[extropy-chat] FWD (SK) Just How Old Can He Go?

[Terry W. Colvin]

Just How Old Can He Go?

December 27, 2004
  By STEVE LOHR


Ray Kurzweil began his dinner with a pill. "A starch
blocker," he explained, "one of my 250 supplements a day."

The risk of encountering starchy food seemed slight indeed
at the vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan he had selected,
where the fare was heavy with kale, seaweed, tofu, steamed
broccoli and bean sprouts. But Mr. Kurzweil, a renowned
inventor and computer scientist, has strong views on
dietary matters.

His regimen for longevity is not everyone's cup of tea
(preferably green tea, Mr. Kurzweil advises, which contains
extra antioxidants to reduce the risk of heart disease and
cancer). And most people would scoff at his notion that
emerging trends in medicine, biotechnology and
nanotechnology open a realistic path to immortality - the
central claim of a new book by Mr. Kurzweil and Dr. Terry
Grossman, a physician and founder of a longevity clinic in
Denver.

"I am serious about it," said Mr. Kurzweil, a wiry man with
few lines on his face for a 56-year-old. "I think death is
a tragedy. I think aging is a tragedy. And going beyond our
limitations is what our species is all about."

The study of human biology, he said, is increasingly
intersecting with his main field of expertise - computing.
Mr. Kurzweil points to the advances in medicine and
genetics as leading toward a view of biology as a kind of
computation.

The chemical units in DNA, which are designated by the
letters A, G, C and T, are assembled and recombined, as if
computer code.

"Genes are sequential programs," he said. "We are learning
how to manipulate the programs inside us, the software of
life. And personally, I really believe that what I'm doing
is reprogramming my biochemistry."

His new book shows a different side of Mr. Kurzweil's
continuing fascination with the connection between humans
and computers. In "The Age of Spiritual Machines,"
published in 1999, Mr. Kurzweil made the case for why
computers will exceed human intelligence within a few
decades.

Provocative and controversial, that book struck skeptics as
extreme and wildly optimistic about the gains technology
can make anytime soon. The same criticism can be made of
his new book, "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live
Forever" (Rodale, 2004), published last month. But then,
Mr. Kurzweil's success as an inventor has been based partly
on ignoring conventional wisdom and a willingness to pursue
ideas that may seem extreme.

He has few qualms about technology, which he says is "the
continuation of evolution by other means." Just as the
boundaries of computing will soon seem limitless, Mr.
Kurzweil insists that improving knowledge and technology
will make death avoidable.

The book describes three stages - the authors call them
"bridges" - over the next 20 to 25 years. By the late
2020's, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, the fruits of artificial
intelligence and nanotechnology, a technology that permits
changes to the body at the cellular level, will really kick
in so that science will enable people to rebuild their
bodies, any way they want to. In 15 to 20 years, he
contends that advances in the understanding of gene
processes will make it possible for biotechnology therapies
to turn off and reverse disease and aging. But only "a
small minority of older boomers will make it past this
impending critical threshold," write the authors, both
graying boomers themselves.

In the meantime, the best that can be done, the authors
say, is to reprogram one's body to live a healthier life to
have a fighting chance to be around when the nanotech
breakthroughs come to the rescue.

Mr. Kurzweil's thinking on health and aging is the result
of both a personal and an intellectual journey. Like his
grandfather, his father died in his 50's of heart disease,
and Mr. Kurzweil , who is married with two children, was
diagnosed with diabetes at 35. Life, clearly, had dealt him
a bad genetic hand.

Mr. Kurzweil reacted poorly to insulin, gaining weight. So
he immersed himself in the research literature on diabetes,
stopped taking insulin, and proceeded to devise his own
program of diet, exercise and the use of some nutritional
supplements. He lost 40 pounds, and brought his blood sugar
and cholesterol levels down to healthy levels.

That thinking went into Mr. Kurzweil's earlier health book,
"The 10 Percent Solution for a Healthy Life: How to
Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart Disease and Cancer,"
which was published in 1993 and advocated a diet with fat
accounting for only 10 percent of total calories consumed
daily, far below the standard public health recommendations
of 30 percent.

Mr. Kurzweil's research soon extended to aging and
longevity, and he has continued at it ever since,
consulting doctors and scientists along the way. His blood,
metabolism and fitness are monitored regularly. The results
appear encouraging. His biological age, using tests like
high-frequency hearing, memory and lung capacity, is about
40. "In a sense, I treat myself as a laboratory," he said.

His experimental bent was evident even before he went to
college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In
1965, as a teenager, he appeared on the television program,
"I've Got a Secret," hosted by Steve Allen, for having
written a computer program that composed piano music.

