Still, from Ponce de Leon to Dorian Gray, humans have sought eternal youth—and affluent, youth-obsessed baby boomers are hardly about to turn their increasingly aching backs on the newest scientific advances. After all, this is what medicine and public health have really been doing for the last 100 years—extending the human life span through innovations such as vaccines and clean water. "We live much longer than our Babylonian ancestors, and I don’t hear anybody saying that’s unnatural," Caplan says. Thus, government and industry officials estimate that at least 30,000 largely affluent Americans have tried the newest age-fighting strategies: hormones, extreme dieting, red wine, cellular regeneration and a hodgepodge of old-fashioned advice with a scientific twist.

TOP VIEW If Ponce de Leon were alive, he would be visiting doctors, rather than searching for a magic fountain. Today affluent patients pay large sums for access to the latest treatments designed to increase longevity and even reverse the signs of aging. Despite their cost, however, many such techniques are controversial, if not illegal, and their side effects may not be fully understood.

Hormones
Around 40, people see a decrease in testosterone, estrogen, human growth hormone and IGF-1 (a hormone whose production is spurred by growth hormone) levels. Those changes can lead to problems ranging from memory loss and a lower sex drive, to muscle weakness and a higher risk of heart disease.

Audrey Kubie, the wife of a Manhattan finance executive, felt like she was going crazy four years ago. "I was forgetting lunch dates. I couldn’t come up with words." She joked that it was early-onset Alzheimer’s disease at age 53, but she didn’t really believe that. Then her neurologist, Gayatri Devi, told her the problem was a menopause-related decline in estrogen.

To reach such a diagnosis, Devi runs new patients through four hours of cognitive testing she calls a "stress test for the brain," homing in on their abstract thinking and visual, verbal, short-term and long-term memory. (Devi, who directs the independent clinic New York Memory and Healthy Aging Services, cannot talk about individuals like Kubie, but could describe her usual routine.) Patients may be asked to name as many words beginning with "C" as they can within one minute. Or they might study a list of words, then try to recall the list 15 minutes later. Their scores are compared with those of other people of the same gender, education level and age range. (A 55-year-old man with a master’s degree should come up with 12 "C" words; a woman with the same criteria, 15.) For the first year, the tests, weekly treatments and prescriptions typically cost about $22,000—in cash, because Devi, like most anti-aging practitioners, does not take insurance.

In addition to cognitive tests, anti-aging specialists typically take blood and urine samples (to check hormone levels) and ask patients to fill out questionnaires about their nutrition, exercise and lifestyle. Braverman reads brain waves to measure factors like voltage and the speed at which information is processed, which he says relate to the production of various hormones. In one test, he gauges how quickly people react to flashes of light and sound. For his part, Joseph Raffaele, a doctor who cofounded the anti-aging clinic PhysioAge Medical Group in Manhattan, looks for biomarkers, or physiological measurements, that could indicate symptoms of aging.

If doctors discern a hormone deficiency—and they almost always do around age 50—they prescribe replacements: for women, specially formulated estrogen, perhaps made from yams or soy. Both genders will probably get testosterone. And, anywhere from 25 to 60 percent of the time, physicians will prescribe human growth hormone.

This is where things get sticky. The first controversy is whether growth hormones really work. Certainly, there are plenty of success stories like Vidor’s. And it’s generally accepted that HGH can build muscle mass and bone density. Physician Mark L. Gordon of Los Angeles, who treats Vidor, along with an A-list of executives and celebrities, rattles off a long roster of claimed benefits from the hormone: "Mental abilities will increase, physical stamina increases, sexual function increases, scars disappear, the hair grows and it starts turning from gray to black. Growth hormone shuts off fat buildup and enhances fat drop-off." Testosterone, he adds, can help smooth out wrinkles on women’s faces.

For 52-year-old Kevin Hart, former chief executive of SunAmerica Financial Network, a regimen of daily HGH treatments, weekly testosterone, multivitamins and nutrients was the only thing that stopped angry outbursts and a deep depression that set in six years ago after he sold his company. With the proceeds from the sale of his stock, "I had newfound wealth, independence, freedom," he says. Yet, instead of being excited, "I went from the happiest guy in the world to this dark, depressed personality. If a mother was taking too long to get her kids out of the car seat when she was dropping them off at school, that would have me out of the car or flipping her off the bird." Gordon told Hart that his hormone levels had probably been dropping for years, but the adrenaline rush of running his company masked it. Once he started taking the hormone supplements, he got back in balance.

