NYT: Just How Old Can He Go?
From: Biwah (biwah_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 12/28/04
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Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 10:47:10 +0000
The New York Times
December 27, 2004
Just How Old Can He Go?
By STEVE LOHR
Ray Kurzweil began his dinner with a pill. "A starch blocker," he explained,
"one of my 250 supplements a day."
Photo:
http://tinyurl.com/4yrzf
Caption:
Rick Friedman for The New York Times
Ray Kurzweil recommends taking vitamins and eating a diet that is low in
carbohydrates, fat and dairy products and high in vegetables for encouraging
longevity.
The risk of encountering starchy food seemed slight indeed at the vegetarian
restaurant in Manhattan he had selected, where the fare was heavy with kale,
seaweed, tofu, steamed broccoli and bean sprouts. But Mr. Kurzweil, a
renowned inventor and computer scientist, has strong views on dietary
matters.
His regimen for longevity is not everyone's cup of tea (preferably green
tea, Mr. Kurzweil advises, which contains extra antioxidants to reduce the
risk of heart disease and cancer). And most people would scoff at his notion
that emerging trends in medicine, biotechnology and nanotechnology open a
realistic path to immortality - the central claim of a new book by Mr.
Kurzweil and Dr. Terry Grossman, a physician and founder of a longevity
clinic in Denver.
"I am serious about it," said Mr. Kurzweil, a wiry man with few lines on his
face for a 56-year-old. "I think death is a tragedy. I think aging is a
tragedy. And going beyond our limitations is what our species is all about."
The study of human biology, he said, is increasingly intersecting with his
main field of expertise - computing. Mr. Kurzweil points to the advances in
medicine and genetics as leading toward a view of biology as a kind of
computation.
The chemical units in DNA, which are designated by the letters A, G, C and
T, are assembled and recombined, as if computer code.
"Genes are sequential programs," he said. "We are learning how to manipulate
the programs inside us, the software of life. And personally, I really
believe that what I'm doing is reprogramming my biochemistry."
His new book shows a different side of Mr. Kurzweil's continuing fascination
with the connection between humans and computers. In "The Age of Spiritual
Machines," published in 1999, Mr. Kurzweil made the case for why computers
will exceed human intelligence within a few decades.
Photo:
http://tinyurl.com/3ntfr
Caption:
Julia Malakie/Associated Press
Ray Kurzweil, shown here in 1991, is working on a way to reprogram one's
body in order to live a healthier life. He helped write a book on some of
his strategies.
Provocative and controversial, that book struck skeptics as extreme and
wildly optimistic about the gains technology can make anytime soon. The same
criticism can be made of his new book, "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough
to Live Forever" (Rodale, 2004), published last month. But then, Mr.
Kurzweil's success as an inventor has been based partly on ignoring
conventional wisdom and a willingness to pursue ideas that may seem extreme.
He has few qualms about technology, which he says is "the continuation of
evolution by other means." Just as the boundaries of computing will soon
seem limitless, Mr. Kurzweil insists that improving knowledge and technology
will make death avoidable.
The book describes three stages - the authors call them "bridges" - over the
next 20 to 25 years. By the late 2020's, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, the fruits
of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, a technology that permits
changes to the body at the cellular level, will really kick in so that
science will enable people to rebuild their bodies, any way they want to. In
15 to 20 years, he contends that advances in the understanding of gene
processes will make it possible for biotechnology therapies to turn off and
reverse disease and aging. But only "a small minority of older boomers will
make it past this impending critical threshold," write the authors, both
graying boomers themselves.
In the meantime, the best that can be done, the authors say, is to reprogram
one's body to live a healthier life to have a fighting chance to be around
when the nanotech breakthroughs come to the rescue.
Mr. Kurzweil's thinking on health and aging is the result of both a personal
and an intellectual journey. Like his grandfather, his father died in his
50's of heart disease, and Mr. Kurzweil , who is married with two children,
was diagnosed with diabetes at 35. Life, clearly, had dealt him a bad
genetic hand.
Mr. Kurzweil reacted poorly to insulin, gaining weight. So he immersed
himself in the research literature on diabetes, stopped taking insulin, and
proceeded to devise his own program of diet, exercise and the use of some
nutritional supplements. He lost 40 pounds, and brought his blood sugar and
cholesterol levels down to healthy levels.
That thinking went into Mr. Kurzweil's earlier health book, "The 10 Percent
Solution for a Healthy Life: How to Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart
Disease and Cancer," which was published in 1993 and advocated a diet with
fat accounting for only 10 percent of total calories consumed daily, far
below the standard public health recommendations of 30 percent.
Mr. Kurzweil's research soon extended to aging and longevity, and he has
continued at it ever since, consulting doctors and scientists along the way.
