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Summary: A fascinating survey
Comment: Hall is a fabulous writer, given to wonderful turns of phrase. He's also a meticulous researcher -- the "Notes" section of the book is gigantic, citing sources for even the most off-hand of remarks.
This is really two books in one It begins discussing Leonard Hayflick and the discovery of programmed cell death, and the resulting search for the telomerase enzyme, then it takes a pretty sharp right turn into being a book about stem-cell research. Although some of the players are the same, they're really two different stories.
Hall's conclusion is that no rolling back of the clock is likely, and that "immortality," or even profound life extension, is probably not in the cards. But it's a fascinating journey nonetheless, and well worth reading.
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Summary: Revolution in Progress
Comment: So, when will stem cells come into widespread medical use? If you answer twenty years from now, you'd be wrong by about 60 years--they first became widely used in the 1960's! Only they were called "bone marrow transplants." Today thousands of them are done every year.
Hall has written a dozen so excellent books on medicine, biotechnology and molecular biology, and this is one of the best. Here he recounts the development of the idea that aging in humans can be scientifically understood and modified. He starts off with the wonderful story of the Hayflick limit with an account of his first interview with him and brings this maverick character to life. How often are the big ideas discovered by rogues and rebels--fearless men?
He covers a very wide swath of current developments in the cutting edge of biology and medicine--telomeres, stem cells, transplants, cloning, and aging--all told in enough depth that you can't help but learn something, even if you are pretty well informed. The history, the personalities, and the ideas are all here.
One thing I appreciated is that Hall makes no pretense about being disinterested in the subject--he takes some of it personally, and is not afraid to relate what his gut is telling him. He is partisan in the best sense of the word. He unflinchingly challenges the idealistic "bioethicists" who have lately ejected such nonsense into the public space, pretending to a certainty only a bishop could appreciate.
Hall also relates in some detail the evolution of the stem cell/cloning debate that has resulted in the policy that federal money can go to research only on the 70 embryonic stem cell lines already in existence, now known to be more like 6. And none of them suitable for therapeutic for humans because they are grown on a substrate of mouse cells and their viruses. The yokels and theologians have managed to set back this important avenue for improving human health by who knows how many decades... Sad to think we'll be looking for progress to the South Koreans, who recently generated human embryonic cell lines by nuclear transfer. Americans have yet to duplicate this
The quality of Hall's prose, and the nature of the subject itself, conspire to produce a book that I found very hard to put down. A terrific read!
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Summary: Meet the masters of biohope and biohype
Comment: (**** 1/2)Stephen Hall has chosen a title that represents his book very well. What he sets forth, in supple, thoughtful, smoothly readable prose, is the saga of recent advances in "life extension" - both longevity research and research into the healing and regeneration of tissues with the aid of stem cells. As his title suggests, the emphasis is on the scientists involved, and on the public face of that science.
Along the way, he clarifies a good deal of the science itself: the discovery of the Hayflick limit, the finite limit to the number of times a normal cell can divide; the connection of that limit to the telomeres, the shoelace-tips on the ends of chromosomes; the chimerical enzyme telomerase, two parts protein and one part RNA, which repairs the telomeres and helps make cancer cells immortal; the sir-1 gene and its congeners which can double or sextuple your lifespan, if you happen to be a roundworm. And so on. Little of this will be news to those laymen who follow the science pages closely, but even for us it's good to have the timeline neatly laid out.
The bulk of Hall's attention, though, goes to the rivalries between laboratories to be first to publish and patent each of these breakthroughs; to the lineages of the biotech startups bankrolling the races; to the contrast between the solid if limited gains made by the biologists and the fairy dust sprinkled on investors; and to the enormous ferment surrounding all these new technologies as they began to impinge on embryonic stem cells and thereapeutic cloning.
Wandering through the scene from chapter to chapter, popping up repeatedly whenever the action gets hot, is the energetic true believer Michael West, the ousted founder of the premiere telomere outfit Geron, and the leading light of Advanced Cell Technology, which set the country on its ear two years ago with a premature announcement that it had cloned a human embryo. In his infectious zeal for abolishing the tyranny of old age, West serves not only as a central figure in the unfolding commercial and political saga, but as a stand-in for the insistent voice in all of us, whispering that all men may be mortal, but hey, maybe *you* can beat the rap.
Hall's conclusion, offered with a full appreciation of the fact that "It's hard to predict things, especially the future," is that a dramatic cure for aging is not likely to be in the cards. Just as cancer turned out to be a whole class of diseases with a host of different causes, so aging is turning out to be more complex than the discipline's pioneers imagined. What we can reasonably expect is a steady advancement of the average life span over the coming century, by another decade or two. How long we have to wait for breakthroughs in tissue regeneration in particular will likely depend less on science than on politics.
Two intriguing lines of lifespan research, the one tracking the sir family of genes, and the one investigating the effects of free radicals, are not ignored but, perhaps because they haven't caught the public fancy sharply, get relatively short shrift. Less than halfway through the book, the spotlight shifts from the study of aging to the study of stem cells. Because the U.S. for the last quarter century has enjoyed an effective moratorium on experimentation with aborted fetuses or discarded IVC embryos, American scientists' attention has focused more and more on the other theoretical way of obtaining human embryos: inserting the nucleus of an adult cell into an enucleated human egg.
If anyone were to succeed in doing that, and coaxing the result to divide until it reached the blastocyst stage - that would be "therapeutic cloning." So far, no one's done it, or at any rate no one who's done it has felt like advertising it. In a political squaring of the circle, President Bush managed to permit NIH to fund limited therapeutic cloning in a way that ended up outlawing funding in practical terms. As a result, scientists in the field face the classic NRA nightmare: when federal stem cells are outlawed, only maverick venture capitalists will have stem cells. At press time, no one knows what's really happening, what kind of ethical oversight private companies are bothering to put in place, or how restricted access to resulting medical breakthroughs will be when it's all proprietary, with no NIH ownership at all. For the moment, the U.S. is stuck with the worst of the "pro-life" and the "mad scientist" worlds, while the rest of the world does its research in the sunlight and steals a technical march on us.
All the players on both sides of that circle-squaring, and the principal shakers, movers and move-blockers in the relevant research, are profiled here, some in full screen 3-d and some in fetching thumbnails. The field is unlikely to be surveyed by a more complete or more even handed chronicler for some while.
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Summary: Big on Merchants, Little on Immortality
Comment: If you're looking for a book describing what it's like to be a research scientist in the academic world, or if you're looking for a detailed history of stem cell politics, this book is for you.However, if you're looking for cutting-edge science, exciting discoveries, and an up-to-date look at the modern day "quest for the fountain of youth" - look elsewhere. You may eventually find some of it, but not without wading through pages of tedious "personal struggles".
This book fits far more easily into the "Biography" genre than the "Popular Science" category.
