Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is an excellent book, but it isn't all it promises to be. I am a non practicing MD, working in IT and a health book signed by Kurzweil was bound to attract my attention. The book follows three lines, called "Bridges" by the authors. Bridge One is what you can and should do today to extend your life expectancy in order to maximize your chances to benefit from Bridge two drugs and devices who, in turn, should allow you to wait for the big prize: Bridge Three technologies. Bridge one is definitely the best part of the book. The authors explain our current understanding of the mechanisms involved in atherosclerosis, cancer, inflammation, etc... and cover a tremendous amount of reliable, mostly peer reviewed, scientific litterature and large scale studies. This understanding is then used to derive the optimal diet and supplementation policy. The book doesn't break any new ground, but is remarkable in the way it synthetizes a large amount of information into understandable and directly usable recommendations. I was constantly telling myself: "yes, they are right, I know that! why am I not acting upon it?". True, there are some weak points: alkaline water comes to mind (check the many discussions on the net about this issue), stevia definitely hasn't been studied enough, it's hard to see how minerals would lose their properties in canned food (bioavailability??) but those blemishes are more than compensated by the careful research that went into other topics: for example, the authors rightly insist on inflammation's role but stop an inch short of recommending rofecoxib (Vioxx). They also shine on heart disease and myocardial infarction, clearly stating that heavy and expensive bypass surgery doesn't improve survival in many many cases. Sound prevention is the key and you'll get a truckload of coherent tips. Bridge two is less convincing, especially when it adresses drugs currently in development. These molecules may deliver what they promise, but there are many lessons to learn from the past... Do you remember those super antibiotics of the 60s and 70s? They were supposed to wipe out infectious disease. Do you remember those mood altering drugs. They should have defeated depression instead of becoming a health problem themselves? Do you remember how interferon would cure many cancers? We don't have any indication that those new drugs will perform better. True, they're interesting. True, we are pumping them out faster than in the past, but I am willing to bet a lot of them will have side effects, will reveal or trigger new mechanisms etc... Bridge Three is mostly nanotechnology based science fiction. It is, I believe, the weakest part of the book. Hyper effective respirocytes sound like a good deal: they would tremendously boost our athletic abilities... but you'd tear your tendons and muscles as soon as you'd attempt a double efficiency sprint. Multiplying the efficiency by a factor of 100 - these are figures taken from the book - would lead to severe heat dissipation problems. Yes, this probably could be solved by some kind of radiator or sail. Whether you'd be bored enough by eternal life to fall in love with someone looking like a spinosaurus remains to be seen. Likewise, getting rid of the heart and using self-propelled blood cells may sound attractive, but it ignores the role of the heartbeat in growing and strengthening blood vessels. In many cases, the authors miss the forest for the tree. These shortcomings aside, Fantastic Voyage is an incredibly useful resource. The voyage might not be the promised endless journey, I am willing to bet that Terry Grossman, Ray Kurzweil, you and I will die. But if we follow half of the book's suggestions, I am sure we'll be healthy corpses. The last virtue of this book is to be thought provoking. One can't help wondering what large scale, well planned, preventive medicine could achieve. Social security budgets would certainly be easier to balance. Also, one can't ignore the cost of the full program: very few people could pay for it today. Ray K. believes that the cost will go down in the near future and/or that computing and data processing power will soon make your own private human genome project a $20 issue. He may be right, but the pharmaceutical industry will definitely milk the fancy drugs it develops for a while, twenty years, possibly more (see the Hatch Waxman Act loopholes in the US, similar legislation elsewhere), add these twenty years to the already long phase 1 through 3 studies and tomorrow suddenly sounds a bit distant. Bridge 2 will not be cheap: if it actually works, it will have huge social implications. But that's beyond the scope of this review... If you are still there ;-) - thank you, buy the book.