Medicine: Adding Life to Years

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Two men who have done much to help their fellows live longer useful lives are physicians who now share the benefits. Boston's Dr. Elliott Proctor Joslin, 91, top authority on diabetes, still examines patients six days a week at the famed Joslin Clinic, gets a big extra dividend from continuing practice because no other man has studied diabetes, or the same patients, for so long. Retired in Florida after 57 years of practice, Dr. Charles Ward Crampton, 81, still keeps his hand in as a consultant to the Geriatric Institute at the University of Miami's School of Medicine and its associated Jackson Memorial Hospital. Says Dr. Crampton sagely: "If a man has sense enough to realize that in many different ways he is not what he was ten years ago, and acts accordingly, he is 'way ahead of the game. Know your limitations—adapt yourself to them—and enjoy your privileges to the utmost." For such an old man, Dr. Crampton has coined the word "eugeron"—which well describes him.

Immortal Amoeba. Gerontology has confirmed that some of age's limitations are imposed by nature herself. One-celled organisms such as the amoeba, because they reproduce by forever growing and dividing, are the only true immortals. Man, like all other multicelled organisms in both animal and vegetable kingdoms, is foredoomed to aging changes and ultimate death. But the rate and nature of these changes are far from constant. There are wide variations even among animals of a single species in a state of nature, and naturally they are vastly wider among human beings, living under infinitely more varied conditions, not only social but physical, economic, nutritional and medical. In this fact lies one of the gerontolo— gists' chief hopes: to discover why some men are biologically old at 60, while others like Stagg are still young at a far more advanced chronological age—then to apply this knowledge to slow down what now appears to be premature aging.

With the flight of time, some tissues become drier and infiltrated with fat. Blood vessels harden (arteriosclerosis). Muscles weaken. Bones grow brittle. Eyes and ears gradually fail, from a number of complex, minute structural changes. Ironically, the teeth—such as are left of them —become more resistant to decay in later life. On empirical evidence, Shakespeare anticipated microanatomy when he said that the oldster is "sans taste," for the average number of taste buds is 208 during the prime of life, but only 88 after the age of 75.

The layman's idea that because an automobile tire or piston wears out, so eventually must human organs, is only half true. In the youthful, still growing organism, cells divide rapidly, and all the components of the body (except nerve cells) are not only quickly added to, but also constantly replaced at the most intimate molecular level. This process does not stop with maturity; it goes on until death. But there is evidence that the rate of cell and tissue replacement slows down, until— perhaps at different times in dif ferent tissues — it is markedly less than the rate of natural death and destruction.

Then the organism, whether mouse (aged two) or man (aged 60 to 80, under favorable conditions), is going downhill.