An illuminating account of the science of life extension with a more critical eye than most.
A Nobel Prize winner in chemistry examines aging and dying.
Ramakrishnan, a molecular biologist and the author of The Gene Machine, writes that biologists don’t consider aging “inevitable.” Progress has diminished human wear and tear over the past century and doubled our longevity without increasing our maximal lifespan. No one has matched Jeanne Calment, who died 25 years ago at 122, though she was feeble, blind, and deaf during her final years. Ramakrishnan emphasizes that all living things can die, but many, including tiny hydras and some jellyfish, can regenerate completely when certain parts are chopped off. Their likelihood of dying does not increase with age, so they are considered biologically immortal. More familiar animals—giant tortoises, some sharks—age extremely slowly, and we have plenty to learn from these creatures. Ramakrishnan is a fine writer, so readers will enjoy his expert if intensely detailed overview of genetics and evolution as it applies to aging. Those who pay attention will be rewarded by his modestly optimistic conclusion about life extenders, which are familiar to health-conscious readers and heavily promoted by entrepreneurial colleagues. The author includes fascinating studies demonstrating that the front-runners—rapamycin, resveratrol, metformin, curcumin—and calorie restriction extend the lives of animals, including primates. However, having no skin in the game, the author breaks ranks with enthusiasts by recounting failed studies. He holds a low opinion of respectable colleagues who promote the elderly male billionaires who finance their startups, as well as the bizarre but flourishing cryonics industry, which freezes people immediately after death “with the idea of defrosting them when a cure for whatever ailed them has been found.” In the end, Ramakrishnan believes that vast lifespans will happen, but not in the near future.
An illuminating account of the science of life extension with a more critical eye than most.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780063113275
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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