Aging – Page 9 – artdiamondblog.com

Japanese “Longevity” Due Partly to Government Over-Counting Centenarians

“A Kobe city official, left, visited Mitsue Watase, 100, at her home last week as Japanese officials started a survey on the whereabouts of centenarians.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Oskar Morgenstern is mainly known as the co-author with John von Neumann of the book that started game theory. But it may be that his most important contribution to economics is a little known book called On the Accuracy of Economic Observations. In that book he gave examples of social scientists theorizing to explain ‘facts’ that turned out not to be true (such as the case of the 14 year-old male widowers).
The point is that truth would be served by economists spending a higher percent of their time in improving the quality of data.
One can imagine Morgenstern sadly smiling at the case of the missing Japanese centenarians:

(p. 1) TOKYO — Japan has long boasted of having many of the world’s oldest people — testament, many here say, to a society with a superior diet and a commitment to its elderly that is unrivaled in the West.

That was before the police found the body of a man thought to be one of Japan’s oldest, at 111 years, mummified in his bed, dead for more than three decades. His daughter, now 81, hid his death to continue collecting his monthly pension payments, the police said.
Alarmed, local governments began sending teams to check on other elderly residents. What they found so far has been anything but encouraging.
A woman thought to be Tokyo’s oldest, who would be 113, was last seen in the 1980s. Another woman, who would be the oldest in the world at 125, is also missing, and probably has been for a long time. When city officials tried to visit her at her registered address, they discovered that the site had been turned into a city park, in 1981.
To date, the authorities have been unable to find more than 281 Japanese who had been listed in records as 100 years old or older. Facing a growing public outcry, the (p. 6) country’s health minister, Akira Nagatsuma, said officials would meet with every person listed as 110 or older to verify that they are alive; Tokyo officials made the same promise for the 3,000 or so residents listed as 100 and up.
The national hand-wringing over the revelations has reached such proportions that the rising toll of people missing has merited daily, and mournful, media coverage. “Is this the reality of a longevity nation?” lamented an editorial last week in The Mainichi newspaper, one of Japan’s biggest dailies.
. . .
. . . officials admit that Japan may have far fewer centenarians than it thought.
“Living until 150 years old is impossible in the natural world,” said Akira Nemoto, director of the elderly services section of the Adachi ward office. “But it is not impossible in the world of Japanese public administration.”

For the full story, see:
MARTIN FACKLER. “Japan, Checking on Its Oldest People, Finds Many Gone, Some Long Gone.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., August 15, 2010): 1 & 6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 14, 2010 and has the somewhat shorter title “Japan, Checking on Its Oldest, Finds Many Gone”; the words “To date” appear in the online, but not the print, version of the article.)

The Morgenstern book is:
Morgenstern, Oskar. On the Accuracy of Economic Observations. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.

“We’re Spending at a Rate that’s Just Unsustainable”

George Shultz, former Dean of the University of Chicago Business School, former Secretary of the Treasury, and former Secretary of State. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 12) What do you make of the direction the Republican Party has taken since you served in Washington? Isn’t the Tea Party a corruption of the values you stood for?
From what I understand of it, it is a reaction, which I share, to the fact that our government seems to have gotten out of control. We’re spending at a rate that’s just unsustainable.
That’s a legacy of the Bush era, I guess.
Everybody is conveniently blaming everything on Bush, but he’s not responsible for what’s happened in the last year.
You’ll be 90 in December. How are you?
I’m terrific. Feeling great. I’m vertical, not horizontal. That’s a big thing.

For the full interview, see:

DEBORAH SOLOMON. “Questions for George Shultz; The Statesman.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., July 4, 2010): 12.
(Note: bolding of interviewer questions was in original.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated June 28, 2010.)

“The Bus — La Guagua — Always Comes for Those Who Wait”

“Carmen Herrera in her Manhattan loft, surrounded by her art. She sold her first work in 2004.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) Under a skylight in her tin-ceilinged loft near Union Square in Manhattan, the abstract painter Carmen Herrera, 94, nursed a flute of Champagne last week, sitting regally in the wheelchair she resents.

