Aggregated News
I’m in a cramped examination room at a clinic in Panama City. The lights are dim, and calming classical music plays from built-in speakers. A nurse has injected a dose of stem cells into Kenneth Scott through an IV in his arm; earlier, those same stem cells had been extracted from Scott’s body so they could be “activated.” Now Scott leans his head back as a laser passes back and forth over his neck. “Tiempo,” the nurse says, sitting next to him. A doctor switches the focus of the laser in his hand to the right side of Scott’s head, telling me that the beam guides the stem cells to where they’re “needed most.” Scott hopes this shuttling around of his stem cells, a procedure that costs patients $10,000, will rejuvenate his 82-year-old body and ward off the effects of aging.
Scott is a slight man, of short stature, and boasts a generous shock of white hair. That morning, when I had arrived at the clinic, he greeted me in an airy button-down shirt, shorts, and sandals, bouncing with childlike...