Alex Comfort

Test-battery to measure ageing-rate in man.

Abstract A technique for the short-term measurement of the rate of human ageing is now both necessary and possible. It could transfer much nonhazardous fundamental research on the slowing of age changes from animals to man: it would provide important experience with, and knowledge of, ageing variables other than mortality, and it would offer a method of attacking the real possibility that drugs and environmental agents already current may affect that rate—a side-effect inherently undetectable with present resources. A test-battery designed for use in this way is described.

THE PIGMENTATION OF MOLLUSCAN SHELLS

(4) Pigmentation of Polymita picta (5) Pigmentation of Cepaea nemoralis (6) Conclusion . . . . . . . . (2) General characters of helicid pigmentation . . (3) Colour associations and interchangeability of pigments . . . . . . . . V. Summary . . . . . . . . . VI. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PAGE 285 286 288 288 289 289 292 292 293 294 294 295 296 296 297 298 299 299

BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF SENESCENCE

1. Senescence is treated as a generic term for the processes in certain organisms which lead to a decreasing power of homoeostasis with increasing age.

Maximum Ages Reached by Domestic Cats

Several workers, notably Flower (Proc. Zool. Soc. London: 145, 1931) and Mellen (the science and mystery op the cat, 1940) have tried to discover the extreme verifiable age in Felis domeslica . This is no easy exercise—it is worth undertaking since mammals kept as pets are the only forms under close observation throughout life in sufficient numbers, and under sufficiently protected conditions, for occasional individuals to approach the absolute upper limit of longevity for the species. At present there are no published actuarial data for any carnivore, but the potential maximum age of cats is known to be greater than in any breed of dog. The rate of increase in the force of mortality at high ages may well show large interspecific differences, to which maximum ages could provide a pointer. Flower ( loc. cit. ) recognised that cats can exceed …

ON RESEARCH AND SUPPORT IN GERIATRICS, INCLUDING DESIGN FOR A STUDY OF MUSCULAR STRENGTH IN THE AGED*

You have asked me to speak to you as a gerontologist-that is, as a biologist working on ageing-and my brief is to suggest to you some programmes of research apt to the clinical situation. The clinician knows he cannot do much about ageing, though he would like to do more, in the interest of his patients, and at the same time find out new facts, in the interests of us all. He does not wish-and I do not intend to press him-to experiment wantonly on the sick. Accordingly the activities suggested should preferably be likely to be beneficial, or a t least harmless; they will depend upon the co-operation of elderly people as volunteers, so they should measure, as far as possible, things which can be measured without bed rest, biopsy, needle pricks or unpleasant and exhausting manipulation. They should be directed to offer a possibility of major palliation for those now old and, if possible, a t the same time throw fundamental light on the ageing process. The demands they make on the clinician are that he should know what is meant by a clinical trial, and that he should not be anxious for fear he finds out something which could raise his hopes of modifying the age process. I think you will understand what I mean when I say that clinical geriatrics in this country, by comparison with the optimists of Eastern and Central Europe, is far too worried about the “News of the World.” It is sober, as i t should be, but sometimes its sobriety lapses into depression, the remedy for which is a measure of psychiatric insight into the reasons which lead us to study old age, and humanity to encourage us in doing so. Fundamental science is, by contrast, occupationally magical and disreputable. It attempts the impossible and the hubristic de me’tier. My function here, therefore, is to lend sanction and authority to projects which require an intellectual father-figure to make them medically respectable, and this therapeutic role I shall try to fill.

Points: Sweet tooth maketh a sour disposition.

references on a disk and use the remaining space for the index and text files which I described in my paper. When I need to look for references which are stored on many floppy disks, I copy them on to the hard disk and use it to locate the data required more quickly. I am delighted to state that well over 500 readers have sent requests for listings of the program. I am doing my best to dispatch them and to answer individual questions about hardware and software requirements. Detailed instructions on how to incorporate this program into other computer systems are also included. DAVID P SELLU Department of Surgery, Dudley Road Hospital, Birmingham B18 7QH

RECOVERY FROM SCHIZOPHRENIA

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On Ecstasy and Originality

The solving of a problem is an aesthetic experience. It involves a reward- mechanism going beyond the practical outcome of the solution and the sense of achievement in the eyes of others — for an unsolved intellectual problem, explicit,as in mathematics, or inexplicit, as a trick recurrence of pattern in wallpaper, rankles as a state of physical unease. This experience appears to be common to scientists and to chimpanzees, and must have played an important adaptive part in fostering the restlessly exploratory behaviour of primates.

A Technology of the Emotions

Mermaids are human creatures that live in the sea, and they are a real part of the experience of any culture which knows the sea. Every child and every fisherman has heard their voices — sweet, half-human, treacherous. Shelley was not the only person to catch glimpses of them: their white limbs wavering in the windlike stream part-animal, part-feminine, and in part the voice of our own self-destructive demon which urges us to cast ourselves down. They got Shelley himself in the end.