After six decades of very private painting, Ms. Herrera sold her first artwork five years ago, at 89. Now, at a small ceremony in her honor, she was basking in the realization that her career had finally, undeniably, taken off. As cameras flashed, she extended long, Giacomettiesque fingers to accept an art foundation’s lifetime achievement award from the director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Her good friend, the painter Tony Bechara, raised a glass. “We have a saying in Puerto Rico,” he said. “The bus — la guagua — always comes for those who wait.”
And the Cuban-born Ms. Herrera, laughing gustily, responded, “Well, Tony, I’ve been at the bus stop for 94 years!”
Since that first sale in 2004, collectors have avidly pursued Ms. Herrera, and her radiantly ascetic paintings have entered the permanent collections of institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Tate Modern. Last year, MoMA included her in a pantheon of Latin American artists on exhibition. And this summer, during a retro-(p. 29)spective show in England, The Observer of London called Ms. Herrera the discovery of the decade, asking, “How can we have missed these beautiful compositions?”
In a word, Ms. Herrera, a nonagenarian homebound painter with arthritis, is hot. In an era when the art world idolizes, and often richly rewards, the young and the new, she embodies a different, much rarer kind of success, that of the artist long overlooked by the market, and by history, who persevered because she had no choice.
“I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure,” she said of painting. “I never in my life had any idea of money and I thought fame was a very vulgar thing. So I just worked and waited. And at the end of my life, I’m getting a lot of recognition, to my amazement and my pleasure, actually.”
. . .
But Ms. Herrera is less expansive about her own art, discussing it with a minimalism redolent of the work. “Paintings speak for themselves,” she said. Geometry and color have been the head and the heart of her work, she added, describing a lifelong quest to pare down her paintings to their essence, like visual haiku.
Asked how she would describe to a student a painting like “Blanco y Verde” (1966) — a canvas of white interrupted by an inverted green triangle — she said, “I wouldn’t have a student.” To a sweet, inquiring child, then? “I’d give him some candy so he’d rot his teeth.”
When pressed about what looks to some like a sensual female shape in the painting, she said: “Look, to me it was white, beautiful white, and then the white was shrieking for the green, and the little triangle created a force field. People see very sexy things — dirty minds! — but to me sex is sex, and triangles are triangles.”
. . .
Ms. Herrera’s late-in-life success has stunned her in many ways. Her larger works now sell for $30,000, and one painting commanded $44,000 — sums unimaginable when she was, say, in her 80s. “I have more money now than I ever had in my life,” she said.
Not that she is succumbing to a life of leisure. At a long table where she peers out over East 19th Street “like a French concierge,” Ms. Herrera, because she must, continues to draw and paint. “Only my love of the straight line keeps me going,” she said.

For the full story, see:
DEBORAH SONTAG. “At 94, She’s the Hot New Thing in Painting, and Enjoying It.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., January 20, 2010): 1 & 29.
(Note: the online version of the article has the title “At 94, She’s the Hot New Thing in Painting” and is dated January 19, 2010.)

Ms. Herrara’s “”Blanco y Verde” (1966-7).”

“Ms. Herrera’s “Red Star” from 1949.”

Source of captions and photos: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

New Scientific Optimism on Life Extension

Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D1) It may be the ultimate free lunch — how to reap all the advantages of a calorically restricted diet, including freedom from disease and an extended healthy life span, without eating one fewer calorie. Just take a drug that tricks the body into thinking it’s on such a diet.

