Here are the first two reviews of my new sci-fi graphic novel, MAXIMUM LIFESPAN,about a scientist who downloads himself into a computer and then into his unsuspecting son.

” I became aware that there was an enzyme called telomerase that lengthened peoples’ lifespan,” Park told CBR News. “That idea spurred a bunch of other questions, like ‘How would people treat life if they were 160, 200, 300 years old?’ What would be the problems, like replacement organs, how would they do their jobs and [what would happen to] their reproduction and families. “

——-> from Comic Book Resources (the premier website for comic-related news)

“Naturally, religion plays a part in Maximum Lifespan, and Park offers a fascinating dilemma; what would be the point in contemplating heaven when you’re unlikely to ever go there? How many people would throw aside all ethics to look thirty at sixty, or add another valuable decade to their existence? As one character ruthlessly remarks “Homo sapiens 1.0 had a good run. Isn’t it time we had an upgrade?”

———-> from a popular graphic novel review site, Shelfabuse.com

Of note, since I wrote MAXIMUM LIFESPAN in 2007, two of its fictional events have already come to pass!


1) Pet Cloning has come … and gone


2) A Nobel Prize was awarded for Telomerase Activation

And there are dozens of other predictions that you can read about before they become tomorrow’s news (consciousness storage and transfer, nanotech immunocytes, defrosting of cryogenically frozen heads for virtual communication, humanist backlash, class warfare, and many more.)

To quote Carl Doherty from Shelfabuse.com again,

Perhaps what’s most striking about this science fiction parable is just how many ideas Park throws at us. If the story touches on similar themes elsewhere in recent pop culture (The Island, Repo Men) it’s because these themes are not only relevant but likely to impact mankind in our own lifetimes.

The first edition is an attractive, Smyth sewn hardcover of 191 pages, but very few copies were printed. Order your collector’s copy before the second edition, soft cover Maximum Lifespan, is all that’s available. Request your copy at your local Barnes & Nobles, through Amazon.com or from our online store.

Between the age of 40 and 50, a universal sign of aging, farsightedness, begins. Also known as Presbyopia, the medical term comes from the Greek word for ‘old man’, presbys, and opia-sight.

The lens can be thought of as having a “Gummy Bear” viscosity, allowing it to flatten when fibers holding it from around its circumference, like the springs around a trampoline, are pulled open . The trampoline springs are themselves connected to and controlled by a relaxed circular muscle sphincter. This focusing mechanism allows you to see objects from distances of 1.5 inches up to infinity.

This oddly-conceived coffee table provides a good model if you see the table top as the iris which controls the amount of light that enters the pupil (open in dark, pinpoint in the bright sun).

At rest, the muscle that controls the trampoline (aka Gummy bear lens) is a big circle so that the lens is maximally flat and permits viewing of objects that are far away.

——————————————-NEARSIGHTEDNESS—————————-

With Myopia (aka nearsightedness), you need glasses to see objects that are far away because the lens focuses the image before the back wall of an egg-shaped, myopic eye:

But keep in mind, the problem with nearsightedness is not the lens. It is as though you had moved a slide projection screen farther away after the focus had been established.

————————————FARSIGHTEDNESS—————————————

To focus on objects that are progressively nearer, like newspapers and prescriptions bottles, the circular muscle will constrict, thereby letting the ‘trampoline springs’ slacken, which in turn, permits the central Gummy Bear/lens to become rounder.

So you need reading glasses as you age because even with the circular ‘lens sphincter’ becoming its smallest circumference, the Gummy Bear has become too hard to take on its rounder, more light-refractive state.

And if you have an egg-shaped eye AND your lens has become a harder Gummy bear, you’ll have myopia and presbyopia and you’ll be needing need bifocals or two sets of glasses.

————–
Reading glass strength is measured in diopters. Click here for a site to test your own eyes.

Although just anecdotal, one of our recent 1 year follow up patients, a gentleman 65 years of age, actually had his reading glass prescription weaken from 2.5 to 2.0 diopters. While taking TA-65, his lens must have become softer.

