Forever Young (washingtonpost.com) Bruce Ames of the University of California at Berkeley is a great man in bioscience. His scholarly articles are among the most cited of the 20th century. If you want to discover whether a substance will cause genetic mutation, what you want is the "Ames Test."



Nonetheless, he's got something he wants to sell you. It is an anti-aging "nutraceutical" that is for sale over the Internet. It's called Juvenon and consists of two antioxidants. He says he doesn't make any money on it; the proceeds all go to a foundation. Nonetheless, the claims he and others make for it are arresting. Memory and energy levels in lab animals increase significantly, he reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.



In his Berkeley living room with its marvelous view of the Golden Gate Bridge, over a glass of sea-dark wine, he loves to say Juvenon makes his aging lab rats "dance the macarena."



"This is great stuff. I'm beginning to remember the '60s," reports Stewart Brand, the onetime counterculture icon who created the Whole Earth Catalog.