Courtesy: Medical Miracles, from Readers Digest 1981.
November.
From the frontiers of science and the far horizons of
personal courage, these stories of medical triumphs and miracles will reaffirm
your faith in the awesome powers of the human spirit. Dramatic victories and
human triumphs.
Selected and edited by the editors of Readers Digest
The Old Testament set the length of man’s natural life-span
at threescore years and ten, of fourscore “by reason of strength.” Some 3000 years later, Elizabethan scholar
Francis Bacon saw no reason to update the figure. “From the time of Moses to these our days the
term of man’s life hath stood about fourscore years of age.”
Neither Bacon nor the Old Testament sages confused that
80-years “term” with life expectancy. A
lucky few might live 70 to 80 years if they survived the army of diseases that
preyed on infancy, youth and middle life.
But life expectancy—the time a person would live if he had average
luck—was a different matter. In the
Bonze and Iron stages, encompassing Old Testament times, it was about 18
years. And in Bacon’s time it was below
35.
Today, medical advances have more than doubled life
expectancy in the world’s wealthier nations.
In this century alone (almost entirely through the eradication of
diseases of the young) more than 20 years have been added to the average
American’s life—now about 74 years for women and 70 for men. Nevertheless, most people feel that life span
is a different matter—fixed, constant, forever beyond human tampering and
medical intervention.
I am convicted they are wrong. New developments in gerontology, the science
of aging, suggest that one day soon we will be able to push our natural span
beyond the limits so long considered immutable.
In 1973 I conducted Senate hearings at which scientists
discussed the possibility of people enjoying health and mental vitality beyond
the age of 100. When the hearings were
over and Congress has set up a National Institute of Aging within the National
Institutes of Health, I conducted to keep in touch with developments in the
field. Regularly, I invite groups of
gerontologists and biomedical experts to informal sessions in my Capitol
office.
What I learn from these encounters is mind-blogging. Researchers across the nation are probing
ever deeper into the mysterious biological activity—breakdown and mutation in
cells and molecules—that we call the aging process. They have already convinced a majority of
gerontologists that we will be able to restructure the human aging process to
our own benefit. The question is not
whether we will be able to control aging but when.
In the United States, medical science has already pushed
life expectancy very close to life-span figures by destroying disease. But the limits are not far ahead. National life expectancy, which jumped 17
years between 1900 and 1950, inched up a mere three in the next quarter century. The last appreciable gains we can expect will
come when cancer and cardiovascular disease, today’s deadliest killers, are
finally tamed.
Yet, even in a world liberated from cancer, heart attack and
stroke, old people will continue to die (even if a little later) from the
cumulative physical and mental collapse we call old age. And what if killer diseases are eliminated
but no remedy is found for the degenerative processes of old age. We could be faced with a mushrooming
population of dependent old people.
The prospect of life prolonged—but not enhanced—by dragging
out its darkest years is chilling.
Fortunately, the aim of gerontologists is not mere prolongation of life;
it is the prolongation of life’s most productive, satisfying years. “Old age itself will not be longer, only
later,” says British gerontologist Alex Comfort, “from 80 to 90, say, instead
of 70 to 80.” Or, as science writer
Albert Rosenfield defined it, gerontology’s basic goal “is to keep people fully
functional and in possession of all their faculties until very end.” If gerontologists can pinpoint whatever it is
that triggers and regulated its speed, the ability to extent human life and its
good years will be in their grasp.
How close are they to this goal? Scientists already posses the ability to
extent life—and have done so repeatedly in experiments on laboratory
animals. But they are not certain just
how the experiments worked. Although
they have manipulated the aging process, they have so far failed to define it.
But theories of aging are beginning to coverage in the
notion that every living creature within it a biological “clock” that
genetically programs the rate at which the organism will age. As this clock ticks on, cells mysteriously
loose their immunity to invasion and disease, their vitality ebbs, and eventually—along
with the rest of the organism—they die.