Even more surprising were the radical improvements in his myopia reflected in his farsighted vision. This might also be attributed to the softening of the lens, thereby allowing the maximally relaxed sphincter and its trampoline springs to pull the lens flatter.

———————
In isolation, there may be a simple explanation. But over the next two posts, we’ll share his improvements in lung capacity and arterial stiffness, which are also universally-deteriorating signs of aging. Together, these improved biomarkers paint an picture of a man growing younger!

Readers of this blog know that I believe Telomerase Activation with TA-65 has made me younger, is safe, and works for others.

When people whom I haven’t seen for a while remark, “You look great! And got skinny! What are you taking?” I cringe a little because I know that semi-rhetorical question will elicit the following eerie deja-vu.

I reply: “Actually, I’ve been taking this new anti-aging pill.”

Them: (A chortle erupts as they literally laugh in my face.)
After reading my response was in ernest, they reply:
“No, seriously. Have you been working out and dieting?”

Me: “No, there’s this nutraceutical that extends the telomeres…(blah, blah, blah)”

Their eyes glaze over as they suppress a strong urge to laugh out loud again and wonder whether they should find a way to quickly escape from someone who has clearly lost his grip on reality.

But as I string words, sentences, and ideas together, my voice morphs back from the grown ups’ garbling of some Charlie Brown holiday cartoon (wah,wahh, wo, wah, wah…) back into English.

Me: “(Wah-wah-wah) protect the chromosomes (wah,wahh, wo, wah, wah) shorten as you age (wah,wahh, wo, wah, wah.) By lengthening your telomeres, you grow younger.”

By now, they have usually concluded that A) I’m serious and believe in what I’m saying, B) I appear to have a logical and coherent story, & C) it’s worth asking a few questions.

Them: “Wow. How come I haven’t heard about it?”

Me: One of several responses:
1) We’re trying to get the word out but only about 500 people, many of whom are borderline reclusive MD’s, PhD’s or CEO’s, have taken it.
2) There has been some limited press in Discover magazine and the Globe and Mail
3) It’s costly and is only offered through a small number of physicians.

Them: “How much is it?” or “Where do I get it?”

Me: “It’s $4,500 for six months. And I’m one of the doctors who can sell it.”

Them: “What? Why so expensive?”

Me: “It is very difficult to extract because it is insoluble in water or lipids. It takes three tons of root to make one batch.”

Them: “I’ll wait for the price to come down. Anyway, is it safe and FDA approved?”

Me: “Its a nutraceutical, like Vitamin C extracted from Rose hips, so it’s not regulated by the FDA. And so far, of the hundreds that have taken it, there have been no new cancers or adverse effects. Of course, before I took it, I scoured all the safety testing regarding carcinogenesis, toxicity, and human trials.

Them: “I don’t want to live longer. What’s the point?”

Now, I explain our goal is to have a better quality of life by becoming younger and then resuming your normal biological aging after stopping, like running a bit farther up a relentlessly descending escalator that you’re riding from the cradle above to the grave below.

Them: “Sounds too good to be true. Anyway, I just want go when it’s my time.”

And that is how it unfolds. Every single time, without fail, like Bill Murray forced to relive the same experiences over and over in Groundhog Day.

I used to wonder why 9 our of 10 rational people will so glibly profess a death wish as the final punctuation to this conversation. I thought it was because the fantasy was too threatening and anyway, they know the cosmos won’t hold them to thier proclamation any time soon. But I just stumbled upon the writings of a life extension advocate and cryonics guru named Ben Best, that might help explain the “logic of emotion” behind my dozens of identical, deja-vu encounters.

