LESSONS FROM FLEAS

Evening Star, Issue 22454, 26 September 1936, Page 2

LESSONS FROM FLEAS

STARVE AND LIVE LONG At Brown University, U.S.A., Dr Lester Ingle and Professor Arthur M. Banta are studying the mystery of life, and especially the process of growing old, says the New York ‘ Times.’ The objects of their critical study are cladocera, so-called water fleas, which are not insects at all, but minute animals related to the lobster. Ingle and Banta cut down the food supply in tho younger stages of the “fleas,” then increased it after maturity. Result: The duration of vigour was increased by 60 per cent. In four years nearly 2,000 fleas were tested at Brown. Animals that were normally fed at all stages of growth had an average life of only 29 days. Their fellows on half-rations for 14 days and full rations thereafter lived to the hale and.hearty age of 42 days. Similar experiments with partial diets until tho fleas were 20 and 28 days old resulted in life spans of 44 and 51 days. Apparently the most favourable period of the abundant life is not early youth, but maturity, when possibly the body is better able to withstand the effects of a fairly rapid dissipation of energy. This is not exactly a revolutionary discovery. For at least a generation it has been known that either by lowering the body temperature or by reducing the food supply it is possible to prolong the life of very low organisms. Evidently wo are confronted here with a modification of the metabolic process whereby food is converted into tissue and energy, a process that obviously puts a mechanical and chemical strain on the organism. If tho strain is great, as when 'large quantities of food are devoured, the wear and tear also are .great. Meals that are heartier than the organism needs mean a burning up of youth. Give the body what it needs—no more—and life is prolonged. Neither Ingle nor Banta care to draw any analogy between water fleas and humans. Still, they do permit themselves to say that “if human life could be prolonged to a proportionate extent, the average expectation of life at birth would be close to 190 years of age.”