Aging in America. Lawrence R. Samuel

if not encouraged during the counterculture years, but now there was more scrutiny of scientists’ claims that they could potentially solve the mystery of aging. Work in the field continued, of course, with much of it centered around the not very sensational role of genetics and cellular processes.

      Still, there was the occasional report of an alleged breakthrough in an off-the-beaten-track area of aging research. In 1980, for example, an East German scientist, one Baron Manfred von Ardenne, told the media that his “multistep oxygen therapy” was making elderly people quite peppy and dramatically lessened their age-related ailments. Another scientist making such a claim might have been quickly dismissed, but the seventy-three-year-old baron had an impressive background, including pioneering the development of television and the Soviet atom bomb. He also reportedly held more than six hundred patents, making him appear to be more than just a mad scientist with a lab in Dresden. “It returns the [oxygen] supply to levels normally found in the young,” he explained, with clinics across Europe adopting the treatment for wealthier patients searching for a way to maintain their youth.¹³

      While pumping high levels of oxygen into the bloodstream was no doubt an effective pick-me-up (the therapy is still done today), most scientists saw no miracle cures for aging on the horizon. “No simple therapy for arresting the aging process has been discovered and few scientists expect one,” Caleb E. Finch of the University of Southern California conceded at a 1981 symposium on aging. The phenomenon of aging remained mysterious, much to scientists’ chagrin, but two principal theories, each having something to do with the cellular workings of the body, had emerged. The first was that aging was the result of a number of “errors” that gradually occurred in an individual’s DNA, while the second was that humans got older due to an erosion of the body’s immune system.¹⁴ The idea of there being some kind of genetic clock that programmed a person’s life span was beginning to fall out of favor, but in some scientific circles it was still vigorously debated. (Some, along these lines, likened aging to the turning of leaves, with the human body experiencing changes analogous to the triggered breakdown of chlorophyll in certain trees.)¹⁵ The consensus, however, was that aging was a lot more complicated than previously believed, making the acceptance of any single theory (or solution) highly unlikely.¹⁶

      In place of identifying a single, master theory of aging, which no longer seemed viable, scientists drifted toward finding a cause of or contributor to the decline of a particular part of the human body. More scrutiny was being paid to the effects of smoking marijuana, for example, as researchers linked the active agent in the weed to a loss of brain cells in rats. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) appeared to affect these cells in the same way as aging, Philip W. Landfield of Wake Forest University had found, although it was too early to say that the chemical compound caused humans’ brains to age prematurely.¹⁷

      Likewise, most serious scientists were now largely abandoning the formation of a grand plan to add many decades to the average human life span. Instead, they were focusing on a specific condition that could perhaps slow the aging process. One of these was space travel, oddly enough, as research by NASA scientists showed that being weightless required less oxygen and food—each something that demanded the body to expend a considerable amount of energy in order to use. Simply fighting the effects of gravity used up about a third of a human’s calorie intake, and so eliminating that factor would theoretically allow an individual to maintain a lower level of metabolism. Reducing the wear and tear on bodily organs via weightlessness would go a long way toward decelerating aging, the NASA researchers believed, conceding that the practicality of gravity would be with us for some time.¹⁸

      Paradoxically, while scientists were retreating somewhat in the area of dramatic life extension, authors exploring the topic were moving full steam ahead. Americans appeared to remain quite interested in adding many years to their lives despite recent research indicating that achieving such a thing was a long shot at best. Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw’s Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach, for example, was on the New York Times bestseller list for months in the early 1980s. The book suggested that readers should, like the coauthors, gobble up huge quantities of vitamins and supplements to radically extend their lives. A host of other books about how readers could possibly live significantly longer were being published, including Roy L. Walford’s Maximum Life Span, Saul Kent’s The Life-Extension Revolution, John A. Mann’s Secrets of Life Extension, Kenneth R. Pelletier’s Longevity: Fulfilling Our Biological Potential, and Osborn Segerberg Jr.’s Living to Be 100.¹⁹ Despite the popularity of such books, the promises contained within them were definitely more sizzle than steak. With the possible exception of severe calorie reduction, there was precious little evidence at this point that an individual could extend his or her life at all except by the tried-and-true methods of eating a balanced diet, doing regular exercise, and avoiding unhealthy activities like smoking.

      Not everyone was even sure that achieving a “maximum life span” for humanity was such a good idea. The science fiction trope of a society whose members lived half of their very long lives as old people lingered over the efforts of scientists still intent on pushing the limits of our biology. Walford, who was also the author of The 120-Year Diet, was a strong advocate for life extension via “undernutrition,” the only path that so far appeared to potentially offer a big leap in longevity. Some gerontologists, however, were cautioning his vision of people living twice as long as they currently did by dramatically restricting calories. Leonard Hayflick of the Center for Gerontological Studies at the University of Florida, for example, imagined such a society not unlike that depicted in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where citizens (the Struldbrugs) never died but became increasingly disabled. Be careful what you wish for, he and others of a similar bent warned those scientists continuing to maintain that the average human life span could and should be one hundred years or more.²⁰

      Of course, a fair number of individuals were reaching the century mark without nearly starving themselves or popping dozens of pills a day. (Doing so famously earned some a mention on NBC’s Today show by the ebullient weatherman Willard Scott.) About twenty-five thousand Americans were aged one hundred or older in 1986, according to the NIA, with more than a hundred thousand centenarians forecast by the year 2000. Roughly half lived in households by themselves or with others, with the other half residing in group-care situations. Interestingly, the percentage of centenarians varied widely in different parts of the United States. The percentage of 100+ers in Hawaii was almost twice that of Washington, D.C., for example, suggesting that lifestyle or climate played a role in longevity. (Simple genetics was likely much more responsible.) Whatever the factors for living to an extraordinarily long age, it was clear that there would be many more centenarians in the future. “If the trend continues, we need to rethink our definitions of young-old, old, and old-old,” the UCLA/USC Long Term Care Gerontology Center noted—exactly what would indeed take place over the next few decades.²¹

      More than anyone else, perhaps, gerontologists understood that aging did not need an aggressive push by science, at least from a social sense. Simple demography was already dramatically extending the mean age of Americans, in the process triggering a host of challenges that would only intensify in the years ahead. Quality of life was more important than quantity, they believed, making the thought of a few decades more of old age for the average person something to be terrified of more than to wish for. By the mid-1980s, the long quest for discovering a scientific fountain of youth in order to indefinitely postpone mortality had been largely eclipsed by the rather pedestrian but much more realistic effort to have more Americans live longer and healthier lives. Developing a stronger immune system in older people was key, they agreed, as it was typically the ability to fight off disease and infections that allowed an individual to reach a ripe old age.²²

      This did not, however, stop marketers from offering consumers a wide range of products said to have some kind of antiaging properties. Many anti-aging products had hit the marketplace over the years despite there being no evidence that any of these skin creams, vitamins, nutritional supplements, minerals, and “power” foods did anything to slow the aging process.²³ Not surprisingly, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was not pleased with how companies were marketing products with “anti-aging” or “skin rejuvenation” promises, as such claims would classify them