Beginning the Chase : Part 2

Chasing Life: New Discoveries in the Search for Immortality to Help You Age Less Today
by Sanjay Gupta, M.D.

(Page 2 of 4)

As I traveled through Moscow and visited various laboratories and "beauty clinics," I realized that many prominent Russian citizens truly believe they have discovered something astounding, so much so that watchdog organizations overseeing the clinics are willing to turn their eyes the other way when it comes to enforcing the law. Despite the widespread knowledge of their existence, cosmetic stem cell treatments are officially illegal in Russia. You wouldn't know it from the Internet, though, where you can find Russian-language sites offering the treatments. Some stories have reported as many as fifty stem cell clinics in the Russian capital. Not surprisingly, most proprietors at these clinics prefer to remain in the shadows and didn't want to talk. That was not the case with Tepliashin.

When we meet, Tepliashin proudly shows me around his clinics and describes the process: After a battery of tests, patients undergo an operation under local anesthetic during which he removes 5 grams or more of fat tissue from the abdominal area or the thigh. Technicians place the fat cells in a vial, where they are put in a solution and spun in a centrifuge. From there, the precious stem cells are extracted and placed in a special growth medium, where they are incubated. It turns out stem cells are located in many different areas of the body, including your bone marrow and even your fat. Once the cells have multiplied sufficiently, vials of stem cells are placed in a tank of liquid nitrogen to induce a state of hibernation, awaiting injection under the skin. This turns out to be a critically important point: because people receiving the treatments get injections of their own cells, there is no risk of rejection the way there would be with cells taken from fetuses.

Tepliashin says his clients get their money's worth. More than looking younger, Tepliashin says stem cell treatments make people live longer, too, reversing the effects of stress, bad food, radiation from X-rays, and viruses. In short, these treatments help people chase life. Imagine a lifetime of eating cheeseburgers and absorbing sunshine on the beach without sunblock potentially reversed, according to Tepliashin, by using your own stem cells to simply rebuild and rejuvenate your damaged cells with fresh, new ones.

It is certainly true that stem cell treatments have not undergone any of the sorts of clinical trials required in the United States and Europe that would confirm they are safe and demonstrate they are effective. Still, there appears to be no shortage of willing clients from Russia's moneyed elite and from elsewhere in Europe. Standing next to a squat, cylindrical vat of liquid nitrogen, a gloved technician lifts a tray holding as many as a thousand vials - representing about five hundred paying customers. The price tag is not cheap: 10,000 to 25,000 for a course of treatments ($12,000-$30,000). As far as I can tell, they aren't willing to wait for a New England Journal of Medicine article to tell them what they think they already know - that stem cells can not only stop them from getting older but can actually turn the clock the other way and make them biologically younger.

"They are used to a comfortable life," Tepliashin tells me. "They do not want to become old. They want to stay young. And we can say that it's a routine procedure. It can be done easily." Tepliashin is a sort of modern-day explorer in the quest for immortality, and he believes he has had the most success. Truth is, we won't know how much success for decades to come, but attempting to stop the clock of aging and stay young is nothing new. Over the centuries, scientists, alchemists, doctors, explorers, and others have tried to find or concoct rejuvenating potions or develop other ways to extend the human life span. Some of their would-be remedies for aging included items not likely to be found at a local health food store: dog testicles, a stag's heart, the breath of a virgin. History is filled with exotic elixirs offering the false promise of eternal youth.

Juan Ponce de León set out looking for the fountain of youth but wound up discovering Florida, by accident, in 1513. I can almost see the T-shirt. Ancient Hebrew and Hindu tales also told of bodies of water capable of conferring eternal life. More than two thousand years ago, Chinese emperors thought there was nothing more important than sending maritime expeditions in search of immortality. They weren't looking for life-giving water but the Isles of the Eastern Sea, where immortals were supposed to live. In ancient Greece, there was a belief that in a remote part of the world lived the Hyperboreans, a people free of all natural ills, with a life span of one thousand years.

In more recent times, scientists traveled to isolated regions of the Caucasus in what was the Soviet Union, chasing reports of extreme longevity. Soviet scientists claimed Russian citizens had lived for 145 years. The Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan and the northern Andes also gained a reputation as places where people were thought to be extremely long-lived. In all three cases, the tales of remarkable longevity turned out to be more about poor record keeping than magnificent health.

Despite all humankind's efforts, we have remained constrained by a life span that has an outer boundary set by the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years, 164 days. Hers is the longest confirmed life span. Even the fittest among us get old. Jack La Lanne is still swimming into his nineties, but he has not escaped the aging process despite his lifelong devotion to exercise and healthy living.

In order to begin our collective chase for life, it is important to establish a few points before we get into some of the antiaging prescriptions. First of all, aging, in and of itself, is a major risk factor for ailments including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and a number of other conditions. Also, no one in the United States has officially died of old age since 1951, when state and federal agencies updated the standard list of contributing and underlying causes of death. "Old age" was dropped from the list that year. Despite this clerical fact, aging is a process that causes people to lose physiological function - from the cellular level to organs to systems - to the point at which they are vulnerable to heart disease, stroke, and cancer - the three leading causes of death in older Americans.

Copyright © 2007 by Sanjay Gupta, M.D.

About the Author

Sanjay Gupta, M.D., is a practicing neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital and associate chief of service at Grady Memorial Hospital. A columnist for TIME magazine and a chief medical correspondent at CNN, he lives in Atlanta, GA.