The problem is that no standard, large, long-term, randomized human trials have been done on HGH, so it is impossible to know how much of Vidor’s and Hart’s gains are because of it, the other hormones they take, their vitamins and supplements or even the power of hope. Meanwhile, the hormones can have serious side effects. Commercial estrogen increases the risk of heart attacks in older women and breast cancer for all ages. The FDA has approved growth hormone only for the rare instances in which people produce little or none of it naturally, and a 1990 law specifically forbids any other use. That’s a tougher stance than the regulators usually take on unapproved drug use because of congressional concerns about its misuse as a steroid/growth enhancer by body builders, teenagers and other at-risk groups, an FDA spokesperson says. Moreover, trials with animals and a small number of people have shown that HGH can lead to diabetes, hypertension, hardening of the arteries, abnormal bone growth, swelling in the legs and feet, aching joints and possibly even an increased risk of cancer.

Not surprisingly, anti-aging physicians question the concern about the treatments they prescribe. Raffaele says so far he has not received any complaints from the FDA, and Gordon has begun switching his patients off the standard, daily HGH injection to an oral spray that, he says, avoids the legal controversy. Advocates also downplay the risks, asserting that the dosages in the HGH trials were far higher than they prescribe and that the "bioidentical" estrogen they use is different from the more dangerous commercial variety, which is made of horse urine.

Vidor and Hart say they are not worried about the warnings. "There are much more horrific things out there," Vidor says. "I’d rather take the chance that this would keep me healthy, than be 80 years old and suffer because I didn’t do this." Hart claims that the controversy over HGH is dying down. Nevertheless, he has devised his own test: "I purposely take myself off the treatments every year for three months, because I want to continue to make sure I need it." The self-test always confirms that he does.

Diet and Wine
Scientists have known for years that when some animals eat about one-third fewer calories than normal, they live significantly longer. There are different theories as to how this works exactly, but the basic idea is that the body focuses its limited energy on the most urgent survival needs, including slowing down the degenerative processes of aging. It’s also been long assumed that the food-deprivation strategy—known as calorie restriction, or CR—should work in humans. More recently, researchers discovered that resveratrol, a substance found in red wine, seems to produce the same effects as CR, possibly by spurring production of a key protein.

Paul Glenn, the 76-year-old founder of the Cycad Group, a venture capital firm near Santa Barbara, has concocted an eclectic meal plan based on years of reading and talking to experts. He eats one "substantial" meal a day, with a diet heavy in bran cereals, lean meat and fish, mixed nuts and skim milk. He works with a trainer three times a week for 30 minutes, then spends another half hour per day swimming and on exercise machines. In addition, he takes about 100 vitamins, supplements and fish oil. But Glenn doesn’t count calories, and he insists that he doesn’t feel deprived. "I’m deliberately indulging in Trader Joe’s 75 percent bittersweet chocolate," he says. "A couple of squares are enough to kill an appetite, and that’s what I want to do, kill my appetite." The result: At 5-foot-10, Glenn is a trim 152 pounds. "I want to stay alive and be healthy longer. Since I don’t have a belief in the hereafter, what you see is what you get," Glenn says.

To supplement his personal efforts, Glenn created a foundation dedicated to anti-aging research in 1965, with an annual budget of around $2 million. (Most recently, the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research gave $5 million to doctor David Sinclair, a cofounder of Sirtris and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, for his work on resveratrol.) So far, he concedes, none of the donations have actually produced much in the way of results, but he’s not discouraged. "We keep meeting more bright people, we keep unfolding more and more layers of complexity." The one disappointment he does admit to: "I will not benefit myself perhaps nearly as much as younger generations."

Peter Thiel has not personally tried any of these tactics, other than following a standard nutritional diet and taking vitamins and supplements. Instead, Thiel, a cofounder of the online payment company PayPal, who now runs venture capital firm Clarium Capital Management and a hedge fund, hopes to find more ways to stave off old age. He has pledged $500,000 over three years toward research into stem cells, DNA, proteins, immunology and other areas. "We’re living in a culture where people are largely in denial about death," he says. "They don’t think they’re going to get old." He has chosen to spread his investment around several research areas, Thiel adds, because, "we really don’t know what’s going to work." Because he’s only 39, there’s a good chance he’ll be around to enjoy the fruits of his contributions. "In 50 years," he predicts, "we could be living in a world where very large numbers of people are living to 100 or more."

Illustration by Matt Mahurin.

Fran Hawthorne is author of Inside the FDA: The Business and Politics Behind the Drugs We Take and the Food We Eat.

Additional Information
Searching for a Magic Pill
Mom Was Right