Ames, a hearty and hard-working 76, is a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in California and scientific advisory board member of Juvenon.com, which markets an anti-aging supplement he developed. In 1998, Ames won the prestigious National Medal of Science, and in 2001 he was awarded Oregon State University's first $50,000 Linus Pauling Institute Prize for Health Research.

In this article, Ames talks about research aimed at extending healthy lifespans -- after, that is, people have done everything they can to take care of themselves.

"There's no sense trying to make people live longer if they're shortening their lifespan by smoking or eating lousy diets, and we're talking about a sizable percent of the country," Ames said.

What we've been doing is looking at rats that get a good diet -- much better than people do -- and trying to see what we can do to make the mitochondria in old rats look like more like young rats.

Based on some work by Italians and our own advances, we found that if you feed acetyl carnitine, which is a normal biochemical that helps bring fatty-acid fuel into the mitochondria, to old rats, their mitochondria look more like mitochondria of young rats. And the rats function better.

But the one thing we didn't solve is the old rats were still putting out more oxidants in their mitochondria than young rats. So we found another mitochondrial biochemical that solves that problem; it's called lipoic acid. It's an antioxidant for mitochondria that does some other good things.

Both of these compounds have been sold in health food stores for years. We found that with the combination, these old rats had more energy and their brains functioned better, their immune systems functioned better, so we published a series of papers on that.

The university (of California) took out a patent on this combination and I formed a company called Juvenon to sell these pills and use the money for doing clinical trials. All my stock is in a non-profit foundation so I get no money from the company and don't expect to.

We did the work in rats. We need to do it in people. I can't afford to do these huge expensive clinical trials, but the company can.

A lot of the degenerative diseases that come along with aging have been tracked to mitochondrial decay -- Parkinson's and nerve degeneration and diabetes and cancer. So I think when you tackle aging, you're going to tackle all these degenerative diseases that come along with it.

I think if you're an old rat, you can be enthusiastic. If you're an old person, we don't know all the answers yet. But there's lots of evidence these normal biochemicals are pretty safe -- they're not going to hurt you. We have every letter we've ever received from a customer in a database -- we have over 5,000 letters, so we always monitor what people say is good and what people say is bad.

Out of those 5,000 letters there are maybe 25 letters with some possible side effect, mostly rashes, so they're all really pretty minor. Plus, there's previous literature on the individual supplements. So I'm pretty confident that it's not going to hurt you.

A lot of people say they take it and they feel terrific. I take but I didn't feel any different, but I'm pretty peppy.

I'm quite optimistic. In terms of life expectancy, in the early 1930s, when they set up Social Security, people were retiring at 60. So they thought only a small percentage of the population would get to 65.

I don't want to retire. I'm having too much fun. The new New Yorker has a cartoon of the doctor telling the patient, "I see you're 57 years old. I'd like to bring that down a bit."

See Part One: Forever Young: Don't Help The Reaper

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