It sounds too good to be true, and maybe it is. Yet such drugs are now in clinical trials. Even if they should fail, as most candidate drugs do, their development represents a new optimism among research biologists that aging is not immutable, that the body has resources that can be mobilized into resisting disease and averting the adversities of old age.
This optimism, however, is not fully shared. Evolutionary biologists, the experts on the theory of aging, have strong reasons to suppose that human life span cannot be altered in any quick and easy way. But they have been confounded by experiments with small laboratory animals, like roundworms, fruit flies and mice. In all these species, the change of single genes has brought noticeable increases in life span.
With theorists’ and their gloomy predictions cast in the shade, at least for the time being, experimental biologists are pushing confidently into the tangle of linkages that evolution has woven among food intake, fertility and life span. “My rule of thumb is to ignore the evolutionary biologists — they’re constantly telling you what you can’t think,” Gary Ruvkun of the Massachusetts General Hospital remarked this June after making an unusual discovery about longevity.
Excitement among researchers on aging has picked up in the last few years with the apparent convergence of two lines of inquiry: single gene changes and the diet known as caloric restriction.
. . .
In the view of evolutionary biologists, the life span of each species is adapted to the nature of its environment. Mice live at most a year in the wild because owls, cats and freezing to death are such frequent hazards. Mice with genes that allow longer life can rarely be favored by natural selection. Rather, the mice that leave the most progeny are those that devote resources to breeding at as early an age as possible.
According to this theory, if mice had wings and could escape their usual predators, natural selection ought to favor longer life. And indeed the maximum life span of bats is 3.5 times greater than flightless mammals of the same size, according to research by Gerald S. Wilkinson of the University of Maryland.
In this view, cells are so robust that they do not limit life span. Instead the problem, especially for longer-lived species, is to keep them under control lest they cause cancer. Cells have not blocked the evolution of extremely long life spans, like that of the bristlecone pine, which lives 5,000 years, or certain deep sea corals, whose age has been found to exceed 4,000 years.
Some species seem to be imperishable. A tiny freshwater animal known as a hydra can regenerate itself from almost any part of its body, apparently because it makes no distinction between its germ cells and its ordinary body cells. In people the germ cells, the egg and sperm, do not age; babies are born equally young, whatever the age of their parents. The genesis of aging was the division of labor in the first multicellular animals between the germ cells and the body cells.
That division put the role of maintaining the species on the germ cells and left the body cells free to become specialized, like neurons or skin cells. But in doing so the body cells made themselves disposable. The reason we die, in the view of Thomas Kirkwood, an expert on the theory of aging, is that constant effort is required to keep the body cells going. “This, in the long run, is unwarranted — in terms of natural selection, there are more important things to do,” he writes.
All that seems clear about life span is that it is not fixed. And if it is not fixed, there may indeed be ways to extend it.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Tests Begin on Drugs That May Slow Aging.” The New York Times (Tues., August 18, 2009): D1 & D?.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: thanks to Luis Locay for calling my attention to the article quoted above.)

“A Man of Science Past Sixty Does More Harm than Good” (Unless His Name is “Avery”)

(p. 421) . . . , in 1928, Fred Griffith in Britain published a striking and puzzling finding. Earlier Griffith had discovered that all known types of pneumococci could exist with or without capsules. Virulent pneumococci had capsules; pneumococci without capsules could be easily destroyed by the immune system. Now he found something much stranger. He killed virulent pneumococci, ones surrounded by capsules, and injected them into mice. Since the bacteria were dead, all the mice survived. He also injected living pneumococci that had no capsules, that were not virulent. Again the mice lived. Their immune systems devoured the unencapsulated pneumococci. But then he injected dead pneumococci surrounded by capsules and living pneumococci without capsules.
The mice died. Somehow the living pneumococci had acquired cap-(p. 422)sules. Somehow they had changed. And, when isolated from the mice, they continued to grow with the capsule–as if they had inherited it.
Griffith’s report seemed to make meaningless years of Avery’s work– and life. The immune system was based on specificity. Avery believed that the capsule was key to that specificity. But if the pneumococcus could change, that seemed to undermine everything Avery believed and thought he had proved. For months he dismissed Griffith’s work as unsound. But Avery’s despair seemed overwhelming. He left the laboratory for six months, suffering from Graves’ disease, a disease likely related to stress. By the time he returned, Michael Dawson, a junior colleague he had asked to check Griffith’s results, had confirmed them. Avery had to accept them.
His work now turned in a different direction. He had to understand how one kind of pneumococcus was transformed into another. He was now almost sixty years old. Thomas Huxley said, “A man of science past sixty does more harm than good.” But now, more than ever, Avery focused on his task.

