Life-extension pioneer dies quietly in Tonopah at unremarkable age
Durk Pearson was a proto biohacker, paving the way for people like Bryan Johnson and Dave Asprey
By Murray Carpenter
In recent years, Durk Pearson looked like a lot of septuagenarian retirees from California--casually dressed, longish white hair, occasionally griping to the county commissioners in Tonopah, Nevada, where he was living out his dotage and owned some rental houses.
But there was a time when he promised more for the aging American, much more.
In the early 1980s, Pearson and his partner Sandy Shaw cut a striking pair. Their 850-page tome, Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach, topped best-seller lists and sold more than a million copies. On the cover, it featured a breathless blurb from a New York Times review: "It's the fountain of youth."
Merv Griffin had them on his TV show more than 30 times to talk about their "life extension therapy” to allow people to live longer, more productive lives.
They flexed their muscles and hyped supplements to improve your sex drive and prolong orgasms, fight depression and male pattern baldness, improve memory and sleep, and reduce cancer risk. They gobbled vitamins and supplements by the handful, especially antioxidants, dozens a day.
They were proto-biohackers.
They paved the way for charismatic life-extension proponents like Bryan Johnson and Dave Asprey who are more popular than ever. Johnson uses the simple motto “don’t die,” and Asprey is the bulletproof coffee guy, who now claims we can live to 180. But the path they are on–spurious health claims, huge book deals, fawning acolytes–was well paved 40 years ago by Pearson and Shaw.
Now, their 1980s TV appearances seem like parody. Their garb looks somewhere between New Age Guru and This is Spinal Tap.
And their claims sound silly ("my hairline has moved forward," Pearson told TV host Tom Snyder, while rocking a combover).
Grant them their commercial wisdom. Few authors have sold as many books, and they also consulted on Hollywood films like Brainstorm, and wrote the screenplay for Clint Eastwood's Dead Pool.
But their primary claim to fame was that their life extension strategies could slow or reverse the aging process. To their credit, they didn’t make specific predictions in their book on their own longevity. “…while we expect to live well beyond the normal three score and ten, we can’t really predict how long we’ll live” they wrote. “Ask us again in 100 years!”
Still, it’s fair to ask how it worked for them, because they frequently cited their own health and vigor as evidence of life extension therapy’s efficacy.
From the sample size of two, they weren’t all that successful.
Shaw died several years ago, in her late 70s. Pearson died in October at age 81. Although their life extension claims garnered a lot of hype, it appears that few noticed their deaths. There’s one remembrance by Pearson’s longtime attorney, and another from an old friend.
Their life spans, in the end, were entirely unremarkable.