The Youth Pill

I just finished reading "The Youth Pill" by my former colleague David Stipp. It's a terrific piece of science writing, and it's good news to boot. It shows that scientists are well on their way to developing pills that we can take daily in order to prolong the active, healthy part of our lives by ten years or so.
Full disclosure: David is a good friend and if I didn't like the book, I wouldn't write about it. But I did and I will.
Stipp makes a believable case that researchers can create pills that create the same effects inside our cells that calorie restriction does. As has been repeatedly proved, animals that exist on low calorie diets -- at least one-third less than normal -- live 20% or more longer than their normally fed peers. This isn't unalloyed good news. Very few humans want to live on such restricted diets all their lives.
But calorie restriction doesn't make us live longer through some Calvinist trade-off of happiness for age. It makes us live longer because it changes certain processes in our cells. Stipp explains that the search for the youth pill involves understanding those mechanisms and then finding chemicals that will promote or block those processes.
Stipp is a terrific reporter and writer who makes the science feel accessible, even for those of us who last took biology before the chemical structure of RNA was decoded. He is particularly endearing when describing research subjects like naked mole rats, -- long lived, long-toothed African rodents that live in colonies underground -- and a worm called a nematode that is transparent and reveals "a rich inner life."
The book acknowledges that we're still some years away from having a youth pill. But it makes a strong case that one or more will be developed and they will do a lot more to prolong and improve our lives than curing cancer or heart disease ever will.