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LETTER TO THE EDITOR |
Calorie Restriction Society Society Cohort Study Team Gardena, California
Address correspondence to Michael J. Rae, Calorie Restriction Society, Society Cohort Study Team, 1827 W. 145th St., Suite 205, Gardena, CA 90249. E-mail: michaelrae{at}cadvision.com
To the Editor:
I was greatly disappointed by the overwhelmingly negative assessment of the prospects for intervening in the aging process presented in the recent special sections on anti-aging medicine in the Journal (Part I, June 2004; Part II, July 2004). I must respectfully take the Guest Editors to task for presenting the unduly one-sided survey of the issue.
All of the Guest Editors of these special sections are engaged in an ongoing (and entirely admirable) public crusade against the charlatanry of current "anti-aging" medical quackery. One wonders, however, if, in the process of incessant debate, they have lost sight of the wider context in which their specific battles are immersed, and of the widespread optimism within the legitimate biogerontological community on the feasibility of genuine intervention in the human biological aging process.
Part I was devoted largely to the more abstract, theoretical aspects of the question of the feasibility of retarding the aging process. The imbalance of having the entire section turned over to the views of moderate (Olshansky, Holliday) to extreme (Hayflick) pessimists was quite remarkable: where were the counterbalancing articles by (for example) Richard Miller (1) or Michael Rose (2), or Steven Austad, who has famously wagered against Olshansky that a person alive today will live to be 150 (3)? The unconscious bias in choice of contributors was doubtless further exacerbated by the large overlap between the authors of individual articles and the guest editorship of the issue itself.
In particular, the article "‘Anti-aging’ Is an Oxymoron" (4), although written by a highly distinguished experimentalist, was embarrassingly filled with errors of logic that the normal standards of peer review should have caught early on in the editorial process. A detailed dissection of the gaps in Hayflick's reasoning is in preparation by the present writer for separate publication. But as a simple matter of well-established experimental fact, Hayflick's intonation that "we cannot even slow, stop, or reverse the aging process in such far simpler entities than ourselves as are, for example, our own automobiles" is a particularly glaring example of a lack of critical review of the manuscript. The retardation of aging has already been accomplished in entities far more complex than an automobile: scientists have been intervening in the rate of loss of molecular fidelity and of age-associated acceleration of vulnerability to pathology in rodents and other laboratory animals for seven decades through calorie restriction (CR). Neither Hayflick nor the Editors of this issue can be ignorant of this robust finding.
In Part II—devoted to evaluating specific avenues toward intervention in the aging process—the Editors chose to primarily present articles devoted to a facile critique of the foibles of the current pseudoscientific "anti-aging" marketplace. While it is important for the conclusions of these articles to reach the lay public, the readership of a gerontological journal is already quite aware that neither growth hormone injections nor vitamin C capsules retard biological aging; their inclusion does not contribute to our understanding of the issues.
Space was also devoted to evaluation of the relative merits of different interpretations of historical demographic shifts in longevity (5) (which can provide no basis for evaluating the prospects of future advances made through the development of genuine anti-aging medicine, precisely because past gains in life expectancy have occurred entirely through the prevention of premature mortality, whereas intervention in the aging process would extend—rather than simply rectangularize—the mortality curve) and to speculations on anti-aging interventions based on hormesis (6) [despite the fact that attempts to retard aging in mammals via hormesis have consistently failed, although they have often normalized survival in genetically or environmentally disfavored organisms (7–9)]. (To cite CR as a counterexample in this context is, of course, a petitio principii). By monopolizing the allocation of space to such distractions, Part II failed to explore its stated subject: avenues by which biological aging might, in fact, be delayed, slowed, arrested, or reversed. Optimism on the therapeutic exploitability of several pathways already demonstrated in model organisms (10–13) is so commonplace as to be safely consensual amongst biogerontologists; its exclusion in Part II continues the misleading impression of the actual range of views present in the biogerontological community.
Further afield, some of the finest minds in aging research have proposed (14) and updated (15–17) a far more ambitious therapeutic program to restore youthful organismal molecular fidelity and functionality in aged humans. The apparent feasibility of this panel of interventions led the authors to the conclusion "that indefinite postponement of aging—which we term ‘engineered negligible senescence’—may be within sight" (14). One has yet to hear a cogent rejoinder to these proposals from the "anti-aging" skeptics. Such a debate would have genuinely advanced our understanding of the technical and theoretical prospects and pitfalls of "anti-aging medicine."
References
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