Aging: Disease or Business Opportunity?

FOR four days last December, America’s pleasure dome in the desert, Las Vegas, played host to a convention dedicated to the proposition that growing old is “a treatable medical condition.”
Booths advertising vitamins, hormones and pharmaceutical drugs, along with an array of oxygenating or detoxifying paraphernalia, filled the exhibition hall of the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. Lectures and workshops were offered on a bevy of “wellness” topics, including the alluring idea that human growth hormone could be deployed to beat back old age.
Several thousand attendees, mostly physicians, crowded the Venetian, a testament to what analysts say is now an industry that snares $50 billion a year in sales by catering to Americans’ obsession with looking and feeling younger. This spring, though, the anti-aging industry has come under a harsher light. The authorities have indicted 20 people, including four doctors, in three states as part of an investigation into what federal and state prosecutors describe as a booming and illegal trade: Internet trafficking in human growth hormone and anabolic steroids.