Some researchers have suggested that the clock of aging is
located in genetic material housed in the nucleus of every cell. Others believe it may operate through the
release of s-called death hormones” that remorselessly wear down the body’s
maintenance-and-repair cells. It may
have multiple locations) cellular nuclei), or it may operate from a master
control center such as the hormone-producing pituitary gland. Though the clock’s location remains elusive,
researchers claim its existence is confirmed every time their experiments
successfully manipulate the aging rate in animal cells.
Denham Harman, University of Hebraska biochemist, believes
aging result from wear and tear inflicted by “free radicals,” broken-off
cellular debris that clusters on cells, clogging of “rusting” them and
ultimately putting them our of action.
Herman’s experiment indicated that diet and antioxidant compounds such
as vitamin E would offset free-radical damage.
In the rests he administered, the lives of laboratory rats were
considerably lengthened.
Another supporter of the free-radical theory, Richard
Hochschild of the University of California at Irvine, reports a series of
experiments with mice, age 70 in human terms, were given substances that help
to repair the membranes after free-radical damage. The mice lived an average of 49 percent
beyond their natural life spans.
Believers in hormone-triggered aging point to laboratory
successes of their own. Removing or
retarding the action of certain glands has altered the aging process in test
animals—often dramatically—. For
instance, removing the fish’s adrenal gland has eliminated the rapid
spawn-age-and-die cycle in Pacific salmon.
Gerontologist W. Donner Denkla removed the pituitary glands from the
brains of aged rats, then administered thyroxin and other vital hormones. Close monitoring showed that a variety of the
rats’ body functions had returned to “juvenile competence.” Their coats were again thick and glossy,
their movements quick and energetic. The
rats showed no signs of age or debility until almost at the point of death.
No doubt the methods to these biomedical pioneers will one
day seem absurdly primitive. But even
these first steps have yielded effective techniques and drugs, already in
limited use on humans in the treatment of advanced senility and otherwise
incurable genetic disorders.
As methods are refined and targets narrowed, gerontologists
may be able to reset man’s biological clock with precision to stretch out the
young and middle years and minimize the period of decline leading to
death. We are on the brink of a major
leap forward in medical science—nothing less than a profound redefinition of
human life.
How soon? An
optimistic few believe we may hold the keys of life-span extension before the
end of the century. Others speculate
that even without mastering all the secrets of aging we will learn enough to
achieve major clinical breakthroughs in the next few decades (much as we
practiced vaccination long before we understood the hows and whys of
immunization). Onesuch breakthrough
would be elimination of the remorselessly slow degenerative aliments of old
age; people would live free of illness or infirmity right up to the end of
their span and then, with little advance warning, simply die.
Luck as well as individual and collective brilliance will
determine whether or not our children or we will inherit the life-span
revolution. The rate of progress also
hinges on availability of funds and the scope of the programs we launch. “The control of the human rate of aging is
going to happen,” says Alex Comfort.
“How soon it will happen depends upon the social pressure for research
and the wisdom with which that research is applied.”
All too many promising leads and experiments are shelved for
want of funds or public interest. One
reason is simply the credibility gap surrounding the notion of an increased
life span. Another is the reluctance of
institutions to nurture ideas that challenge established assumptions or that
fail to guarantee a return on investment.
In 1979 the federal government spent nearly $900 million in
cancer research and almost $500 million in heart-and lung disease
research. Not everyone, fortunately,
suffers from these diseases. But
aging—the one affliction that affects all of us—will get about $37 million for
federally sponsored research. Much of
that will go for social, psychological and statistical studies of the
elderly. Only a portion will finance
biological studies of the aging process—and just the smallest fraction of that
will finance research aimed at extending life span.
Are we dragging our feet because we are afraid? Could we be thinking of the strain that even
a ten-years increase in life span would put on our overburdened social welfare
and health services? We should think
again. When our productive years fill
out most of our life span, the social and economic dependence of age will be
diminished problem. With age freed of
its present stigma and infirmity, society might at last profit from the wisdom
and experience we now thoughtlessly throw away.
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