CAN WE DEFY OLD AGE?

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4611, 8 October 1923, Page 2

CAN WE DEFY OLD AGE?

(By A Scientist, in the “Overseas Daily Mail.”') * The fight against old age . was waged by the scientist long before science itself parted company from magic. To-day we term "physiological death” that which comes as a result of the exhaustion of the tissuein contrast to that devolution whicn follows disease. Dr. Voronoff and his fellow-workers have declared war on this physiological death, and are perfecting technique .which will, they consider, in any event postpone the evil day. It has been suspected for some time that the body cells ■were capable of living for ever, and recent, research work has demonstrated that these cells do not die, but are killed by not having the proper food‘supplied to them. Side by side wita these researches investigations have been going on into the functions ofcertain glands of the body. Hiese glands form substances which are termed “internal secretions,” because || they are not poured out by a duct into some organ of the body, but are passed into the blood in its passage through the gland. Many workers h.ave shown that these secretions have a marked , influence upon health, and it is probable that they have a direct influence upon the nutrition of the body cells. ft is more than thirty years aggfi: that Brown-JSequard first tried-the" effect of a dried extract of the very gland with which Voronoff is workingVoronoff’s advance is to transplant one of these organs from a chimpanzee to a man. The question which arises is : “Are the scientific probabilities with t,he success or failure of Voronoff’s method?” . The answer to this must be: “With its failure.” Although there will be temporary improvement; in the? aptient’s condition, due to the accumulated internal secretion in the gland transplanted, .the gland will not live, an-1 in consequence will produce' no Y further supply of the important secretion in its new home. The results of transplanting animal tissues into the human body have always been disappointing. Great hope was extended, for example, tp the replacement of the cornea an eye with a portion of similar tissue removed from a rabbit’s eye, but this work has now been admitted to have ended in failure., The human body treats these imported portions of animal tissue in the same way as it deals with other foreign bodies ; it may throw a protective covering of elementary tissue over them, but it declines to admit them into its working.