Nobody Gets Any Younger

What makes a man--or any other organism--grow old and die? Medicine doesn't know. Last week in St. Louis, Dr. Albert I. Lansing thought he might be on the trail of an answer.

Dr. Lansing, a 32-year-old geneticist and old-age expert at Washington University, has been studying the rotifer, a minute animal that lives in water. Rotifers are ideally fitted for experiments on senescence : they are multicellular,* have simple brains, eye spots, and live three weeks or less. The females produce fertile eggs without male help. (The males are rare, weak, often impotent, live only 24 hours.)

Some Lansing findings:

P: By selecting eggs from adolescent, mature and doddering rotifers, he determined that children of aged females die young, while offspring of youngsters live long. Lansing juggled rotifer generations around, eventually became expert enough to predict the life span of any given batch of eggs.

P: By removing calcium/- from the rotifers' water, he stretched out their lives. By adding calcium, he shortened them. Brief immersions in sodium citrate, which removes calcium, lengthened the life spans of aging rotifers.

Last week Lansing, part way through his experiments, had already reached a few tentative conclusions: 1) some factor that controls aging is carried by the egg; 2) the same mysterious agent that stimulates growth is apparently concerned with senescence, too.

* The lower, unicellular organisms which reproduce by fission (splitting) do not grow old in the ordinary sense; they are "reborn" whenever they divide.

/- Doctors have known for 50 years that calcium accumulates in aging bodies; they cannot tell why.

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