Science: The Infant Science of Old Age

And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;

And thereby hangs a tale.

Even today scientists know very little more than Shakespeare knew 341 years ago about how the rotting goes on. So last week, biological chemists at the Atlantic City meeting of the American Chemical Society took stock of man’s knowledge of aging and agreed it was high time scientists learned more.

The death rate is lowest for children at the age of ten and rises thereafter with age. If it did not increase, the national death rate would be only one-tenth as great as it is now. Said Pathologist Henry Swain Simms of Columbia: If the death rate remained at its lowest (one in 800 at the age of ten) man’s life expectancy could be 550 years. Aging, the biochemists think, is essentially a chemical process and can probably be influenced if scientists learn enough about it. One way to learn more, Professor Simms suggested, is to apply known causes of death to healthy animals of various known ages and see what happens. In his experiments, he bled to death rats of all ages, found that an 825-day rat was 16 times more likely to die of a given amount of hemorrhage than a 100-day rat. Facts added by William Hall Lewis Jr. of Cornell University Medical College, Manhattan:

> Kidney function “shows slight changes before 65 years of age, accelerated changes thereafter.”

“Certain chemical elements of the blood, such as calcium and the lipids [fats], show no appreciable change with age, in contrast to the known alteration of the chemical content of the tissues, especially the arteries.” One way to forestall aging, some chemists suspect, is a judicious diet. Dr. Henry Clapp Sherman of Columbia found that when rats were given increased amounts of either calcium or riboflavin (vitamin 62) or vitamin A, senility was deferred and they lived longer.

Biggest news about aging is what scientists do not know. Examples:

> Nobody knows in detail what effect nutrition has on life span.

> Nobody knows for sure whether hardening of the arteries is connected with the aging process. Some children have some form of it, usually after an infection.

> Nobody knows how cells in an aged body differ from cells in a young one, nor can they detect much change in body fluids. “A ten-year-old child, looking at your face,” confesses Professor Simms, “can tell more about how old you are than the best experts can tell from laboratory study of body tissues.”

> Nobody completely understands why old bones are slow to heal.

> Nobody knows why some muscles show miscroscopic changes, perhaps resulting from aging, while others do not. “You can’t tell a spring chicken from an old fowl by examination of muscle tissue.” A better way is to cook the bird and carve it.

> Nobody is absolutely sure why old hair becomes grey,* old hands mottled, old faces sallow.

^ Nobody knows why anything dies, “We say a person died of cancer, but we don’t know why the cancer killed him. We don’t know the mechanics of death.”

First problem facing the gerontologists is to get funds for research. Sadly they note that when two boys out West died of plague (TIME, Sept. 8), Surgeon General Thomas Parran called a conference which urged the Government to spend $1,800,000 on plague fighting. And though only 1,000 people die of infantile paralysis each year, so much money is raised to combat it that the chief problem is devising ways to spend it. But no one had any idea where to find anything like $2,000,000 a year needed to study aging, the greatest enemy of man’s health.

* However, several biochemists last week reported that prematurely grey hair can be warded off and even darkened again by para-amino-benzoic acid, a member of the vitamin B complex.