Health
Never Say Die
When Houston octogenarian Miller Quarles offered $100,000 to anyone who could find a cure for aging, he was called a crackpot. Not anymore.
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Wright, who is 48, first began thinking about the conundrum of aging at the unusually young age of 19, when he was an undergraduate at Harvard. “Within the scientific community, aging research had been regarded with much skepticism,” he says. “Finally, over the past fifteen years, one could think of approaching the question of aging not as a quack but in terms of serious science. Now it is within the realm of possibility that within twenty years, we might be able to extend our own life spans.”
Wright, who went on to earn an M.D. and a Ph.D. at Stanford and worked as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris before arriving at Southwestern in 1978, is by turns sober when discussing his methodology and almost giddy with excitement when talking about the future applications of telomere theory. He has been known, on occasion, to serenade his graduate classes with a ditty he’s written to the tune of “By the Light of the Silvery Moon”—a love song, of sorts, to the telomere: “. . . If you keep it strong, and keep it long / You’ll feel real good inside / While you continue to divide!”
Ironically, the answer to the problem that now absorbs Wright—how to keep our cells’ telomeres long—may lie in the body’s archenemy: cancer. Cancer cells are immortal—they simply cannot stop dividing and proliferating. And while that is what makes them so savage, it is also what makes them so intriguing to life-extension researchers. The scientists’ challenge is how to manipulate our telomeres to make our cancer cells mortal and our healthy cells immortal, or at least longer-lasting. Wright and Shay have shown that an enzyme called telomerase may be the key, since lab studies have demonstrated that it is probably the ingredient that keeps the telomeres of cancer cells long. If further tests bear out their findings, Wright and Shay’s research will have a significant impact on science’s ability to both cure cancer and extend the human life span.
Although it’s unlikely that life-extension researchers will discover how to stall the aging process before Quarles’s turn-of-the-millennium deadline, he expectantly waits, trying to preserve himself as best he can in the meantime. He plays tennis, eats a low-fat diet, doesn’t drink or smoke, consumes a staggering array of vitamins, and leads “a very active sexual life,” he says with a self-satisfied grin. When he is not at his office in downtown Houston poring over oil company reports or running COADS, the Curing Old Age Disease Society, which he founded in 1990, he works out of his modest home near the Galleria, surrounded by souvenirs of his decades spent looking for oil. Every spare inch of his living room is covered with rocks—crystal-lined geodes, rippled agates, translucent quartz—that Quarles has cut with a diamond saw and carefully polished in his garage. On his breakfast table rests one of his most prized possessions, a piece of petrified amber that contains a tiny bee. Lifeless but lifelike, its papery wings are perfectly preserved, hovering for all eternity.
“Some people accuse me of wanting to play God,” he says. “All I know is that this is a wonderful place to be. I’ve seen an explosion of scientific advances in my lifetime, from antibiotics to television to landing on Mars, and I know that things will progress even faster in the next hundred years. It’s so exciting, and I want to be here to see it. What’s in heaven that’s not here?”
The earth has always yielded valuable information to Quarles the geophysicist (his ability to pinpoint where to drill has earned him a reputation among Houston oilmen for having the Midas touch), so perhaps it is understandable that he would expect our cells to provide answers for him as well. Although he is vague when asked about a host of moral and logistical problems that life extension would create, he argues that an older society would be a wiser society, greatly benefiting from elders’ experience. He can be persuasive when arguing that longer lives mean better lives—so persuasive, in fact, that most of the people in his life (his two ex-wives, his three girlfriends, his personal trainer, his physician, and his three daughters) belong to COADS. As the president of the four-hundred-member organization, Quarles speaks on the Rotary Club circuit, arguing that life-extension research is shockingly underfunded because it has been “unfairly” overshadowed by AIDS and cancer.
Quarles may betray a bit of self-interest in such pronouncements, but he is determined to get his message across no matter what the price. When the British producers of a BBC documentary on aging outfitted him in a white Stetson, a Western shirt, a turquoise-studded bolo tie, and blue jeans and filmed him prowling oil fields in a chauffeur-driven white stretch limousine so he would look more like a “real” Texas oilman, Quarles complied. (In reality the unostentatious millionaire would take a Luby’s LuAnn Platter over a porterhouse steak any day.) He has also matched his rhetoric with his dollars, currently holding 45,000 shares in Geron and offering an annual $10,000 prize to individuals who accelerate the development of an aging “cure” or heighten public awareness of the possibilities for life extension. And, in a last-ditch effort to tap the fountain of youth, he has tried to raise $1 billion—the amount he thinks it will take to make life extension a reality in his lifetime—by firing off fundraising letters to some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential people: Ross Perot, Bill Gates, Rush Limbaugh, Ted Turner, the sultan of Brunei, and all members of Congress over 55. He has yet to hear back an encouraging word.
So he patiently waits, polishing his rocks, juggling the affections of his girlfriends, and playing tennis, even on blazingly hot afternoons like this one, with one of them, Sandy, a vivacious, fit blonde in her early fifties. “Look at him!” Sandy says indignantly as she scurries after a tennis ball. “The man truly does not sweat, even in this heat.” Quarles watches her with a look of amusement. “It’s almost eerie,” she says. “I need to start taking those vitamins of his.”
During an hour of vicious serves and sneaky backhands, Quarles beats her effortlessly. Before heading back to the locker rooms, they stop—at Sandy’s insistence—for a glass of water. Then, as often happens with Quarles, the conversation turns to the possibilities that science may offer in the future.
“Just think, we could clone each other and play doubles,” he says wryly, zipping up the plastic cover of his tennis racket.
“And have two of you in this world?” Sandy says, bursting into laughter. “God help us all.”
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