Health & Medicine / Aging

Venice, California, is as good a place as any to stay young forever. The sun shines 11 months a year, the temperature never strays too far from perfect, and the famous (or infamous) boardwalk is home to more than its share of eccentrics, surfers, bikini-clad roller skaters, and body worshipers. Roy Walford, professor emeritus of pathology at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, would have to be considered one of the eccentrics, although he manages to stand out even among the denizens of Venice Beach.

 Walford lives in a one-story, redbrick industrial building, one block from the beach. The windows are boarded over. The entrance is in back, off an alleyway, through a wrought-iron gate. Inside, Walford waits behind his desk with a shaved head and a dramatic Fu Manchu mustache of the kind more commonly seen adorning the members of outlaw motorcycle gangs than scientists.

 For Walford to seem out of character is hardly new. This is not a person who has led the closeted life of an academic or buried himself in a laboratory, despite the obsession with which he has pursued his science. For the better part of 50 years he has dedicated his life and his research to the belief that threescore years and fifteen is woefully short for a human life span and that we should all live decades longer. And he’s had some success. His most important work has focused on the relationship between eating and longevity. In a seminal series of experiments beginning in the 1960s, Walford studied the effect of depriving laboratory mice of calories and discovered that the less they ate—within reason—the longer they lived. The research convinced him that it might be worthwhile to apply the same lessons to himself. So since the early 1980s, he has followed what he describes as a near-starvation diet. Walford believes that his diet of a mere 1,600 or so calories a day—about a third to a half less than a man his size would normally consume—will give him the best possible chance of living to 120.

And this is where the problem comes in. Here Walford sits at age 75, still doing research, working on half a dozen projects simultaneously, and yet he finds it difficult to walk. A chronic nerve disorder he picked up nearly 10 years ago as a volunteer guinea pig in a surreal ecosystem experiment makes living to 120 seem an even more ludicrous goal than it was back when he was able to walk normally.

While Walford’s condition has impaired his balance and his mobility, his will seems unaffected: “I have to try to walk consciously instead of unconsciously. Conscious walking means you balance on one foot and then the other and you fall forward.” He says this quietly, with precise, controlled gestures, as if saving energy for the next decade. As one might expect of a man with this kind of willpower, he is thin. But at 5 feet 8 inches and 134 pounds—some 15 pounds less than he weighed as a college wrestler—he still has a muscular physique, the product of every-other-day weight workouts at a local gym. And his nerve condition has certainly not kept him from his goal of understanding aging. He visits his ucla laboratory a few times a week to work on a “crucial experiment” he hopes will give him an immunological answer to postponing the toll of time.

Walford’s new research is based on the fact that in mice and humans, the immune system malfunctions during aging, losing the ability to distinguish between healthy cells and invasive pathogens such as bacteria and viruses. Eventually the system begins to mount so-called autoimmune attacks against the body itself. Walford has long theorized that this is a root cause of the regrettable side effects of aging, and he still hopes to find out if he’s right. To test the theory, he is raising mice with defective immune systems in an ultraclean environment. “In a normal environment, they’d just die of infection,” he says. “But I want to see if they have correspondingly less autoimmunity and how that influences their survival in a world without pathogens.”

If the mice live longer, Walford will have provided formidable support to his immunological theory of aging, which might have dramatic benefits for future generations. After all, as he has pointed out, if human aging were completely preventable, and disease eradicated, the average life span might be about 300 years. Everyone would eventually die from accidents, but those who are lucky might live to be 600.

Even as a youngster, Walford considered life entirely too full of opportunities to imagine their fitting into one life span. He grew up in San Diego, the son of a career naval officer. He was the top student in his high-school class, as well as a first-rate gymnast, wrestler and jitterbug dancer. At 17 he announced in an article for his school newspaper that the human life span was unacceptably short. As an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology, he thought about studying philosophy, physics, and mathematics, but settled on premed. “We used to joke that together we would conquer three great challenges: space, time, and death,” says his Caltech roommate, Al Hibbs, now a retired nasa space scientist. “I was supposed to conquer space, Roy was supposed to conquer death; together we would build a time machine. They were young men’s fantasies, but he got interested in them seriously.”

After graduation, both Hibbs and Walford went to the University of Chicago—Walford for his medical degree, Hibbs for a master’s degree in mathematics. There, Walford became involved in theater and wrote his own comedic adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. He picked up spare cash performing in a balancing act, in which he was held aloft by a biologist-cum-weight lifter. Before earning his M.D. in 1948, he began practicing what he later dubbed his theory of signposts. The essence of the theory is that life will become an unmemorable blur unless people engage occasionally in what Walford describes as “rather crazy” activities, which act as signposts marking the passage of the years. In this case, he and Hibbs made plans to sail around the world. They lacked only the boat and the money to buy it with. So they decided to play roulette.

“We figured the only way of getting money without having to work at it was either to rob a bank or win at the casinos,” says Hibbs. The two analyzed roulette tables, with the knowledge that the tables aren’t mathematically perfect. “Some numbers come up more often than they should,” says Walford. They raked in $6,000 in Reno and $30,000 in Las Vegas, an achievement heralded by Life magazine in an article headlined “Two Student Theoreticians Invent System for Beating Roulette Wheel.” Then they bought a yacht and set off on their sailing adventure.

The plan was to cover the day-to-day expenses for the trip by writing for Science Illustrated magazine. But the magazine folded and, after 18 months of sailing, the duo found themselves stranded in the Caribbean. So Hibbs eventually returned to Caltech for his Ph.D., and Walford headed to Panama for his medical internship. Following two years at a veterans affairs hospital in Los Angeles and another two at an Air Force pathology laboratory in Illinois, Walford joined the medical faculty of ucla in 1954 and began delving into the aging process.

Working with mice in the laboratory, he quickly realized the benefits of the mantra of caloric restriction research: undernutrition without malnutrition. The maximum life span of a typical lab mouse is 39 months, corresponding to 110 years in humans. Walford and researchers have demonstrated that mice that eat only 60 percent of their preferred diet will live as long as 56 months—the equivalent of 165 human years—provided they start their diets before three months of age. Although these mice are smaller than their normally fed peers, they seem to retain their youthfulness and intellects well into their extended old age. “We’ve found that a 36-month-old restricted mouse will run a maze with the same facility as a six-month-old normally fed mouse,” Walford says. “That’s a substantial preservation of intellectual function.” 

 SIGNPOSTS OF A LIFE

National Institutes of Health Institute on Aging Web site has information on the physiology and biochemistry of aging: www.nih.gov/health/chip/nia/aging.

Find everything you wanted to know about Walford and more, from his experiences in the Biosphere to his diet plans to his books: www.walford.com.

The Biosphere 2 homepage offers design plans, research projects, and visitor information: www.bio2.edu.