In a series of publications several decades ago, Roger Williams articulated the fact that each individual person is biochemically and physically unique - to a much greater extent than is usually realized. (See, for example,
Our health is, in part, a function of our biochemical environment. Since we are each unique, it is likely that the ideal chemical conditions for each of us are also unique. Even these "ideals'' are individualized, since the aspirations, for example, of a long-distance runner are different from those of a physicist or an expectant mother. If all three happened to be biochemically identical, the goals of each would probably be optimized by different chemical environments.
This applies to both our internal and external chemical environments. A farmer in Iowa might differ from a farmer in India. One might prefer DDT on his crops alone, while the other would apply it also to the walls of his home in order to prevent malaria.
The wonders of modern chemistry have enabled us to synthesize a great many of the chemicals that affect our lives such as vitamins and hormones. Chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides have also enhanced the efficiency of modern farming to such an extent that we have a wide variety of foods available with different chemical compositions. Medicines are, of course, another chemical benefit.
The trick is to know how much of each substance to introduce into our own individual environments to achieve optimum health. Moreover, this is not a question that any of us can postpone. We are living now in a chemical environment over which we have a substantial amount of control. We do not have the ability to delay our lives and live them at some future time when more knowledge is available.
Everyone, therefore, guesses. Even the drug addict guesses, although his guess is obviously wrong. Obviously wrong also are the guesses of ignorant people who decide to fear that which they do not understand and seek escape from "chemicals.'' The editorial "How to Survive the Perils of Eating'' by Thomas H. Jukes,
The FASEB Journal 9, pp 991-992, August 1995 gives current examples of this.
The stakes are high as is illustrated in Figure 1. As Jukes points out, life expectancies are steadily rising in the United States. This is happening largely as a result of modern chemistry. Still, millions of lives are unnecessarily shortened as a result of limitations in our abilities to optimize our chemical environments.
Figures 1 to 7 are from the paper "Quantitative Measurement of Human Physiological Age by Profiling of Body Fluids and Pattern Recognition'' by A. B. Robinson and L. R. Robinson,
Mechanisms of Ageing and Development 59, pp 47-67 (1991). Figure 1 shows the life expectancies (violent deaths omitted) of two experimental groups of American men - one group in their 20s and the other in their 50s and 60s. Notice the large group of young men who will be outlived by the older men and the large group of older men who will die long before some of the others. Moreover, there are many years of deteriorating health and suffering associated with most of these early deaths.In order to intelligently adjust a chemical system, one needs quantitative information about that system and a quantitative evaluation of the results of each adjustment. This is especially true of the biochemistry of a human being - a system so complicated that it cannot (during our lifetimes) be directly and entirely understood.
It is ironic, therefore, that today there are tens of millions of people sitting at computers that are providing them with a river of information about the outside world but which are providing no information at all about the individual health and biochemical well-being of these peo
ple. Yet, measured by their own self-interest, this internal biochemical information is far more important than most other information.
Suppose, for example, that you have just read the popular book The Melatonin Miracle by W. Pierpaoli, W. Regelson, and C. Colman, Si-mon and Schuster, 1995, have examined some of the underlying research papers, and have decided to adjust your melatonin level. The book contains some guesses about dose as a function of age, but how much is best for you individually? More importantly, how are you going to know whether or not the dose you decide to take has a positive or negative effect on your health? (We could just as well have used vitamin C in this example or any one of the thousands of other low-cost chemical modifications that are available to most Americans.) Melatonin has been shown to reverse and retard some of the degenerative effects of aging in mice. Will it do the same for you? Since the effects of such systemic changes are usually slow and people prone to self experimentation usually try numerous supplements, most mela-tonin users will never know whether or not it has helped them and most will discontinue it eventually. Few will ingest an ideal dose.
If, however, your personal computer had been daily measuring and tracking the physiological age of you and your family members by means of biochemical indicators in your urine or breath, you could obtain objective information about your melatonin experiment. If it slows your rate of aging or diminishes your personal probability of serious diseases, then the computer could help you adjust the dose for an optimum effect. If not, then you could move on quickly to something else.
Also, even though there is substantial biochemical individuality, there are many similarities between different people. As experience is accumulated, your computer should be able to direct you toward the most promising modifications.
