PROFESSOR STEINACH AND THE RAT
Writing with vivacity and humor, Mr. Clarence Day, Jr., speculates with
so much whimsicality upon the possible effects of surgical rejuvenation
of men that one might overlook the keenness of his observation in a
hurried perusal of his article. For the sake of preserving it for more
leisurely study, and because the points raised are really worthy of
attention, the article is reproduced here in full, with acknowledgments
to +The Literary Review+, in which it first appeared, of date November
20, 1920. Says Mr. Day:
Biologists really seem to be discovering ways of making men young again.
So far, it is like making men drunk; the state that is produced does not
last. But it looks as though they might succeed in adding a chapter to
life. I wish it could be added to the other end: to youth instead of to
the last flickers. But if we can renew and re-live middle-age, that will
be better still.
A man named Steinach, in Vienna, has been experimenting for ten years
with rats. Full accounts of his work were published last summer in the
great biological journal founded by Roux, and these were summarized and
discussed by the London +Athenaeum+, which is now the most interesting
of all English weeklies. It is from the +Athenaeum's+ account that I am
taking these facts.
Steinach has been studying the interstitial cells that fill in the
spaces between the tubules of the testes, in males, and between the
follicles of the ovaries in females. His reason for choosing these cells
for his experiments is that they are a well-spring of life. Furthermore,
since all our vital functions are interrelated, to make these cells
active gives the whole organism new life and strength. This is not the
only way of stimulating the organism, but it seems the most powerful.
An old rat is like a senile old man; he is bald and emaciated, his eyes
are clouded, his breathing is labored. He stays in one place, with bent
back, and has small interest in anything. If you cut one of his genital
ducts, however, which is a comparatively slight operation, it has the
effect of making the interstitial cells multiply actively. Waves of life
flood his being. Within a few weeks he is transformed. These currents
restore and rebuild him; skin, muscle and mind. Both in looks and
behavior he is indistinguishable from other strong rats.
He has cast off old age. Senility, which sets in with men when they are
from sixty to eighty years old, begins after twenty to thirty months in
a rat. He is then about through. But when an operation is performed on a
senile rat he gets from six to eight months' new life. In other words,
the addition to his normal span is 20 to 30 per cent. That would be a
large fraction of life for a man to live over again. The rat lives it
vigorously, eagerly, back in his prime.
When senility again comes upon him it is in a modified form. His
organism as a whole is in better shape. It is his mind now that tires.
As Steinach has already cut one or both of his genital ducts, that
method of stimulating his cells cannot, of course, be repeated. But
another operation is ready. Some unfortunate young male is deprived of
his testes by Steinach, and these are implanted forthwith in this hoary
old rat.
A second spell of active life follows, not so long as the first. It ends
in acute psychic senility. The rat goes all to pieces. It is as if the
brain, twice restimulated to emotion, curiosity, keenness, had
approached the very limit of its running, and was completely exhausted.
Steinach has not yet tried whether a third rejuvenation is possible.
That remains to be seen. He lives in Vienna, and everything there has
come to a stop. He has no assistants, no funds, with which to conduct
further experiments. "May happier lands or cities carry the work on," he
writes at the end.
It seems as though some rich American ought to stake the old boy.
* * * *
Steinach has naturally found it more difficult to give new youth to
females. But here, too, he has in a measure succeeded. X-ray treatment
and ovarian transplantation are the methods employed.
As to human experiments, there is a colleague of Steinach's named
Lichtenstern, who has operated on numerous men and women with apparent
success. There has not been time yet to measure how long their new lease
of life is to be; but they have regained the joy of life they had
lost--strength and powers of work. Still, all this needs confirming.
In a rat it is the sexual impulses that are directly reanimated. He
again knows the fevers of courtship, the conflicts of marriage; and
whether he is glad to repeat these commotions depends on the rat. In
man, however, the sexual impulses are more or less sublimated, so that
the new energy may appear in any of the other forms of psychic activity.
Whatever such faculties he has in him once more grow strong.
* * * *
How wonderful it would be if we could at least prolong certain
lives--great writers like H. G. Wells and Conrad, great artists, great
doctors. But in practice, the men who would get hold of this would be
John D. Rockefeller and W. J. Bryan. The rich uncle would walk in and
tell his hopeless heirs he had been to see Steinach. Senators would live
forever. The world would grow harder for youth.
Even were we able to control all this, and reserve the boon for the
best, would it work? Say we did choose the right men--is it not too
intimate a suggestion that we should set a man of science upon them,
prepared with a little knife to slice one of their genital ducts? Men
have fought all these years for the right to live. Have they no right to
die? Must an old man who is needed by the public be condemned to live
on, his aged cells stirred and restirred while we glean his brains bare?
Some Socrates of the future may yet envy that other his hemlock.
* * * *
This, we say it regretfully, is the end of Mr. Day's article. It is
admirable fooling. We will not pay his wit the poor compliment of taking
him seriously at the last and pointing out to him that it was Heine who
said, "Nobody loves life like an old man!" There will be no need of
insistence to urge the old men, useful or useless, to submit to an
operation to renew their youth. But it is to be hoped that they will
never be asked to submit to the cutting of the genital duct. It seems to
the writer that +The Athenaeum+ must have misconstrued Dr. Steinach's
experiments in some degree, inasmuch as it is difficult to conceive of
the operation of severing a genital duct as conducive to cell-formation.
However, probably ligating is meant instead of severing. But this is not
the point really brought out by Mr. Day's clever article. The real point
is, Is it likely that if Mr. John Jones takes Dr. Brinkley's goat-gland
operation for the renewal of his youth, and thereby adds thirty years to
his life, and at the end of this thirty years of friskiness undergoes a
second transplantation of glands, thereby gaining twenty years more, and
at the end of this twenty years takes the operation a third time,
securing a further lease of gaiety for ten years, will the final years
of Mr. John Jones be years of acute psychic senility, as observed by Dr.
Steinach in his rat? To the writer it seems a +non sequitur+. The cases
are not parallel. The rejuvenated rat appears to regard his acquired
vitality as impelling toward revelry and excess. It is necessary to
emphasize the point that the pith and marrow of Dr. Brinkley's discovery
is that since it is clearly shown that rejuvenation is accomplished by
the restoration of activity to the sex-glands, therefore the
preservation of this rejuvenation MUST depend upon the CONSERVATION of
the seminal fluids, and cannot depend upon any other single factor
whatever. It has been already explained that Dr. Brinkley puts it out of
the power of the rejuvenated man to destroy the good that has come into
his life, and protects him against the danger of yielding too freely to
passionate impulse, by preventing the escape of the rejuvenating agent.
The means of nourishing the body and brain being therefore insured as to
supply, it is not reasonable to suppose that the nerve-cells of the
rejuvenated man can fail to receive their proper nourishment for many
succeeding years, and, passing by the rat as a fallacious parallel, we
cannot see any good reason why the human body and brain, either under
the guidance of self-control, or surgically safeguarded against the
waste of excess, should not function at their best for fifty years of
added life, with very possibly another fifty added to that. The real
crux of the matter is the resistive quality of tissue, which is
approximately 200 years for such organs as kidneys and heart, and, say,
150 for nerve-substance.
[Illustration: THE OPERATING ROOM AT THE BRINKLEY HOSPITAL]