Mr. Kurzweil's inventions mainly center on the use of
artificial intelligence technology to teach computers to
recognize patterns, a task far easier for humans than
machines. His creations include an early
optical-character-recognition program; a text-to-speech
voice synthesizer for the blind; the first commercial
speech-recognition system that could handle many words; and
sophisticated computer-based instruments, a project in
collaboration with Stevie Wonder, the singer and musician.

His inventions have earned him many awards over the years
including the $500,000 Lemelson-M.I.T. Prize, the nation's
largest award for invention and innovation, and the
government's National Medal of Technology. Over the years,
he has licensed or sold his technologies to larger
companies, like Xerox, which bought his
optical-character-recognition technology in 1980. He is now
chairman of Kurzweil Technologies Inc., in Wellesley Hills,
Mass., and his instinct for commercial invention has made
him a wealthy man, free to pursue the ideas that interest
him.

In the artificial intelligence field, he is known more as a
practical inventor than as a pure scientist. "Ray Kurzweil
seems to have this knack for defining a problem so that he
can attack it in a way that is useful and it actually
works," said Raj Reddy, a computer science professor at
Carnegie Mellon University, who is a leading artificial
intelligence scholar. "And his work is guided by
high-quality research. He always does his homework."

It is clear that plenty of homework went into "Fantastic
Voyage." The book, with 452 pages, has more than 900
footnotes. There is a research rationale for each
recommendation, backed up by some 2,000 scientific
citations. "We started from a perspective of, 'What does
the medical literature show?' " said Dr. Grossman, the
book's co-author and founder of the Frontier Medical
Institute, a longevity clinic. "We can defend everything we
say."

The authors offer no silver bullet, no single nostrum, or
even a handful, that will insure a long and healthy life.
"It's a complex case," Mr. Kurzweil said. "That's why it
takes a book to make it."

The authors advocate eating less than you need, with diets
that are very low in carbohydrates and fat, high in
vegetables and low in dairy products. Daily aerobic
exercise is part of the formula. The authors are also big
believers in the health value of antioxidants, like
vitamins A, C and E. They can combat oxidation processes
that release free radicals, which are wayward molecules
that damage cells and increase the risk of disease and the
pace of aging.

Traditionally, the medical profession has focused on
treating disease. But disease prevention is increasingly a
theme of medical research and practice as it becomes clear
that ailments like heart disease and cancer are strongly
influenced by diet and lifestyle.

"People are coming from a number of directions to these
same truths," said Dr. Joseph Zibrak, an assistant
professor at Harvard Medical School. "The science behind
much of what Kurzweil and Grossman are talking about is
becoming conventional."

Mr. Kurzweil, however, recommends far more than the
standard preventative counsel to eat a healthier diet and
get more exercise. Moderation is not his counsel for the
radical reprogramming of the body. For example, Mr.
Kurzweil and Dr. Grossman advocate taking large doses of
vitamins and minerals and letting your body sort out what
it needs - an approach that some experts say is extreme and
perhaps risky.

"They have totally bought into mega-dosing on vitamins by
accepting scanty evidence too early, before it's been
properly evaluated," said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor in
the school of public health at the University of Illinois
at Chicago.

Mr. Olshansky points to a recent study, by an
epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, that found
taking high doses of vitamin E may slightly increase the
risks of dying earlier. "Mega-dosing could be mutagenic; it
could cause problems," Mr. Olshansky said. "If you follow
Ray and Terry's advice, you could die sooner. Kurzweil is
asking people to be guinea pigs."

Mr. Kurzweil and Dr. Grossman say there is a market for
their ideas, beyond just their book. They have set up a
small side business selling supplement pills, "Ray &
Terry's Total Daily Care," which is a pared-down version of
Mr. Kurzweil's vitamin and nutrient program. For people 50
or over, they recommend six pills a day, which cost $1.25 a
day, and fewer pills for younger people.

Mr. Kurzweil, however, is going further. He is sticking to
his 250 pill-a-day regimen, though he adjusts his routine
if his research suggests improvements. In this research,
Mr. Kurzweil is both the scientist and the laboratory.
"I've tried to approach this as an inventor," he said.
"That's how I approach problems, constantly measuring,
testing and searching for the best ideas."


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/27/technology/27kurzweil.html?ex=1105165414&ei=1&en=34426efcc835b878

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company 


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
     Alternate: < fortean1 at msn.com >
Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html >
Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB *
      U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program
------------
Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List
   TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org > [Southeast Asia
veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]