Sirtris Pharmaceuticals was, until recently, the golden child of antiaging research. Founded by Harvard biochemist David Sinclair and venture capitalist ­Christoph Westphal, it produced research suggesting something almost too good to be true: that a chemical in red wine could help you live a longer, healthier life. With its young, photogenic founders, the startup was a media darling, the subject of dozens of breathless magazine and newspaper articles. Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline was so impressed that it spent $720 million to buy Sirtris in 2008.

David Stipp's new book The Youth Pill traces this meteoritic rise and other events in the history of antiaging research, detailing how the science and personalities came together at just the right moment to create the successful company. In the mid to late 1990s, Stipp explains, what had been considered a fringe field began evolving into a focused attempt to uncover the biochemistry of aging. Scientists including Cynthia Kenyon at the University of California, San Francisco, and Leonard Guarente at MIT began to find genes linked to longevity in lower organisms such as yeast and worms, prompting a conceptual shift in our understanding of aging. Rather than inevitable decay, their work suggested, aging was a genetically controlled process--and thus one that could be manipulated.