THE YOUTH PILL

With lively prose and a strong narrative, Stipp, a renowned science journalist, takes readers through the history of the science and business of aging and the brilliant minds behind it who have taken it upon themselves to not only fight the aging process but challenge the powerful pharmaceutical industry and government regulators. It is an informative and provocative read that shows how a small group of optimistic and determined scientists might change the way we live forever.

No medical advances inspire more media hyperventilation than do those in aging research. But despite our wishful thinking, we know it's an impossible dream. Noted business and science journalist David Stipp explores the history of the movement to slow aging. Gerontology, the study of aging, has been plagued by fits and starts that eventually lead to dead ends, not to mention the generations of hoaxes starting with the Fountain of Youth that have disillusioned us in our quest to live longer lives. Aging's daunting complexity, coupled with the fact that neither the drug regulators nor the medical establishment regard it as a malady worth treatment, insured that pharmaceutical companies kept their distance from the aging business. Biotech's scientist-entrepreneurs, however, are made of dreamier stuff than Big Pharma executives, and as gerontology began applying the sharp tools of molecular biology to aging, the field's young visionaries began knocking on venture capitalists' doors with business plans promising drugs that would stunt the roots of aging. New insights into what causes animals to age transformed the antiaging quest and gave it new life. New start-ups began to emerge to take advance of this new research and develop a drug that could actually slow down the aging process at its core.

David Stipp is a former senior writer for Fortune, where he worked from 1995-2006 as the magazine's chief science and medical writer. He was previously a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering science, medicine, and technology. For the past ten years, he has written extensively on the science, demographics, and economics of aging and in 2006 wrote a front page story for The Wall Street Journal that broke the news that resveratrol, in ingredient in red wine, induces antiaging effects in mice. In 1998 he won a National Association of Science Writer's Science-in-Society award.