Making a Youth Pill

Once the process of aging is correctly identified, will pharmaceuticals be able to counteract it? Slate reviews two books that take on aging and the human endeavor for immorality. “Nature doesn’t care if some of the calcium then hardens our arteries, causing late-in-life heart attacks.

We care, however, and David Stipp in The Youth Pill: Scientists at the Brink of an Anti-Aging Revolution joins Weiner in exploring the frontiers of the science that is tackling the possibilities of beating aging and cheating death. Weiner brings a lyrical, even meditative, approach to his portraits of the people who are at work tweaking the evolutionary process.”