Understanding Aging

Abstract

Enormous advances in our understanding of human aging have occurred during the last 50 yr. From the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries only four comprehensive and important sources of information were available:

• 1. August Weismann’s book entitled Essays on Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems (the first of these essays dealt with The Duration of Life; 1). Weissmann states (p. 10) “In the first place in regulating the length of life, the advantage to the species, and not to the individual, is alone of any importance. This must be obvious to any one who has once thoroughly thought out the process of natural selection_”.

• 2. A highly systematized second early source of information on aging was the collection of essays edited by Cowdry and published in 1938. This 900+ page volume contains 34 chapters and was appropriately called Problems of Aging.

• 3. At about the same time Raymond Pearl published his book on aging (2). Pearl believed that aging was the indirect result of cell specialization and that only the germ line was resistant to aging. Unfortunately Pearl died in the late 1930s and is largely remembered now for having been the founding editor of Quarterly Review of Biology while he was at the Johns Hopkins University, this author’s alma mater.

• 4. Alexis Carrel wrote a monumental scientific and philosophical book, Man, the Unknown (3). Carrel believed that he had demonstrated that vertebrate cells could be kept in culture and live indefinitely, a conclusion challenged by others (more on this later).