Mavericks of Medicine: Conversations on the Frontiers of Medical Research, by David Jay Brown, Smart Publications, 354 pages.

This is a bedside book. But don’t buy it if you have a problem with falling asleep, because once you taste the pages you imbibe high octane.

In 354 pages crammed with mind-opening interviews, David Jay Brown achieves escape velocity beyond our mundane medical world. His fellow travellers on the 21st-century odyssey may be recognized by some of us, but ignored by most.

Too bad, because they are inventing the future.

Take, for example, Dr. Aubrey de Grey(PhD), a self-taught biogerontologist, who urges that we drink from the Fountain of Youth by living to 150 years through his strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. No, it isn’t hokum. They are concepts that de Grey, a computer scientist, developed by listening to his geneticist wife, Dr. Adelaide Carpenter(PhD; a former professor at the University of California at San Diego), talk about her discipline. His theory involves the loss of cells we need, the accumulation of cells we don’t need and how we can handle the “junk” we accumulate with our years.

Dr. de Grey’s work is a segue from the Hayflick Limit, as proposed by the eponymous microbiologist Dr. Leonard Hayflick(PhD), who discovered that cultured human cells can divide only a finite number of times. In the interview involving Dr. Hayflick, there is also a discussion of his role in the production of the oral polio vaccine.

Many of the 22 cutting edge physicians and scientists profiled in the book have charted longevity as their goal and are subsuming that current science will reduce mortality from the major killers of cardiovascular, cancer or diabetes in the near future. But Brown doesn’t hesitate to include others such as Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Kary Mullis(PhD)or Dr. Bernie Siegel. These pioneers who have dared to challenge the “Neophobists,” relics of the anti-Semmelweis crowd, have staked other end points that make life fuller, not just longer.

It’s a disturbing book that dares the reader to think outside the jacket about the future of medicine.

Charles Godfrey works in rehabilitation medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and is writing a history of Sunnybrook Hospital.