Fantastic Voyage redux

kw: book reviews, opinion, rejects

I checked out Fantastic Voyage: Live long enough to live forever by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman. I perused the table of contents, read scattered items here and there, but didn't go further. The writing is done well enough, but most of the info is old hat. So is the notion that unlimited lifespan is just around the corner. Somebody-or-other makes such promises—and gains enough publicity to make a bit of a splash—about once a generation.

As has been said before, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Of the latter, sadly, there is next to none. Again, I haven't looked at a great deal of the book. But I have perused enough to get this impression: The main claim is based on extrapolating the trend of average life expectancy since the 1880s or so.

I am sure we've all heard, "In 1900 people lived less than forty years; now they live to about eighty." There are so many fallacies in these fourteen words I can only touch the most egregious. The average life expectancy at birth in 1900 was (depending on your source) somewhere between 35 and 40 years. However, infant mortality was so high, that if you dig, you can find out the following, all for 1900:

• Average life expectancy for five-year-olds was about sixty.
• Average life expectancy for twenty-year-olds was above seventy.
• There were a few hundred-year-olds around, but nobody known was older than 115.

I'll just mention that one of my ancestors, Peregrine White, born aboard the Mayflower in 1621, lived to be 99. But only 1/3 of white children born in the Plymouth colony in the 1620s lived to adulthood.

The situation is this: advances in public health since the American Civil War have greatly reduced "early death", but haven't made much of a dent in the outer boundary, the maximum life span. In fact, in the whole Twentieth Century, only two people are known to have lived more than 118 years, and neither was American: a Japanese monk, and a saucy French woman (who claimed she tried to seduce Vincent Van Gogh).

All that said, Kurzweil and Grossman's book has plenty of useful advice about proper diet and exercise. It has a major section on the need for mega-vitamin doses "for most people," claiming nearly all of us have one or more defective digestive enzymes. I dunno. Some vitamins are toxic, especially the B complex, so you have to do a lot of research before you go on a mega-regimen. That's all I'll say on that.

A final note: What does Kurzweil have to do with this anyway? He is one of the great inventors of our time. Does that qualify him to have medical authority? Not at all. I think he's a name that can get the book past the editors at Rodale. Dr. Grossman has been working longevity research a long time. But the results he reports simply don't support the claims the book makes. I sure wish they did!