—————-

“Suicide counseling is primarily for people who are undecided about the value of life. The suicide counselor can attempt to remind or inform the despairing person of the potential pleasures of life — or attempt to suggest ways to end pain and depression. But a person lacking the will to live usually has no motivation to find a reason to live. The suicide counselor is helpless to change a person who innately experiences life as being something negative — helpless to find goals & values that would be meaningful. Many (if not most) people will eagerly choose death as a means to stop physical or emotional pain if the pain is intense enough and if the prospect of the pain ending seems bleak.

To me, discussing the value of life extension with people uninterested in extending their own lives is a great deal like suicide counseling. I see no easy way of translating my positive attitudes about life into other people having a positive attitude about life. I have come to believe that if a person does not value life, or believes that the value of life has an expiry date, the matter is beyond discussion. And I mean this not in the sense of difficulty of communication, but in the sense that what is of value to me may not be of value for someone else. I like strawberry and she likes vanilla. I want to live to be a thousand years old — and he doesn’t care whether he is alive in five years. Personal choices.

(he goes on to explain all the things he would do with a longer lifespan)

But telling people what I would do with my extended life will not satisfy those who don’t know what to do with themselves. Enthusiasm for living is the driving force behind the desire to live. To someone who equates extended life with extended boredom, a list of possible activities will only seem like a list of chores.

If people ask me why I want to live forever, I ask why they want to die. This is not a trick answer — my bafflement is as genuine as theirs. I can only speculate that most people live lives that are woefully boring, depressive or painful — and they are locked in despair that things will ever change. Many people complete the goals of social programming (education, marriage, family, career and retirement) — and then feel that there is nothing left to do but die. Why so little imagination and enthusiasm? I cannot understand why people are so content to age & die when science is making strides towards the prevention of these things and there is such a limitless supply of exciting things to explore & experience. Yet people ask me why — in a few decades — I cannot find fulfillment and satisfaction that I have lived. Why should I want a good thing to end? There is an incomprehensible gulf of different attitudes.

Too many people cannot believe in the potential for rejuvenation and perpetual youth. An elderly relative of mine who had been a dirt farmer all his life spent his final years on his porch playing a record “When you and I were young, Maggie” — bringing tears to his eyes. As a hard-working youth he and his young wife were described as the happiest of couples. Narrowing opportunities accompanying a deteriorating body & mind — with no hope for improvement — have a destructive effect on enthusiasm for life.

The energy of youth is often spent struggling to establish oneself in the world, with too little time to smell the flowers. Youth presents us with many opportunities which we fumble due to lack of wisdom — opportunities which seem lost forever when wisdom arrives. I have regrets for things I have done, but far greater regrets for things I have not done. All my mistakes were really terrific “learning experiences” Everything would be OK were it not for aging and death. I love my life and my life history — “warts and all”. Without aging and death all my mistakes would merely be the path to wisdom and fulfillment. Aging and death mean the futile loss of my life’s lessons, experiences and opportunity. I will do all in my power to prevent this tragedy. With rejuvenation we need not spend years mourning the loss of youth. A lifespan of even one hundred years is far too brief an experience of life. I want to live many thousands of years, at least — as long as possible.”

——–

(My Disclaimer: I do NOT advocate cryonics, for a lot of reasons that I ‘flesh out’ in my new sci-fi graphic novel, Maximum Lifespan, about a scientist who freezes his body and downloads his consciousness into a computer and then into his unsuspecting son.)

But Best’s insights truly shed new light on my Groundhog Day conversations. Historically, spirituality has always made good commerce in the transmigration of souls, whether it be the maudlin reawakening at the deathbed, or its ‘chicken-little’ proclamations that we’re ‘living in the end of days.’ Eschatology of individuals and their memes must emerge from their core values of the futility of earthly living and a sort of spiritual thermodynamics, not from a perspective of hope and abundance, which are relegated to the theism of an Afterlife and the magic beans of fairy tales.