His blood, metabolism and fitness are monitored regularly. The results
appear encouraging. His biological age, using tests like high-frequency
hearing, memory and lung capacity, is about 40. "In a sense, I treat myself
as a laboratory," he said.
His experimental bent was evident even before he went to college at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1965, as a teenager, he appeared
on the television program, "I've Got a Secret," hosted by Steve Allen, for
having written a computer program that composed piano music.
Mr. Kurzweil's inventions mainly center on the use of artificial
intelligence technology to teach computers to recognize patterns, a task far
easier for humans than machines. His creations include an early
optical-character-recognition program; a text-to-speech voice synthesizer
for the blind; the first commercial speech-recognition system that could
handle many words; and sophisticated computer-based instruments, a project
in collaboration with Stevie Wonder, the singer and musician.
His inventions have earned him many awards over the years including the
$500,000 Lemelson-M.I.T. Prize, the nation's largest award for invention and
innovation, and the government's National Medal of Technology. Over the
years, he has licensed or sold his technologies to larger companies, like
Xerox, which bought his optical-character-recognition technology in 1980. He
is now chairman of Kurzweil Technologies Inc., in Wellesley Hills, Mass.,
and his instinct for commercial invention has made him a wealthy man, free
to pursue the ideas that interest him.
In the artificial intelligence field, he is known more as a practical
inventor than as a pure scientist. "Ray Kurzweil seems to have this knack
for defining a problem so that he can attack it in a way that is useful and
it actually works," said Raj Reddy, a computer science professor at Carnegie
Mellon University, who is a leading artificial intelligence scholar. "And
his work is guided by high-quality research. He always does his homework."
It is clear that plenty of homework went into "Fantastic Voyage." The book,
with 452 pages, has more than 900 footnotes. There is a research rationale
for each recommendation, backed up by some 2,000 scientific citations. "We
started from a perspective of, 'What does the medical literature show?' "
said Dr. Grossman, the book's co-author and founder of the Frontier Medical
Institute, a longevity clinic. "We can defend everything we say."
The authors offer no silver bullet, no single nostrum, or even a handful,
that will insure a long and healthy life. "It's a complex case," Mr.
Kurzweil said. "That's why it takes a book to make it."
The authors advocate eating less than you need, with diets that are very low
in carbohydrates and fat, high in vegetables and low in dairy products.
Daily aerobic exercise is part of the formula. The authors are also big
believers in the health value of antioxidants, like vitamins A, C and E.
They can combat oxidation processes that release free radicals, which are
wayward molecules that damage cells and increase the risk of disease and the
pace of aging.
Traditionally, the medical profession has focused on treating disease. But
disease prevention is increasingly a theme of medical research and practice
as it becomes clear that ailments like heart disease and cancer are strongly
influenced by diet and lifestyle.
"People are coming from a number of directions to these same truths," said
Dr. Joseph Zibrak, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. "The
science behind much of what Kurzweil and Grossman are talking about is
becoming conventional."
Mr. Kurzweil, however, recommends far more than the standard preventative
counsel to eat a healthier diet and get more exercise. Moderation is not his
counsel for the radical reprogramming of the body. For example, Mr. Kurzweil
and Dr. Grossman advocate taking large doses of vitamins and minerals and
letting your body sort out what it needs - an approach that some experts say
is extreme and perhaps risky.
"They have totally bought into mega-dosing on vitamins by accepting scanty
evidence too early, before it's been properly evaluated," said S. Jay
Olshansky, a professor in the school of public health at the University of
Illinois at Chicago.
Mr. Olshansky points to a recent study, by an epidemiologist at Johns
Hopkins University, that found taking high doses of vitamin E may slightly
increase the risks of dying earlier. "Mega-dosing could be mutagenic; it
could cause problems," Mr. Olshansky said. "If you follow Ray and Terry's
advice, you could die sooner. Kurzweil is asking people to be guinea pigs."
Mr. Kurzweil and Dr. Grossman say there is a market for their ideas, beyond
just their book. They have set up a small side business selling supplement
pills, "Ray & Terry's Total Daily Care," which is a pared-down version of
Mr. Kurzweil's vitamin and nutrient program. For people 50 or over, they
recommend six pills a day, which cost $1.25 a day, and fewer pills for
younger people.
Mr. Kurzweil, however, is going further. He is sticking to his 250
pill-a-day regimen, though he adjusts his routine if his research suggests
improvements. In this research, Mr. Kurzweil is both the scientist and the
laboratory. "I've tried to approach this as an inventor," he said. "That's
how I approach problems, constantly measuring, testing and searching for the
best ideas."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/27/technology/27kurzweil.html
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