ABOLITION OF OLD AGE

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3376, 2 March 1920, Page 2

ABOLITION OF OLD AGE

It is a testimony to the progress ' of the science of surgery, that it * has wrested from the sister science of medicine, the claim to the possession of the secret of the prolongation of human life. Medicine, { which often claimed to have found ' the key of the momentous secret in J its possession, has always failed to justify the high hopes raised in ' regard to the elixir of life, though several centuries have passed since s the claim to eternal youth was first! i put forward in its name. To-day it < is surgery that beckons us along the 11 path that promises to lead to the , 1 long-deferred abolition of old age. 1 "There are at this moment in France, two eld men to whom I • have restored youthful vigour, by • grafting upon them certain glands taken from an ape," states Dr Serge ; Voronoff, Director of the Physiological Laboratory of the College of France, in Paris. "The operation is simple. A local anaesthetic is used. One cuts open the skin, introduces I the tissue, and sews up the incision. Nature completes the process by assimilation." According to the discoverer of this great surgical secret, the operation was performed seven months ago on one of the two old men to whom he refers. In the other case it was performed three months ago, and it is too early to speak confidently of the iesults in this instance. The first case is a man of 66 years of age, a Parisian, prominent in public affairs, whost vitality had been exhausted by a life of hard work. He was a bowed, decrepit, weak man in senile decay. To-day the only signs of age are'his white hair and wrinkled skin. "He walks upright, with a firm step, and with brain clear and active, sleeps well, and has 'he appetite of a man in the prime of life," states Dr Voronoff. "He has become young again." With that unconscious peversity which men absorbed in scientific work so often display, Dr Voronoff l is confining his experiments to the male sex at present. He seems to be unaware that the abolition of the traces of time on the human face and figure is a matter that appeals more forcibly to women than to men. He thinks that it will be possible to restore the vanished youth of womanhood, but the sex will regret to learn that it promises to be a more difficult task than restoring the youth of old men. Dr Voronoff has met with much experimental success in restoring the youthful activities of rams and billy-goats, but the results of his preliminary experiments with ewes and nannies have been discouraging. For some years Dr Voronoff, who is a tall, robust man in the prime of life, and therefore able to take a purely professional view of the question of the renewal of youth, instead of being biased by personal hopes, has been carrying out his experiments in restoring the vitality of youth to elderly rams and billygoats, by grafting interstital glands taken from young and healthy animals of the same species. It was because of his success in these experiments that he brought up the subject at an important gathering of professional men in Paris, and expressed his conviction that youthful vigour could be restored to human beings by graft'ng on them interstital glands taken from monkeys. ! Better results would be obtained by j grafting on old men interstital : glands taken from young men, but the difficulty of inducing young men to sacrifice themselves in order to prolong the lives of their elders has not yet been overcome. I In the course of a press interview Dr Voronoff explained * his experiments. "I have studied this question of glands for many years, and in the case of the thyroid gland, which controls the brains, I grafted one from a monkey on to a boy of 14, who had none, and was an idiot. This was in 1914, and it proved such a success that in a few years the boy was in a normal condition, and in 1917 he was found fit for military service. So I decided on similar experiments with the interstital glands. I conducted these on rams and he-goats. I have 120 of these animals in the lands surrounding my laboratory at Neuilly. Here" is a photograph of one of thees animals taken before the experiment was made. He was a decrepit animal —fifteen years old, which corresponds to about 70 years in a human being. He could hardly stand, and was nearing his end. On 7th May, 1918, I grafted on him interstital glands, which I took from a healthy young he-goat. Two months after he was young and vigorous again. Subsequently I removed all the interstital glands I had grafted, and in a few weeks he became old again, and lost his vigour. On 7th May of this year I again grafted on his interstital glands, and within two months the animal was young once more." ' "In the human body we have glands which secret liquids controll- ' ing the leading organs," continued Dr Voronoff. "Some control the heart, others the brain —this is the j case of the tyroid gland or Adam's apple—while there are some which control the general strength and vigour of the baby. When you take these glands out of a living body, the organs they control stop working. If you take the thyroid gland out of a man, his brain will cease to work, and he will become an idiot. If you take out the interstital glands , that form part of one man's principal organs, his ordinary strength , will diminish, and he will become , more and more feeble. When a ] man grows old and feeble it is be- ( cause his interstital glands secrete , less of the fluid which controls vig- < our. So it occurred to me that the < grafting of new interstital glands on . the old bodv might restore vigour to j it." ! , Dr Voronoff's statements have \ aroused a great deal of interest, ■ j both inside and outside the profession to which he belongs, but natur- ( ally the general attitude of profes- , sional men and laymen is one of ( scepticism. Dr Josiah Oldfield, a -, Harley Street physician, who has ( specialised on the medical proper- , ties of various fruits, and is senior \ physician of the Lady Margaret ( Fruitarian Hospital at Bromley, ' t near London, when interviewed re- ; , garding Dr Voronoff's experiments, ( said that within certain limitations ', it would be possible to make an old , man young, by grafting into him t some of the organs of a juvenile j money. "Take an old crab apple j tree, and cut it down to the main j, stem," said Dr Oldfield, "then graft j on to this old stem scions from a!, young apple tree, and in a few years j. you will have a fine head of vigor- .