Source:
Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Revised ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: italics in original.)

Success Came Late to Author of Wizard of Oz

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

I remember a conversation with the late labor economist Sherwin Rosen on the substantial decline in research productivity of economists as they age. My memory is that he said the decline usually wasn’t because of inability, but because, at some point, the older economists stop trying.
I think there’s some truth to that. The belief that it is too late to succeed, can lead people to stop trying, and thereby make the prediction self-fulfilling.
Fortunately, L. Frank Baum kept trying:

(p. A15) If L. Frank Baum had been listed on the stock exchange in 1900, his shares would have been trading near historic lows. The soon-to-be famous author of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” had at that point failed at a long series of energetic attempts to find a career. At 44, Baum had already been a chicken farmer, an actor, a seller of machinery lubricants, a purveyor of novelty goods and a newspaper publisher. All his life he’d written lively prose — plays, ads, columns — but most of it seemed to go nowhere.

Then, suddenly, it did. The story of a girl named Dorothy who with her little dog, Toto, travels to the wondrous land of Oz burst from Baum’s pencil, almost taking him by surprise. “The story really seemed to write itself,” he told his publisher. “Then, I couldn’t find any regular paper, so I took anything at all, including a bunch of old envelopes.” Turned into a proper book with defining illustrations by W.W. Denslow, the story most of us know as “The Wizard of Oz” was an immediate sensation in 1900. In a review, the New York Times commended it, saying that it was “ingeniously woven out of commonplace material.” Baum would produce 13 sequels, though none had quite the sparkle of the first.

For the full review, see:
JOHN STEELE GORDON. “Books; Inventing a New World; The men who engineered the astonishing emergence of the modern age.” Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 11, 2009): W8.

The book being reviewed, is:
Schwartz, Evan I. Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Experiments Suggest We Can Live Longer

“Rhesus monkeys, 27-year-old Canto, left, and Owen, 29, are among the oldest surviving subjects in a study of the links between diet and aging.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) A study published Wednesday found that rapamycin, a drug used in organ transplants, increased the life span of mice by 9% to 14%, the first definitive case in which a chemical has been shown to extend the life span of normal mammals.

Anti-aging researchers also expect a second study, to be released this week, will show that sharply cutting the calorie intake of monkeys extends their lives substantially. The experiment is said to be the first technique shown to retard aging in primates.
The prospect of a reliable human longevity pill is still distant. A commentary released with the rapamycin study strongly cautioned against taking the drug to prolong life because of potentially deadly side effects. Rapamycin suppresses the immune system and carries strong warnings about the resulting risk of infections and death.
But the mouse and monkey findings appear to mark the most substantial scientific progress yet in the search for ways to extend human life spans — once viewed as a fringe area of study.
“It’s time to break out of our denial about aging,” said Aubrey de Grey, a British gerontologist who has drawn controversy for his suggestions on how to forestall death. “Aging is, unequivocally, the major cause of death in the industrialized world and a perfectly legitimate target of medical intervention.”

For the full story, see:
KEITH J. WINSTEIN. “”Two Mammals’ Longevity Boosted; Transplant Drug Lengthens Lives of Mice, and Fewer Calories Benefit Monkeys.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., JULY 10, 2009): A3.

Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Experiments on Animal Genes Enthuses Longevity Researchers

“Charles Yogi, 89, a track & field athlete, is part of the Hawaii Lifespan Study.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ story quoted and cited below.

(p. A18) Based on animal experiments, gerontologists believe that one key to a healthy, longer lifespan may be found in a few master genes that affect cellular responses to famine, drought and other survival stresses. The more active these genes are, the longer an organism seems to survive — at least in the laboratory. Moreover, researchers are convinced that some genes may protect us against the risks of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and dementia.
. . .
Recent insights into the genetics of aging among simple organisms are stoking their enthusiasm. In January, for example, gerontologist Valter Longo at the University of Southern California reported that by altering two genes he made yeast that lived 10 times longer than normal. “We can really reprogram the lifespan of these organisms,” he said. In March, scientists at the University of Washington identified 15 genes regulating lifespan in yeast and worms that resemble genes found in humans. At least three companies are working independently on potential therapies based on the discovery that life span in mammals may be regulated partly by genetically controlled enzymes called sirtuins.

