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Lifespan has as a central purpose to achieve in our time the means to arrest the aging process of the human body that starts at birth and continues throughout our lives. It is this aging that invariably leads to organically Terry aeration and failure and ultimately death our science and technology at Leicester equal to the task of conquering aging. We believe that it is high time our civilization seriously undertakes the job if we launch a major scientific campaign now with great advances can be made in our lifetime that will extend our vigorous life and assure much healthier longer lives for our children and their progeny. We propose to evaluate the medical claims of various current anti aging and rejuvenation treatments throughout the world and to establish the aging treatment centers for those therapies that have been demonstrated as valid medical treatments. Speaker as Dr burnouts trailer gerontologist with the National Institute of Health who subject is a question can the rate of aging be changed Dr Strangelove. I I feel very. Happy and grateful to be able to be here to speak with you this evening because I feel that the enterprise which Dr Schloss and his associates have begun here can be a most important one in helping us to understand and to do what is possible as far as the ageing process is concerned. As you may know the ancient the medieval all chemists had three. Major objectives in mind. The first of these was to transmute baser elements in the gold. This is a job which the Atomic Energy Commission has done the second was to leave the earth and go to to the moon or to one of the planets and this. I suspect will do in the next few years and the third was to conquer the question of aging. That is to live indefinitely now. It's not at all certain at the present time to what extent it will be possible to change the the rate of aging and the reason that one cannot say with any kind of certainty what one can do in this line is because it takes a rather foolish man to take a stand on something that he doesn't understand even in its basic outlines. But in answer to the question which. Has been posed han the rate of aging be changed I would like to read you very briefly. Mainly because it's in a more succinct way than my meandering. Speech would give to you I'd like to read you a summary of what I'm going to say and then concentrate on a few details which I think are particularly exciting and challenging and the rate of aging be changed two kinds of answers can be given to this question in the most general sense any biochemical biological process is susceptible to influence by environmental factors and there is no reason our priori to suppose that aging is an exception to this rule for example in cold blooded animals there is evidence dating back to the studies of living Northrup in one nine hundred twelve that such animals age rapidly at high temperatures and of course slowly at low environmental temperatures. That dietary restriction of rats experimental animals causes of fifty percent or more increase in lifespan was shown by Professor Mackay several decades ago X. radiation exposure causes certain changes which are similar to a sort of accelerated aging and these three are examples in which the apparent rate of aging as measured by the best indices we have namely the ability to stay alive for a longer period of time than than the animals which are the controls Clearly one can either speed up or or slow down the the rate at which individuals die. Whether in all these cases one is actually affecting the aging process per se or which portion of it one is affecting one cannot as yet. An accurate prediction of the extent to which the life span of Man will be capable of alteration depends upon the development of a fundamental understanding of how we age that is what is the intimate you are so you are and super cellular nature of the changes which occur in man and in his relatives the primates and other vertebrates. As they move through time changes which decrease the ability to stay alive to methods of changing the rate of aging are apparent Firstly we can deliberately continue those evolutionary changes which of given the human race to race its advantage over all of its close relatives among primates and length of life when one says Is it possible to breed a longer lived race the answer must obviously be yes with at least been done once in the case of of our movement from our own ancestry. Genetic selection that is selective breeding is therefore the first method not to satisfactory for those of us now live by which man's lifespan can be increased or if we wish decreased the second method is to determine the causes of aging and to interfere with those by appropriate means there is little doubt among those who are most active in research in this field that an understanding of the biology of aging is within the reach of this generation provided that a sufficient priority in terms of good brains sound financing adequate facilities and administrative support is given to this undertaking. I'm not saying that we will be able to conquer aging but I'm quite sure that we can understand the biological basis of it if we put enough people to work at it and from that understanding I would be highly surprised as from any other basic scientific endeavor if we did not derive some information about how to modify or to control it that's a confidence which is based on an inductive observation of how science has gone in the past when we understand something then we can usually do something about it. Aging researches at present accelerating at a striking rate but this is not to say that we are yet in a position to say what that process is we are in a position to list the various possibilities we have tested that is we and other scientists have tested and discarded some of these