ous growth. Within limits, by constantly renewing with young scions, a tree may attain immortality. By putting aside all technical difficulties, which I think are insurmountable, it has to be remembered that old age in human beings begins through the alimentary canal. A man does not, like a tree, grow old in his extremities, while his stomach remains young. A tree becomes old because there is a gradual silting up of the sap fairway, beginning at the branch tips, while the main trunk is still young, in that its sap channels are open, and its roots alive. An old man has no young trunk to graft upon. He begins to age in his central organs of nutrition. With an old stomach and an old liver, I can see no rational ground for believing that the implanting of a young organ will have any real permanent effect upon his vitality, or can rejuvenate him. From observations of the greater vitality of lower forms of life, I consider that there is no little danger that the young monkey cells will dominate the old human cells, and that what would be eventually perpetuated, whenever the grafting succeeded, would be more monkey than man." The more orthodox members of the medical profession are still more sceptical. "In the human body we may graft cartilage with cartilage, bone with bone, and restore skin surfaces with grafts of skin," states a doctor, in writing in the "Observer" on Dr Voronoff's claims. "But nature draws the line at attempts with grafting tissues placed amid a heterogeneous environment. Implant a piece of bone in the middle of a muscle, and the fragment of bone becomes a foreign body. Similarly, put a piece of gland tissue anywhere inside the body and nature proceeds at once to remove it by absorption. The fact is now universally admitted by medical men, that of all the so-called ductless, or technically endocrine glands, the thyroid is pre-eminently the most important and at the same time the most interesting. First in. the form of a powder prepared from the dried thyroid gland of the sheep, it has been proved to possess a theropeutic value of proteant extent. The precise nature of its active principle is more or less a matter of conjecture. It is the organ whose secretion secures for us healthy nutrition by controlling the poison factors, of which the great chemical laboratory constituted by the organs employed in the preparation of our food for assimilation is productive. These poison factors are the by-products of the digestive ferments. It is the function of the thyroid to render them harmless, to neutralise them; a lazy thyroid enables these poisons to accumulate, and auto-intoxication, as it is called, follows, which is productive of disease. This subject, however, need not be pursued further than for the purpose of showing its relation to old age." "Having regard to the deleterious influence which auto-intoxication has upon our tissues, the theory of Metchnikoff that old age is the result of it stand out in the light of a sound proposition. From this point of view old age is not a natural, but a pathological, process. We wear out, and become old, because possibly more jr less throughout life a process in continuous action is poisoning our issues. The writer has long been >f the belief that a man is as old—lot as his arteries, as it is eommony supposed, but as his thyroid. The )ft-time mystery of a ripe old age is explained by the possession of a sound thyroid gland. Arterio-scler-)is—hard arteries—is the result of i degenerative process of which a aulty thyroid is the cause. Premaure old age can be similarly attriuited. Perennial youth is the signnanual of a thyroir which retains its igour. But it is not by any process »f grafting that we can add to the diysiological output of an organ so issential for our existence. If it vere possible to do so the inference hat we could cheat the advances of ige is unsound. By the time that it vas considered necessary to help uir thyroid—a problematical matter o determine—our arteries might aleady be scerosed. We should have o estimate how much thyroid help vas required, otherwise the graft night be in excess of our needs; hen we should die of hyper-thyroid-sm. There is only one way of helpng thyroid action, and that is by neans of the therapeutic way now n use. This treatment, however, •equires expert knowledge lest it )rove harmful."