Doctor Eternity

Modern medicine has scored many victories in its battle against aging. The life expectancy of a child born in this country in 2005 was 77.8 years, up from 47.3 in 1900. (As Grossman points out in his longevity lectures, the oldest person in recorded history was the French woman Jeanne Louise Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 — and might have lived longer if she hadn't started smoking at 100.) But some of the ideas associated with anti-aging are questionable, verging on modern-day snake oil. Last year, federal and state agencies indicted twenty people for illegally peddling human growth hormone for its alleged age-defying properties — a type of steroid championed by the founders of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.

Grossman shies away from the more controversial ideas associated with life extension. He used to prescribe human growth hormone, which is banned by the Food and Drug Administration for all but a few treatments, to his patients and took it himself, but stopped several years ago when he decided the steroids' risks outweighed their benefits. "Growth hormone is live fast, ride hard, die young," he says now.

He's also changed his tune about cryonics, the process of deep-freezing recently deceased humans so that they can be revived in the future. He was on the medical advisory board of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, one of the country's leading cryonics facilities, but he says he resigned that post for ethical and personal reasons. And while he practices caloric restriction — a method of limiting dietary energy intake that has been shown to extend the life of some lab animals — he prefers the modest dietary curbs followed by residents of Okinawa, Japan, who are reported to have the longest life expectancy in the world, over the considerable food constraints associated with the extraterrestrially pale and waifish members of the Calorie Restriction Society.

After all of the exotic claims about immortality are stripped away, the Grossman Wellness Center is essentially just a holistic preventive medicine practice — and several wealthy clients undergo Grossman's evaluations solely as their annual executive physical. Some of the most unusual treatments he uses aren't associated with longevity, in fact, but are instead part of the disease-treatment arm of his operation, the Frontier Medical Institute, where Grossman uses integrative — and sometimes controversial — therapies such as chelation (the process of removing heavy metals from the body by intravenously injecting organic compounds into patients' bodies) to treat ailments like angina, macular degeneration and others he says "fall through the cracks of the medical system."

While he is far from the only person advocating natural supplements and lifestyle changes as life-extension strategies, his partnership with a technological authority like Kurzweil has freed his claims from much of the usual stigma of natural-medicine mumbo-jumbo.

"I completely agree with their reasoning," says Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist at the University of Cambridge in England who's one of the leading scientific proponents of a cure for aging. "Their impact among the general public has been considerable, not least because of Ray's prominence in other areas of technology."

But other aging experts have challenged him. "Fantastic Voyage makes for a wonderful science-fiction novel," says S. Jay Olshansky, a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago who researches the upper limits to human longevity. "This doesn't mean there won't be breakthroughs in the field of aging; it's just that their claims of forthcoming immortality so far have no basis in science."

Olshansky and his colleagues point out that death is way too complicated to be blithely called a disease that will soon be cured.

Aging is an ongoing biological process, explains Bruce Carnes, a professor at University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center who studies aging. It's the buildup of all the damage a person's building blocks are exposed to from birth. In other words, death isn't a disease, life is — one that would be a doozy to cure. To do so, he says, would involve around-the-clock surveillance of each of the trillions of cells comprising a human body, not to mention each of the 25,000 genes in each of those cells.

Even if Grossman does somehow succeed in extending the human life of his patients, skeptics wonder if he'd be able to figure out what worked and replicate it, since his longevity regimens involve so many different components.

"He's eating two kilos of vitamins a day," says tech guru, science-fiction writer and Wired magazine columnist Bruce Sterling of Kurzweil's regimen of 180 to 210 vitamins and minerals a day. "You can't cram all those things into you in the vague hope that you will live for 200 years. There is no control group."

And it comes at a price. The cheapest longevity option at Grossman Wellness Center, the half-day option, rings in at a hefty $1,500. A stockroom in the clinic is packed to the ceiling with more vitamins and supplements than any health-food store. Grossman and Kurzweil sell them online at www.RayandTerry.com. where a month's worth of their "Longevity MultiPack" pills goes for $79.95. It adds up to a very expensive way to live forever, especially considering there's no money-back guarantee.