possibilities and the general assignment of responsibility to each of the various types of causes could well be achieved within this decade when the problem is understood in outline a filling in of details on specific mechanism would logically follow and at that time the opportunities for changing the rate of ageing of the human race will be more in the realm of science fact than of science fiction those who wish to promote the arrival of that day I hope you listen carefully would do well to avoid false promises and extravagant claims the encouragement of support awareness of the magnitude of the challenge in the difficulties and also of the opportunity and a certain impatience are the most valuable contributions which you can make. Now. I'd like to tell you. Very briefly. About some of the obvious effects of aging some that you know intuitively. And then to discuss two or three of the major hypotheses which have been occupying us. I'd like to say that if you if you study the problem of age in which is the study of those changes in each of us which decreases our ability to stay alive they fall into certain logical categories and these categories can be broken down into specific I posses which are consistent with various biological concepts or with biochemical ideas it's possible for example that aging is primarily a nuclear phenomenon that is that there is damage of genetic material in the nucleus of cells which sit around for twenty thirty forty fifty years without dividing it's possible that aging is a consequence of differentiation differentiation is a process whereby during embryo all Andrea logical development and individual chooses or certain cells are determined to become one kind of functioning entity and other cells are determined to form another kind that is we have the same genetic information in the cells of our brain as we do on our liver cells or in the cells of our toenails. But we select from the library of information in different different groups of information in order to form the specific products which characterize brain cells or muscle or skin or toenails. And this means that we restrict instead of reading everything which is in the library we throw in certain cell types certain books away and we read certain others now we don't know really what the nature of this of the mechanism controlling differentiation is this is one of the unsolved puzzles of biology we know that when a message is is formed on the template of the. Genetic material the deaths oxy rive and the plague acid that it has a certain chemical resemblance complementary resemblance to the D.N.A. We don't know however how very how one messenger is chosen over another. Now whatever this mechanism is however it's reasonably precise that is except in certain unusual situations you hardly ever get hair produced in the liver and vice versa so that it's an accurate machine that's operating here and the question is how does it work. One possibility which Dr Hendley in our laboratory is is studying is that the words for different proteins the structural elements of different cells are written with different in with different letters in in this code there are sixty four code words each three letter words. That are in the genetic code and there are only twenty things that have to be written with those so that there are there are on the average three three words for each each of the amino acids which go into the final product now if differentiation for example involved the selective use of one set of words one word in one cell type for each amino acid and a different group of words for the same amino acids in another cell type. This one could could be the way that one reads out the message in in the D.N.A. suppose however that in the process of activating the machinery which the lect one kind of message over another we destroyed the ability to read out a message which is not quantitatively important that is not very many molecules of this substance are required in a cell but they're required if we turn off the machinery we may eventually starve the selves to death by the organism that carries it by virtue of the very process which makes us into multiple celled and differentiated animals. Another idea. That's over very quickly is the question of the Matic mutations and we have in our audience here Dr Curtis who has done some very elegant studies to test this hypothesis he and I don't necessarily agree on the interpretation of his experiments but this is one of the funds of the game I personally do not believe that genetic damage is an important contributor to the aging process I won't give you the arguments right now you might like to. Discuss that later now. How much time. OK. Another question is are there substances which are accumulated in cells or in the serum of old older animals which prevent cell the cells from functioning properly about forty five years ago Alexis corral who was at the Rockefeller Institute was a Director of it that's a very intriguing experiment in which he showed that syrup from older animals would not permit the the same rate of growth or were even inhibitory to cells in tissue culture and it's a most surprising thing that forty five years have gone by and the exact nature of the substances he was dealing with and even the confirmation of the original description of the discovery has not as not taken place and several people in our laboratory are currently checking this and we do indeed find that old cells the old serum serum from all human beings does not support the growth of of cells from a young animal as well as does the serum from from a young animal Thank you Dr Strangelove can the rate of aging be changed Dr Strangelove says yes. However it can be made possible only with continued and organized efforts how rapid the progress will be depends upon your support. Please join lifespan now and help us hasten the process.