Profiles and shenanigans of major figures in the aging-research arena. Telomeres, longevity genes, stem cells, politics, clone-o-phobia.

So, when will stem cells come into widespread medical use? If you answer twenty years from now, you'd be wrong by about 60 years--they first became widely used in the 1960's! Only they were called "bone marrow transplants." Today thousands of them are done every year.

Hall has written a dozen so excellent books on medicine, biotechnology and molecular biology, and this is one of the best. Here he recounts the development of the idea that aging in humans can be scientifically understood and modified. He starts off with the wonderful story of the Hayflick limit with an account of his first interview with him and brings this maverick character to life. How often are the big ideas discovered by rogues and rebels--fearless men?

He covers a very wide swath of current developments in the cutting edge of biology and medicine--telomeres, stem cells, transplants, cloning, and aging--all told in enough depth that you can't help but learn something, even if you are pretty well informed. The history, the personalities, and the ideas are all here.

One thing I appreciated is that Hall makes no pretense about being disinterested in the subject--he takes some of it personally, and is not afraid to relate what his gut is telling him. He is partisan in the best sense of the word. He unflinchingly challenges the idealistic "bioethicists" who have lately ejected such nonsense into the public space, pretending to a certainty only a bishop could appreciate.

Hall also relates in some detail the evolution of the stem cell/cloning debate that has resulted in the policy that federal money can go to research only on the 70 embryonic stem cell lines already in existence, now known to be more like 6. And none of them suitable for therapeutic for humans because they are grown on a substrate of mouse cells and their viruses. The yokels and theologians have managed to set back this important avenue for improving human health by who knows how many decades... Sad to think we'll be looking for progress to the South Koreans, who recently generated human embryonic cell lines by nuclear transfer. Americans have yet to duplicate this

The quality of Hall's prose, and the nature of the subject itself, conspire to produce a book that I found very hard to put down. A terrific read! ( )