Word: lansinger
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What makes a man-or any other organism-grow old and die? Medicine doesn't know. Last week in St. Louis, Dr. Albert I. Lansing thought he might be on the trail of an answer.
Dr. Lansing, a 32-year-old geneticist and old-age expert at Washington University, has been studying the rotifer, a minute animal that lives in water. Rotifers are ideally fitted for experiments on senescence : they are multicellular,* have simple brains, eye spots, and live three weeks or less. The females...
Some Lansing findings:
¶ By selecting eggs from adolescent, mature and doddering rotifers, he determined that children of aged females die young, while offspring of youngsters live long. Lansing juggled rotifer generations around, eventually became expert enough to predict the life span of any given batch of eggs.
Last week Lansing, part way through his experiments, had already reached a few tentative conclusions: 1) some factor that controls aging is carried by the egg; 2) the same mysterious agent that stimulates growth is apparently concerned with senescence, too.