Aging occurs slowly, but death-dealing conditions focus one's attention immediately. Each of us has his own examples. A close friend of ours died of lung cancer - metastasized from colon cancer which could have been surgically stopped. A family member died of hemorrhagic pancreatitis, also without the chance that surgery could have provided. In these cases, surgery might have saved their lives, but they did not know that they were ill. A computer interfaced to look daily at their biochemical profiles could have provided that knowledge.
Are such interfaces available in the marketplace? No. Could current technology provide them to the marketplace at prices comparable to good laser printers? We are sure that the answer is yes. These interfaces will not be provided by the deadwood of tax-financed inquiry and they will probably not be built by those parts of the medical indus
try whose executives count their profits in human suffering, but they will certainly be built by free enterprise. The only question is whether or not they will be built in our lifetimes.
We believe that a peripheral device for the personal computer of about the same size and cost as a laser printer can be built which has the capability of quantitative measurement of 50 to 100 substances in a sample of breath or urine. All of the software required to interpret this information was written and tested many years ago (see references in Robinson and Robinson paper mentioned above). The building of a prototype of this peripheral device is a primary goal of our work at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
Even one or two substances can contain substantial amounts of information. Figure 2 shows, for example, the successively increasing diagnostic coefficients as a function of age in fruit flies calculated from only two substances. Figure 3 shows the summed values of only two substances in the casual urine of men as a function of age, while Figure 4 gives age diagnostic coefficients calculated from 15 human urinary constituents - 8 of which increase with age and 7 of which decrease.
In the case of Figure 4, quantitative measurements of 15 substances in casual (ordinarily provided without special instructions or requirements) urine samples have been compressed by calculation into a one-dimensional parameter of the sort illustrated by Figure 5. It is these one-dimensional compressions that guide decisions.
It is important to recognize that the substances measured in these experiments did not include any special selection based on aging. Approximately 30% of the substances in human urine are moderately to strongly age correlated, so virtually any random selection of metabo-lites can lead to the same result. Since this is true of many aspects of our systemic health, it is to be expected that a single computer peripheral could evaluate most conditions of interest.
Figure 6 illustrates a simple use of this technique. From the diagnostic coefficients from Figure 4 scattered along the life remaining axis in Figure 5, the men can be classified as young or old by choosing an arbitrary point and calling everyone to the left "young'' and everyone to the right "old.'' By using all possible arbitrary points, Figure 6 can be constructed. The curved line shows a theoretically perfect result (taking into account the overlapping life expectancies), while the stepped line is from the experiment. Imagine that we were instead classifying colon cancer or pancreatitis.
Returning to our problem with the melatonin pills, the daily quanti
tative measurement of your own physiological age would give you and your computer a longitudinal baseline which takes into account your own biochemical individuality and rate of aging. After you have been taking melatonin for a while, the computer could simply calculate the probability that it is affecting your physiological age. If the results are pleasing, you could vary the dose to find an optimum.This is not science fiction. We originated part of this field of inquiry and have worked in this area for many years. These machines can be built now, and they eventually will be built. It is then that the computer will be a truly interactive tool for the benefit of ordinary people.
Through optimum nutrition; through hormone adjustment with age; through early application of procedures such as surgery; and through other techniques - guided by the computational power of microchips that track our personal health within our own homes (entirely independent of the deadwood of government and medical bureaucracy), our aging curve will eventually improve as illustrated in Figure 7.
How much can we expect to adjust our fate by the intelligent use of chemistry? Many years ago, I designed a series of experiments on cancer in mice which were then carried out over a two-year period by technicians under my direction and extended later by F. C. Westall. (See Robinson, A. B., Hunsberger, A., and Westall, F. C.,
Mechanisms of Aging and Development 76, pp 210-214 (1994). The results of one part of those experiments (increased rate of cancer growth with vitamin C supplements) caused so much trouble that Linus Pauling went ballistic and even now, after his death, his relatives are still publicizing myths about the incident.This controversy over vitamin C obscured, however, the real result. In experiments on squamous cell carcinoma in 1,846 mice using about 30 different diets,
we were able to vary the rate of growth of cancer over a 20-fold range by diet alone. Obviously, the possibility of giving each cancer victim (or potential victim - which includes us all) a tool for quantitative health measurement to guide his own nutritional self-experiments should be turned into a reality.
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Vol. 23, No. 4
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 23, No. 4 Date: December 01, 1995 01:30 PM Title: Up From Slavery
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