Perpetual Youth.

Progress, Volume II, Issue 4, 1 February 1907, Page 143

Perpetual Youth.

Is the elixir of life, that dream of the meche\al alchemists ,to be among the achievements of science an the future ? Not, of course, in the sense of averting death altogether, but of staving it off of prolonging the period of youth ? Certain aspects of the question are discussed by Dr Carl Snjder m an article in the Monthly Review, entitled " The Quest of Prolonged Youth." "It may be " he writes " that we shall never learn to avert old age It may be, but there is no a pi ion certainty Whether we do or not, it seems possible that we may at least learn its cause Of this we at present know practically nothing " Weismann, Metchnikoff, and Demange have put forward conjectures on the subject, but no comprehensive theory has yet been advanced. Weismann holds that death was brought about by natural selection , that, for the welfare of organisms, their increase must be limited. Even if this explanation be admitted, it takes us a very little way We want to know what changes take place in the organism that result in old age and death Metchnikoff conjectures that old age is the work of certain cells, which he calls " macrophags," that attack the most active elements of the tissues— brain cells, liver cells, kidney cells etc.— and convert them into a sort of connective tissue unable to carry on their former functions This hypothesis, however, is not yet generally accepted A more definite theory is based on " some recent extraordinary experiments by Dr. Wolfgang Weichardt, a German pin sician. He submitted guinea pigs to exercise on a miniature treadmill until they fell dead from exhaustion Then he concocted from the fatigued muscles of the animals a juice or sap When this juice was injected into the veins of unworked guinea pigs it produced in them all the outward signs of fatigue, and in from twenty to forty hours they died Sap prepared from unworked animals had no such effect These experiments seem to show that prolonged muscular activity produces in the muscles a poison which, circulating through the body of an animal, causes its death In its action it is evidently similar to the poisons elaborated by bacteria. Dr Weichardt calls it " Ermudungs-Toxin " that is, fatigue toxin or poison. Following up these experiments, Dr Weichardt showed that, as -in the case of bacterial poisons, a very little fatigue toxin injected into the veins of an animal acts as an anti-toxin It is possible to inoculate an animal against fatigue. Animals and even human beings thus inoculated are capable of much more prolonged exertion than they are without it These remarkable results are curiously near a conjecture by Metchnikoff, that cyto-toxins might be found which would reinforce the aging cells and stimulate them to renewed youth The bearing of Dr Weichardt's investigations on the greater problem, that biologists have been approaching from various points of view, will be seen from Dr. Snyder's remark that old age is, in some serse, merely accumulated fatigue.