Best’s words made me realize that biomedicine of our culture, the medicine that I’ve practiced for the last 21 years, is like a crack Roman legion engaged in frontier skirmishes even as Rome burns. I realized that Allopathic medicine and all our important cultural institutions have addressed immortality long ago and safely proclaimed all worlds of life extension to be flat and, ipso facto, frivolous to consider. I presume the logic goes something like this:

If G-d (or Gaia, or whatever trickster entity that controls us) had wanted us to eat from Eden’s other tree, the Tree of Eternal Life, he would have given us something like this supposed telomerase activator. But since this Ed Park guy isn’t famous and I’ve never heard about this, this couldn’t possibly be legit. Who cares if someone won a Nobel Prize for it? Unless Oprah, Oz, and Perez Hilton are talking, it can’t be that important.

Fast forward to the next time someone smugly proclaims, “Sounds too good to be true. Anyway, I just want go when it’s my time,” I’ll smile knowing full well that their ‘faith in futility’ is really talking but that most wouldn’t find it hard to choose between antidote and alter water if they’d just been poisoned.

Dear reader, we’ve all been poisoned with the knowledge of our own mortality and we are all afflicted with the only undeniable risk factor for causing death: being alive.

We close with the words of the Apollo and Dionysus of the aging Boomers:

At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.

Five to one, baby
One in five
No one here gets out alive.

The news yesterday was of a new class of drug to fight melanoma using a new mechanism: it boosts your immune system instead of destroying it.

I created this diagram to illustrate the treatment of cancer as of 2010:

But as with many things, best treatment for cancer is prevention. If you protect the tips of the chromosomes (the TELOMERES), you don’t get the recombination and breaks that cause cancer.

The second best the p53 enzyme, the “watchman of the genome”, which repairs DNA, causes damaged cells to stop dividing, or destroys them outright.

The third line is the adaptive immune system of the T Cells, especially the Natural Killer cells. Check out this link to see how your body has possibly cured you of cancer millions of times already.

Once cancer becomes clinically-evident (like the weeds above ground in this diagram,) treatment becomes increasingly destructive from precision surgery, to local radiation, to systemic chemotherapy.

The efficacy of radiation and chemotherapy comes from targeting rapidly-producing cells.  Unfortunately, your own body’s stem cells are also rapidly-producing. So the cure is often worse than the disease and at the very least, it makes it harder to fight the disease

Would you put down a student protest....

.... by dropping napalm on campus?

Returning to our pyramid diagram, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of weed-killer, or scorched earth.

Telomerase activation occurs with rest, exercise, good diet, and taking TA-65.

To learn more about the link between cancer and telomeres check out this link.

Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, a day when we honor those who died during war.  For some historical perspective, here is a list of the seven most lethal wars that mankind has faced.

The Seven Deadliest Wars:

#7 Vietnam War (1968-75) - 2.5M killed

#6 Korean War (1950-52) - 2.5M killed

#5 Second Congo War (1998-2003) - 3.8M killed

#4 Russian Civil War (1917-1921) - 5M killed

#3 World War One (1914-1918) - 10M killed

#2 World War Two (1939-1945) - 40M killed

#1 War Against Aging (50,000 B.C. - present) 100 Billion killed

In this  “War Against Aging”, an individual’s weapons were limited to rest, exercise, nutrition, and herbs.

Cultures waged their battles against oblivion using prayers and sacrifices, having descendants, fighting wars, or creating art and ideas of lasting value.

But the winds of war are shifting against our ancient enemy of aging, which has slain 94% of its combatants (100B of the 106B Homo sapiens that have lived.)

Because just as we harnessed the power of the atomic nucleus to deter war, science has harnessed the power of the cellular nucleus to deter aging.

TA-65 is simply a scientifically-proven, MAGIC BULLET to defeat the Grim Reaper by refurbishing and recharging your DNA protection at the genetic level.

To enlist in our “War to End All Ends,”  visit:

http://www.rechargebiomedical.com/aging.html

With the current furor over Tiger Woods and ARod’s doctor
being busted for treating high profile athletes from MLB and the NFL, we should revisit the facts about ANABOLIC substances that cause increased muscle mass through altered gene expression.

