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Clonaid Receives 'Anti-Aging' AwardBy Lindsey Tanner, Seattle Post March
14, 2003 A group that claims to have cloned the first human babies, and capsules that purport to combat old age, are recipients of tongue-in-cheek awards from three prominent aging experts. The "Silver Fleece" awards announced Thursday were created by S. Jay Olshansky, a scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, aging expert Leonard Hayflick of the University of California at San Francisco, and Bruce Carnes, who studies the biology of aging at the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago. The trio contend the anti-aging industry's claims aren't backed up by science. The selection of Clonaid, the group whose recent cloning claims have been questioned by many scientists, was a "no-brainer," Hayflick said. Clonaid claims on its Web site that in the eventual cloning of an adult, memories and personality will be transferred into "a brand new body," allowing people to "wake up after death." Also winning an award are capsules called Longevity, sold by Urban Nutrition, Inc. as an "anti-aging formula." The recipients "are people who are trying to exploit the fear of death that almost everyone has," Carnes said. But Thomas Kaenzig, Clonaid's vice president, said the criticism comes from "backward-oriented scientists" akin to those who "said 50 years ago that we will not be able to go to the moon." Matthew Oden, Urban Nutrition's marketing manager, said Longevity doesn't claim to reverse or stop aging, even though the company calls it an "anti-aging formula." That's "more just a buzz word," he said. The product is primarily promoted as helping rejuvenate appearance and the immune system, Oden said. The awards - bottles of corn syrup labeled "Snake Oil" - are modeled after the "Golden Fleece" awards created by former U.S. Sen. William Proxmire to highlight questionable government spending. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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