By Emily Ford
eford@salisburypost.com
KANNAPOLIS ó Even though she got the name wrong, Oprah Winfrey seemed impressed with the N.C. Research Campus when video from the biotech hub aired on her TV show Tuesday.
Calling it the “North Carolina Research Center,” Winfrey said the project is founder David Murdock’s “gift to humanity.”
The show was about extreme life extension, or extending human life far beyond 100 years, and featured taped segments on Murdock and the Research Campus. The 85-year-old billionaire owner of Dole Food Co. claims he will live to be 125.
He’s developing the $1.5 billion complex in downtown Kannapolis to help people live longer, healthier lives.
“He’s dedicated his life to doing exactly what we’ve talked about today,” Winfrey said.
Winfrey did not come to Kannapolis but sent a production team earlier this month. A few local researchers appeared in video that aired Tuesday, but the real star was world-class equipment in the Core Laboratory, the centerpiece of the Research Campus.
Dr. Steven Zeisel, director of the UNC Nutrition Research Institute in Kannapolis, explained on camera how the instruments will help scientists advance the study of health and nutrition.
Cameras filmed the celebrity occupants of the Core Lab, including one of the world’s first actively-shielded 950 megahertz nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers.
Winfrey called it “the only one of its kind on the planet,” but there are at least two others.
Video showed Winfrey visiting Murdock at his 2,200-acre estate in California, where he greeted her on his bicycle and called out, “Hi sexy.”
She narrated a short biography about Murdock, telling the rags-to-riches story of the ninth-grade dropout who slept on a park bench and went five days without eating to the billionaire four times over who once owned 100 companies.
Murdock made his fortune in real estate.
He became convinced that nutrition and exercise can extend life after his wife died of cancer in 1985. He told Winfrey he traveled the world trying to save her life and later realized they had not been eating properly.
“What I wanted to do is find a cure for cancer,” he said.
Scientists in Kannapolis are trying to better understand cancer and other diseases like diabetes.
The program showed Murdock doing pushups and lifting weights, as well as using a juicer in his kitchen.
He told Winfrey he takes no medication.
“No Viagra?” she asked.
He drove her to Costco, where they loaded a grocery cart with fruits and vegetables. Then Murdock realized he had forgotten his wallet.
Winfrey also had no money and told the studio audience that a producer paid the bill.
Winfrey and Murdock are friends, and Murdock has talked about collaborating with her.
The show featured other ways to extend human life, including a regenerative medicine program at Wake Forest University that grows human organs and a machine called a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.