All the world loves a winner and the undeniable truth is that ANABOLIC substances such as testosterone and HGH, do make professional athletes run faster and hit balls harder. And doing those things sells TV ads and fills stadium seats.

But even for the weekend warriors, it has been common for men concerned about aging to take Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and other male hormones, which include tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), androstenedione, and testosterone.

If you think of your body like a car, then anabolic substances cause a supercharging and that burns through your stem cells and may ironically cause premature aging!

In contrast, telomerase activation is regenerative, leading to improved function by naturally rescuing senescent or dormant cells. Your metabolism increases only as a result of firing on “all cylinders”, not because of adding supercharged intake and exhaust and ‘red-lining’ at 9000 RPM’s

When people ask whether taking TA-65 is safe, I say yes because we know the three dozen or so genes that it modulates thanks to these amazing “gene chips” that measure the 25,000 known human genes on a device about the size of a postage stamp.

Interestingly, most of the genes activated by TA-65 are involved in DNA repair and rejuvenation, which are undeniably GOOD things.

In contrast, anabolic steroids like testosterone alter genes expression in almost a thousand genes!

To learn why non-anabolic telomerase activation is safer than the current “anti-aging” fads of HGH and male hormones, go to http://www.rechargebiomedical.com/taisnotanabolic.html

On March 30th, some Über-geeks fired up their Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland in an effort to move one huge step closer to Einstein’s elusive lifelong dream of a G.U.T. or Grand Unified Theory.  That ‘theory of everything’ is a somewhat verifiable way to explain how the particles of the Standard Model of particle physics fit with our understanding of Electromagnetism, Strong and Weak nuclear forces, and Gravity.

I know what you’re thinking:

“Zzzzzzzz…BOh–ring”

But WAKE UP! To paraphrase the Baby-Boomers’-Bard, “The future now, will later be past.”

The story of how firing up the big blaster didn’t end the universe was eclipsed in the headlines because 1) it didn’t affect the survivors of Oceanic 815 and 2) it’s not as riveting as Kate Gosselin’s fate on Dancing with the Stars. I get that. But explaining the whole universe is pretty good for a species of “Monkey-boy” hominids that have only been in existence for a mere 200k of the universe’s 13.7 billion years, or 0.000014 of its creator’s existence. This would be probably as likely one of your dust mites writing your entire life story into a Tony-award winning musical during a commercial break of Dancing with the Stars.

So if these acne-stricken, Toblerone-scarfing smarties find their Higgs Boson particle (or Dan Brown’s ‘God Particle’ from Angels and Demons) they’ll be closer to unifying their models and better still, their mom’s get to tell their ‘Frenemies’ how their kid turned out to be smarter than Einstein.

I know what you’re thinking:

“Where the $*@! is he going with this?”

In 1986, Sean Connery played a 14th century theologian/gumshoe named William of Ockham in a pretty cool whodunit movie called The Name of the Rose.

He (Sir William of Ockham, not the greatest James Bond of all time) is best known for his principle of “Ockham’s Razor,”  which has been a close companion of scientists and detectives from Carolus Linnaeus to Lieutenant Columbo:

pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate

“plurality should not be posited without necessity”

In other words, don’t evoke a whole bunch of reasons when only one will do just fine.

So that’s really the point of this posting.   To explain aging, theorists often focus on the results of human aging, not its root cause, which is likely to be telomere erosion.

Since telomere erosion allows the ends of all DNA to be exposed and injured, it is sufficient to explain and encompass all the other theories such as:

• Error Accumulation
• Somatic mutation
• Accumulative-Waste
• Free Radical theory
• Mitohormesis
…etc.

To paraphrase another pretty cool movie “One theory to rule them all, one theory to bind them…”

It seems logical that if every living creature with non-circular DNA uses telomerase to protect their DNA libraries, despite having evolved a variety of different repeating sequences, then the evolutionary conservation of telomerase must be a necessary condition for the survival of any species that carries the entire library in every cell nucleus.

