanopower, nanosurgery, "intelligent" cells, and a lot more. I could go on and on; I've only scratched the surface of the information provided in this interesting and valuable book. Kurzweil and Grossman are to be commended for making this important information available to the public, written in an easy and understandable style, with recommendations that the reader can implement immediately. At the end of the book they provide a page of resources and contact information and the standard index to topics. More importantly, however, they provide over sixty pages of notes, references, and citations so the reader can consult the primary sources for more detail. I wish more authors would do that. This is a serious book to be read once and then consulted continuously for its suggestions and recommendations. But, now, the real question: Do I really want to live forever? Well, let me think about that for a few years!