Doctor Eternity

When I first met him at his Lakewood office, several weeks before undergoing my longevity evaluation, he eagerly showed off his latest technological doohickey with a toothy grin: an iPhone, which he uses, along with his Amazon Kindle electronic book device, to keep his contacts, his schedule, even his reading material all tidily arranged.

Behind his uncluttered desk, his office walls are tiled with qualifications and honors. There are precisely positioned certifications from the National Board of Medical Examiners, the American Board of Holistic Medicine and the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine; his medical degree from the University of Florida; a printed-out page from Amazon.com noting that Fantastic Voyage had become the number-one selling science book on the site in December 2004; and a plaque quoting from a 2600 B.C. Chinese medical text: "Superior doctors prevent the disease. Mediocre doctors treat the disease. Inferior doctors treat the full-blown disease."

Grossman even clocks traffic lights on his way to work, calculating the delays between red and green, to determine the most efficient route. No wonder he's obsessed with defeating the messiest, least controllable part of life: the end of it.

And he's not the first person in his family to resist shuffling off into the dark ether. Jacob Light, Grossman's grandfather, lived to 104, with only one hospital visit. When he turned 100, Grossman asked him his secret.

"It's simple," he told his grandson. "Right after I was born, I took a breath in, and then took a breath out. And I kept repeating it."

So maybe there was something about Grossman's genes from the get-go, a hereditary quirk that inspires him to cling to this mortal coil as long as possible. If so, it took a while for that trait to be expressed. The Florida native first moved to Colorado in 1970 to be an organic farmer in a Huerfano County commune. He decided to change careers, though, after reading the Michael Crichton book Five Patients, which deconstructed the hospital system. He attended the University of Florida med school, then returned to Colorado in 1980 and became a general practitioner in Grand County.

He enjoyed the gig, relishing the old-fashioned charm of treating inmates at the local jail and teaching fifth-graders about the birds and the bees. But he had an epiphany, or at least the beginning of one, when he realized that drug companies kept encouraging him to prescribe new, more expensive pharmaceuticals just before cheaper, generic versions of the old pills came out. "My job as a physician was essentially to peddle drugs for drug companies," he says. "I felt I was kind of duped."

There had to be a different way to heal people, Grossman decided — and he found it through one of the people he was caring for.

When Grossman began suffering from residual knee pain from a skiing accident, a patient recommended he try an herbal remedy made from the inner bark of a pine tree found in the south of France. The therapy seemed to work, and Grossman found himself a convert to holistic medicine — which he threw himself into with all the passion of a born-again believer. Rather than just retroactively treating diseases, he began focusing on preventive medicine, finding holistic ways to stave off diseases before they occurred. And, once he attended the first annual meeting of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine in 1994, he pledged to prevent the greatest disease of all: aging.

So Grossman moved to Denver and founded a nutritional medicine practice in Lakewood that increasingly emphasized longevity treatments. Business boomed, the practice moved to a larger office nearby, and Grossman began research on what would eventually become his first book, The Baby Boomer's Guide to Living Forever.

But his conversion wasn't complete. The final step came with a chance run-in with inventor Ray Kurzweil at the 1999 Foresight Institute Conference on nanotechnology in California. Kurzweil is to technology what Grossman has become to medicine: a maverick who delights in pushing boundaries of conventional thought. Though in Kurzweil's case, those boundaries are blown to smithereens. He believes that information technology is accelerating at an exponential rate, doubling in computing power every year. At that rate, technological progress will soon reach radical, blinding speeds, leading us to the singularity.

"This is the point at which we have merged with our technology by putting it inside us," Kurzweil says. "By 2045, we will have expanded our intelligence a billionfold, according to my calculations. It's an event horizon that's hard to see beyond, because it is so transformative."

The way he sees it, computers will become far more powerful than the human brain. People will be able to learn, compile and share vast quantities of information instantaneously through a pervasive cerebral Internet. Nanoscale robots will be able to repair or replicate every process in the human body, as well as manufacture food, water and anything else out of thin air. It's a world of post-humanity, where we will all achieve immortality.

The theory may sound downright loony, but Kurzweil has a knack for being dead on when it comes to believing computers can do remarkable things. He's spearheaded technological breakthroughs in computerized text reading, text-to-speech synthesis and computer voice recognition, earning him twelve honorary doctorates and a prestigious National Medal of Technology and making him a multi-millionaire. In his 1990 book The Age of Intelligent Machines, he predicted that computers would likely beat the world chess champion by 1998, an event that occurred in 1997. He also foretold that the world would soon be transformed by a global Internet, an idea that must have seemed almost as ludicrous at the time as the concept of singularity does today.