Since the “Grand Inquisitors” these days are physicists and not sadistic zealots, anyone can come up with a theory. Even I did. If you want to check out my theory of aging, go to: http://www.rechargebiomedical.com/aging.html

And if you want to do something logical and positive towards living healthier and longer, you should do what hundreds of MD’s, PhD’s, and CEO’s have already done: take TA-65 to activate your telomerase and repair your critically short telomeres. You have our MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE!

Bacteria are simple and all their functions are limited to that one tiny cell. In contrast, Eukaryotes (those with nuclei) are complex and each cell has many specialized organelles that perform different functions compartmentalized by membranes.

Bacteria have a circular DNA that is small and easy to copy. Each bacterium is like a simple robot with a shopping list of things it can do. The robots can overrun but they can’t organize themselves into organs, let alone larger creatures.

In contrast, eukaryotic cells, which make up ALL plants and animals, have hugely convoluted, linear DNA, comprising many chromosomes protected by a nuclear membrane. Unlike a robot with the list, they are like a person bearing the complete library (thousands of genes for proteins and RNA) that the entire society (the organism) requires to function. Although that particular cell may only actively need a fraction of the genes, they carry the entire library.

As you know, Darwin’s evolutionary theory emphasized competitive reproductive advantage created by mutations in the creation of species. Ironically, the biggest evolutionary inflections involved two cooperative milestones known as “Symbiogenesis” (the creation of new life from combination of species and the fictional name of the biotech giant in my new graphic novel, Maximum Lifespan.)

Some scientists believe that Eukaryotes were created when DNA viruses with membranes were incorporated into primitive bacteria, forming the first nucleated cells.

Next, those primitive single cell eukaryotes, the Protozoa, incorporated bacteria into their cytoplasm to produce energy, such as mitochondria for animals, and chloroplasts for plants.

But there are three problems with carrying huge DNA libraries:

1. inefficiency
2. errors: 50 billion cell divisions daily, each requiring 6 billion base pairs to be copied, yielding 300 quintillion chances for transcription errors
3. non-circular DNA shortens each time it divides leading to REPLICATIVE SENESCENCE.

Click here to read Carolyn Abraham’s article and wonderful video explaining this process:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article965900.ece

So really, we exist only because long ago, little bacteria, the mitochondria, were given a nice place to live inside our cells. In exchange for that cozy hideaway, those bacteria generate our fuel. But like “Manuchrian Candidates,” they can also morph into assassins at the end of life, as we’ll describe in a future blog posting.

To learn how TA-65 is reversing chromosome deterioration for hundreds of pioneers and making us younger, go to http://www.rechargebiomedical.com/

The two oldest trees known were Bristlecone Pine trees in Nevada (Prometheus-5000 years old) and Prometheus in California (4800 years old)

a Bristlecone pine

Like all living things more evolved that bacteria, trees need to lengthen their telomeres with telomerase otherwise they’ll die from critically shortened chromosome tips, the telomeres. The difference between us and trees is that their telomeres are seven base pairs repeating (TTTAGGG) rather than the six that we use (TTAGGG.)

Bacteria all have circular DNA, which can be easily reproduced without shortening. In contrast, each cell from a EUKARYOTE (yeast, plants, and animals) houses the entire vast library of thousands of genes in its nucleus. The variable expression of those genes determines the form and function cells in their organs.

Evidence shows that trees with more telomerase activity live longer. With high telomerase activation, 2000- to 5000-year lifespans are possible. With moderate activity comes medium lifespans (400- to 500 years) and with little activation, the pine trees are short-lived (100- to 200-years.) †

You are fortunate to live in a time after the discovery of TA-65, a nutraceutical substance that can activate telomerase and thereby delay aging. Start your Patton Protocol now and you can experience rejuvenation so that someday, you can be “as old as the trees.”

† Flanary and Kletetschka published these results in Rejuvenation Research (2006 Spring; 9(1): 61-63

To learn more, go to:
Rechargebiomedical.com