WHY YOU'LL LIVE TO 150

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POPULAR SCIENCE, AUGUST 2011
WHY YOU'LL LIVE TO 150

The Man Who Would Stop Time
Bill Andrews has spent two decades unlocking the molecular mechanisms of aging. His mission: to extend the human life span to 150 years--or die trying

But in his race to cure aging, Andrews may himself be running out of time. The stock-market crash of 2008 nearly wiped out two investors who had until then been his primary funders. Without the money to continue refining the nearly 40 telomerase-activating chemicals he and his team had already discovered, Andrews made the decision last September to cut a deal with John W. Anderson, the founder of Isagenix, an Arizona-based network marketing supplement company. This month, Isagenix will launch an anti-aging product containing several natural compounds that Sierra Sciences has verified to have “telomere-supporting” properties. It’s not the powerful drug Andrews originally envisioned, but he says he believes it will promote “health and well-being” and just possibly generate enough cash to underwrite the expensive “medicinal chemistry” required to come up with a more fully developed anti-aging compound—one attractive enough to bring in a billionaire or a Big Pharma partner with pockets deep enough to take a drug candidate through the FDA’s time-consuming and fabulously expensive approval process.

“I want to cure my aging,” Andrews tells me, “my friends’ and family’s aging, my investors’ aging, their friends’ and families’ aging, and make a ton of money. And I want to cure everybody else’s aging too—I put that probably equal to making a ton of money."

For all the monastic devotion he brings to the cause, Andrews is a pure gene jock. It’s a sign of our nutraceutical-besotted times that such a scientist has made a marriage of convenience with a supplement industry often equated with hippie herb lovers and cynical marketers looking to exploit the next pseudoscience fad. Gone are the bulk shipments of synthetic chemicals to be assayed, replaced by a small weekly delivery of ingredients derived mostly from traditional Chinese and Indian medicinal herbs that John W. Anderson prepares in his five-man Arizona lab. To Andrews’s surprise (and considerable relief), at least three of these compounds have tested positive for telomerase activation in the lab, even though many of the source materials are readily available in health-food stores. Have longtime devotees of traditional Chinese and Indian medicinal herbs been activating their telomerase without knowing it? Anderson, a self-described nutraceutical research scientist and medicine hunter, demurs, saying only that his nonchemical extraction and refining process concentrates and enhances any healing properties they may have previously exhibited. As Jon Cornell, Andrews’s administrative lieutenant at Sierra Sciences, says, if herbs and roots naturally had the level of telomerase-inducing activity that Andrews and his team are really looking for, “we’d probably already have immortal people.”

FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-07/man-who-would-stop-time