UNFOLDING THE SCIENCE OF AGING

Real scientists often express their dismay with scientific storytellers. The truth of the matter is that the most important “storytellers” are most often scientist themselves but with journalistic talents who write full-length books and not journalists who publish articles in local newspapers and popular magazines. Some of these books have well over 1,000 references, which in turn reference thousands more, compared to an article that originated from the summary of one or two scientific papers. Any one who has struggled to read and understand a scientific paper describing original research can appreciate what it takes to read and comprehend 1,000 of them in a coherent way. The bottom line is that writers comb the scientific literature for coherent gems of wisdom that they can weave into a readable story to publish in the popular press. I am talking only about those who write to inform the lay public of what is new and revealing hidden in the back rooms of science laboratories  or scientific journals available to those who pay high subscription fees. In one sense, these authors are like some veterinarians and physicians professors who do the same thing and then tell their students to apply that information to clinical treatments. Professors should be closer to the "test tube banging" scientist than even medical specialists are closer than general practitioners are. This is a process that takes years.

The danger is that journalists sometimes tend to exaggerate the results or do not understand the limits and restriction of the findings. The most dramatic examples deal with desperate people and their loved ones grasping at straws by rushing to use scientific  results without the necessary winnowing of time: terminal cancer patients are a prime example. Right now, genetics in cancer are huge in the newspapers but few understand the meaning of the results; however, aging has been a “hot” topic of interest perhaps since man learned he could die. The problem is that there is not enough information in a short article to understand how to interpret, what they are reading; scientific books help to fill in that information gap.

In the fall of 1994, I retired and was in the process of cleaning out my office when the last issue of Clinical Chemistry arrived in my mailbox. Out of habit, I glanced through it and found the managing editor was beseeching his readers to pay special attention to an article in that edition; it had to do with red wine and a compound called “resveratrol”, a relatively simple compound, which sounded like the same old thing; eat this or that and you will live longer. The editor said the article published in that issue should be believed because he and his staff thought that the numbers were too good to be true so they check and verified the techniques used; red wine prolonged life and “resveratrol” in that wine appeared to be the responsible compound. Up until that time, the only thing that prolonged life had been restriction of caloric intake. Of course, this discovery launched a flurry of research most of it buried in had to read and interpret scientific papers. In addition, a flood of “over the counter” resveratrol containing products were produced and sold with all kinds of unproven claims. This was reminiscent of the Vitamin C products that flooded markets some years earlier with the ill-advised recommendations of the marketers to take massive doses, which people did. Vitamin C or ascorbic acid is an antioxidant understood as a chemical that protects the body from the damaging effects of free radicals of which ozone is one. It sounds good and logical but it is not.

I recently read, finished it yesterday, a book by Nick Lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Inventions of Evolution. This talented science writer has a PhD in chemistry with a long research history in that field. In one section of his book, he condensed the work of a number of scientists into his book in the form of the complicated and unfolding story of “resveratrol”. In the process, he made a number of interesting points that were well worth reading. Apparently, it is one of a number of compounds, many of them that belong to a large family of signal molecules we call insulin, and their matching cell surface receptors that activate two different aging related genes. Of course, “insulin” is more of a popularized concept in the minds of most people related to sugar metabolism and reduced to a single compound and specific compound just as the disease diabetes mellitus we reduced to Type I and Type II, when in truth is not that simple: it is an extremely complicated disease complex. Basically, lack of insulin means cells starve for lack of internalization of glucose or lack of nutrition thus tying insulin to life prolonging restriction of nutrition. I would have never dreamed of such a convoluted connection between red wine and life involving genes and evolution had I not read it in Dr. Lanes book. Even though scientists have unequivocally prolonged life significantly in primitive life forms with resveratrol, it is just plain disingenuous to simplify all that science by saying “red wine” or resveratrol prolongs life, which would be equivalent to saying food or specifically sugar prolongs life or that there are just two types of diabetes

What I found exciting was the ability of scientists to compound-by-compound further unfolding the story of something as ill defined as the mechanisms associated with the length of life across all species, which is a story no single scientific paper could tell. Can critics criticize Nick Lane for inaccuracies or misinterpretations: of course, they can and will but in doing so they miss the big message. The story of “insulin” simplified to Type I and type II diabetes tells the story of that disease the same as an ancient scholar told the story of aging with the tale of a head  bowed, drooling, badly withered120 year old man who was granted a wish for prolonged life but did not have the wisdom to ask for prolonged good health.   

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