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quate should try feeding it to rats. The experimenter is almost certain to find that the rats fail to reproduce in the second or third generations."
We are given more hope of perpetuating ourselves and our kind by Professor Henry Clapp Sherman, of Columbia University, who maintains that something like an extra decade can be inserted at the apex of life by the simple expedient of living in accordance with today's knowledge of nutrition. He recommends a "supersufficient diet — high in vitamins, calcium and protein."
IT is a comparatively new subject — this science of old age — and it is known as geriatrics or gerontology. Geriatrist Henry S. Simms of the Columbia University School of Medicine says, "Ninety per cent of the deaths in the United States each year result from the progressive loss of resistance to disease with advancing age. The death of humans is at a minimum at the age of ten. If the death rate remained at this level throughout the whole life span, your life expectancy would be 550 years instead of about 63 . .
Resistance to disease is a chemical process, according to Dr. Simms, and the work of the geriatrist is to find out why the process is so efficient in children, and steadily decreases in efficiency as people grow older.
Professor Hornell Hart of Duke University is even more optimistic as to the prospects of a longer life. There will be no foreseeable limit to the number of years a man may live, he says, "when the reasons are discovered for aging in organisms made up
August, 1931
of cells which under favorable conditions remain immortally young."
Oxford scientist Dr. V. Korenchevsky, heads a staff whose purpose is to find out "Why one man dies at 50 while another lives to 100 . . . When Vv^e find the answer to this question it will be perfectly simple to insure normal life to well over 100 by administering the proper chemical compounds to help life run its normal course."
Death rates have been declining steadily during the past half century as a result of progress in medicine; but, according to the Census Bureaus, the rate for women is, for some unknown reason, declining faster than the rate for men. In the 45 to 54 age group, male deaths fell from 15.7 per 1,000 to 12.5, and female deaths from 14.2 to 8.6 between 1900 and 1940.
Some of the advice scientists beam our way may not be welcome to all of us. "It is better not to drink even moderately if you want to live long on this earth," asserts New York Life's Dr. Arthur Hunter. He states that records of sixty life insurance companies for over 2,000,000 people prove that every drink costs the moderate drinker 25 minutes of life.
Smoking will prevent your living as long as you otherwise would, according to the late Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins. "Smoking is associated with a definite impairment of longevity. This curtailment of life is proportional to the habitual amount of tobacco smoked, being great for the heavy, and less for the moderate smokers."
People live longer in some parts of the country than in others. You will
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