The Exigency of Medical Research on Aging

Michael E. DeBakey, M.D.
Chancellor Emeritus, Baylor College of Medicine
Distinguished Service Professor and
Olga Keith Wiess Professor of Surgery
Director, DeBakey Heart Center

This is truly a heartwarming tribute you have accorded me, and I am most sincerely grateful. I appreciate the perspicacious remarks made by our President, Dr. Peter Traber, I am also thankful for the eloquent encomium expressed by Dr. Rollo Hanlon, one of the most esteemed pioneering cardiovascular surgeons of our time and an internationally recognized scholar. For me, his long, faithful, and devoted friendship is well expressed by Grimald, the 16th century English poet:

"Of all the heavenly gifts that mortal man commend, What trusty treasure in the world can countervail a friend?"

I am also grateful to John Ochsner for the laudatory, and sometimes refreshing, sentiments he expressed. I take great pride in his surgical accomplishments following his cardiovascular surgical training with me. It is personally satisfying for me because his late father, the eminent Dr. Alton Ochsner, was my surgery mentor.

I should now like to turn to the more important, and basic, reason for this gracious gathering, namely, the support of the Huffington Center on Aging. The generosity of Phyllis and Roy Huffington in establishing this Center deserves special plaudits from us and our children. Sincere gratitude is also due Lynn Wyatt, Melinda Berkman, and Ann Bookout, who have diligently and faithfully labored to make this evening not only pleasurable, but highly successful.

On a sad note, we all mourn the irreplaceable loss of Phyllis Huffington, whose consuming humanitarian interests and fervent support of research in aging and of healthcare for the elderly led to the founding of the Huffington Center on Aging by her and Ambassador Huffington. Her acute intellect and vision are reflected in anticipation of the extended human longevity we are now witnessing. May her gentle soul rest in peace.

The generosity of the donors for the Huffington Center, reflecting the philanthropic spirit of this community, are truly exemplary. This magnanimity I have personally witnessed – in the building of a Medical Center from absolute ground zero to one of the most prestigious and innovative academic health centers in the world, all within a relatively brief half century, an accomplishment that no other medical center in the world can proclaim.

The ineluctability of the aging process, along with some of its indispositions, have long been recognized and acknowledged. Through the years, the sages have written prolifically about aging, and some of their aphorisms are edifying. Over 2,000 years ago Plato wrote:

"He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden."

Plato’s disciple, Aristotle, in his Diogenes Laertuis, made the following statement, that resonates with me:

"Education is the best provision for old age."

And shortly afterwards, Hippocrates noted that:

"Old people have fewer diseases than the young, but their diseases never leave them."

(The Huffington Center has found a way to defy that assertion.)

Not long after that, Antoiphanes, in his Fragments, stated:

"Old age is, so to speak, the sanctuary of ills; they all take refuge in it."

Poets, too, addressed this life process, some more dismally than others. Thus, in Richard III, Shakespeare wrote:

"I have not that alacrity of spirit, Nor cheer of mind, that I was wont to have."

When he was a little older, he took a more temperate view by writing in As You Like It:

"My age is as a lusty Winter, Frosty, but kindly."

Byron’s poesy, which is among my favorites, is more poignant on this matter. In his Don Juan, he ruminated:

"Just as old age is creeping on apace,
And clouds come o’er the sunset of our day,
They Kindly leave us, though not quite alone
But in good company – the gout or stone."

Lord Byron, another of my favorite poets, in his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, included this verse in a somewhat plaintive moods, but with his characteristic rapturous cadence;

"What is the worst of woes that wait on Age?
What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow:
To view each loved one blotted from life’s page
And be alone on earth, as I am now."

Walt Whitman, however, was almost blissful when he referred to this phase of life in this Song at Sunset as:

"The grandeur and exquisiteness of old age."

In a recent book, appropriately entitled Age Doesn’t Matter Unless You’re Cheese, I found this delightful quotation from Albert Einstein:

"Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born."

Even Will Rogers, whose satiric witticisms were often directed politically, sometimes weighed in on growing older with such persiflage as:

1. First, eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.
2. Second, the older we get the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.
3. Third, some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know "why" I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.
4. Fourth, you know you are getting old when everything dries up or leaks.
5. Fifth, I don’t know how I got over the hill without getting to the top.
6. Sixth, one of the many things no one tells you about aging is that it is such a nice change from being young.
7. Seventh, one must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.
8. Eight, being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable.
9. Ninth, long ago when man cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft, today it’s call golf.
10. And finally, if you don’t learn to laugh at trouble, you won’t have anything to laugh at when you are old.

On a more serious note, let me cite a few observations on the importance of the Huffington Center on Aging and its role in medical research and a healthful longevity:

In the past century, survival expectancy in the United States has almost doubled, and the number and proportion of older people are steadily increasing. It is estimated that within the next few decades more than 70 million Americans will be 65 years and older. The number of centenarians, currently estimated to 50 to 75 thousand, will increase to 131,000 in the year 2010 and to 834,000 in the year 2050.

By age 75, most adults have three or more medical anomalies. These figures strikingly demonstrate the need to address this problem vigorously in terms of both advancing longevity and controlling the associated indisposing medical conditions. Only by expansion of focused research and training of geriatric physicians can these objectives be achieved. This is precisely the mission of the Huffington Center on Aging, a mission that is being pursued with great diligence and much satisfaction under the admirable leadership first of Dr. Robert J. Luchi, Founding Director, and now of Dr. Roy Smith, current Director. In recent years considerable progress has been made in discovering age-related biomarkers. There is good reason to believe that further, more intensive research in the Huffington Center on Aging can lead to a better understanding of the complex panel of such biomarkers, which may provide more effective recognition of the underlying critical age-related biologic changes, and may thus result in extended longevity, as well as a more enjoyable life

I would like to conclude with two keenly sensitive and concinnate verses. First from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.’s The Old Player:

"Call him not old whose visionary brain
Holds o’er the post its undivided reign,
For him in vain the envious seasons roll,
Who bears eternal summer in this soul."

And finally from Henry Wordsworth Longfellow’s Morituri Salutamus:

"Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales
At Sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales
Goethe, at Weimer, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past.
What then? Shall we sit idly down and say
The night hath come; it is no longer day?
The night hath not yet come; we are not quite
Cut off from labor by failing light;
For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day."

Thank you for a marvelous evening, and God bless you.

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