| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Letters to the Editor Aging Gracefully I commend Dr. Lowenstein for his insightful article on aging in the Winter 2003 issue of California Wild. He focuses not only on slowing the aging process, but, more importantly, on improving the quality of life. I refer interested readers to an article, now over four years old, which discusses “rectangularization” of the life span, i.e., delaying aging , and also the extension of the maximal life span of multicellular organisms: “Telomeres, cancer and aging. Altering the human life span” by D.A. Banks and M. Fossel: JAMA 1997; 278:1345-1348. Jack Kronfield My attention has been drawn to a nice piece by Jerold Lowenstein, at http://www.calacademy.org/calwild/winter2003/stories/counterpoints2.html, concerning my and colleagues’ article in last July’s BioEssays. Thank you for the positive comments. However, the closing remark is incorrect: “de Grey and his five colleagues don’t provide the formula for maintaining one’s wits and capacity for joy in extreme old age. They recognize this is a serious drawback to ENS.” On the contrary, we recognize nothing of the kind. We feel that there is virtually no chance of increasing total lifespan considerably faster than healthy lifespan. This is a point upon which the biogerontology community is united. In fact, whether one thinks that progress will be rapid or slow, there is unanimity that it will occur by a lengthening of “healthspan” and not “frailspan.” There is a very simple reason for this: being frail is risky and always will be. Indeed, you supply data confirming this in later parts of your piece. The misunderstanding of this point concerns me considerably, because it is probably the most prevalent misconception about anti-aging research among the general public. If a professor at UCSF considers that our work is focused on extending the elderly’s years of disability, we have even more work to do than I thought. Aubrey de Grey Author responds: I greatly admired the article in BioEssays and learned a lot from it. The comment Dr. de Grey took exception to was not intended as a criticism of his work but as a rhetorical device for going on to consider some of the other material included in the column. I understood that the author and his colleagues were concerned with the same matters, though of course none of us has the final answer to the issues raised. I’m sorry if I implied that his work indicated a lack of concern for these broader issues. |