For the full story, see:
ROBERT LEE HOTZ. “Secrets of the ‘Wellderly’; Scientists Hope to Crack the Genetic Code of Those Who Live the Longest.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., SEPTEMBER 19, 2008): A18.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Age and Inventiveness

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B5) A particularly stark view of age-related constraints on researchers’ work comes from Benjamin Jones, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He examined biographical data over the past century for more than 700 Nobel laureates and renowned inventors.

His conclusion: “Innovators are productive over a narrowing span of their life cycle.” In the early 20th century, he found, researchers at the times of their greatest contributions averaged slightly more than 36 years old. In recent decades, innovation before the age of 30 became increasing rare, with the peak age of contribution rising toward age 40. Meanwhile, the frequency of key contributions has consistently diminished by researchers in their early or mid-50s.
Occasionally, Mr. Jones says, booming new fields “permit easier access to the frontier, allowing people to make contributions at younger ages.” That could account for the relative youth of Internet innovators, such as Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc Andreessen and Messrs. Page and Brin. But “when the revolution is over,” Mr. Jones finds, “ages rise.”
Unwilling to see researchers at peak productivity for only a small part of their careers, tech companies are fighting back in a variety of ways. At microchip maker Texas Instruments Inc., in Dallas, executives are pairing up recent college graduates and other fresh research hires with experienced mentors, called “craftsmen,” for intensive training and coaching.
This system means that new design engineers can become fully effective in three or four years, instead of five to seven, says Taylor Efland, chief technologist for TI’s analog chip business. Analog chips are used in power management, data conversion and amplification.
At Sun Microsystems Inc., teams of younger and older researchers are common. That can help everyone’s productivity, says Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer for the Santa Clara, Calif., computer maker. Younger team members provide energy and optimism; veterans provide a savvier sense of what problems to tackle.

For the full story, see:
GEORGE ANDERS. “THEORY & PRACTICE; Companies Try to Extend Researchers’ Productivity; Teams of Various Ages, Newer Hires Combat Short Spans of Inventing.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., AUGUST 18, 2008): B5.

A large literature exists on the relationship between age and scientific productivity. I am particularly fond of the following examples:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “Age and the Acceptance of Cliometrics.” The Journal of Economic History 40, no. 4 (December 1980): 838-841.
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “An Economic Model of the Life-Cycle Research Productivity of Scientists.” Scientometrics 6, no. 3 (1984): 189-196.
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “The Life-Cycle Research Productivity of Mathematicians and Scientists.” The Journal of Gerontology 41, no. 4 (July 1986): 520-525.
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “An Optimal Control Model of the Life-Cycle Research Productivity of Scientists.” Scientometrics 11, nos. 3-4 (1987): 247-249.
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “The Polywater Episode and the Appraisal of Theories.” In A. Donovan, L. Laudan and R. Laudan, eds., Scrutinizing Science: Empirical Studies of Scientific Change. Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988, 181-198.
Hull, David L., Peter D. Tessner and Arthur M. Diamond, Jr. “Planck’s Principle: Do Younger Scientists Accept New Scientific Ideas with Greater Alacrity than Older Scientists?” Science 202 (November 17, 1978): 717-723.

“Dream Big and Dare to Fail”

(p. 8A) ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – Norman Vaughan, a dog handler and driver in Adm. Richard Byrd’s 1928 expedition to the South Pole, has died.
Vaughan died at Providence Alaska Medical Center just a few days after turning 100 years old.
He was well enough six days before his death to enjoy a birthday celebration at the hospital attended by more than 100 friends and hospital workers.
Vaughan’s motto was “Dream big and dare to fail.”

Source:
“Vaughan with Byrd at Pole.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, January 8, 2006): 8A.