Oldsters' Pied Piper

Orthodox members of the International Association of Gerontology were outraged last week that Rumania's Dr. Anna Asian, advocate of a discredited rejuvenation treatment (TIME, Dec. 21), had been invited to speak at their San Francisco congress. When Dr. Asian, 63, managed to monopolize local press coverage, the delegates were even angrier.

Dr. Asian has little command of English, but her paper was translated and read in a heavy accent. Her audience of skeptics could not understand a word. Then she had pictures flashed on the screen showing before-and-after views of her patients. An old man so emaciated that he looked like a death's head appeared later with plump cheeks. Obviously he had been well fed in the meantime, but Dr. Asian attributed his improvement to her regimen of giving thrice-weekly injections of procaine (better known by one of its trade names, Novocain). The applause for Dr. Asian was polite but weak.

For a Brooklyn research team, Dr. Leo Gitman reported on a careful scientific study of oldsters, in which one group received procaine injections, and another got exactly the same food and care, but without the procaine injections. The doctor could find no difference that could be unequivocally attributed to the procaine. Dr. Gitman sat down to a long roar of applause.

Then bedlam broke loose. A dozen detractors wanted the floor to attack Dr. Asian's work and condemn it as quackery. She had one defender, Manhattan's Dr. Osias Leon Friedman, who insisted disdainfully that the Brooklyn doctors had not been using the right kind of procaine. Dr. Gitman retorted angrily that before they began their test, his research team had tried to buy the drug from Dr. Asian herself, to be sure it was the same material, and she had turned them down cold.

Snorted Dr. Nathan Shock of the U.S. National Institutes of Health: "If these claims for procaine were true, you'd be adding ten years to your life every time your dentist fills a tooth. This woman is the Pied Piper of 1960, leading the aged instead of the young."

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