to separate, under very high G, cell moieties on a very large scale. The Anderson centrifuge has been used to separate viruslike particles from human tumors, and has been used to clean vaccines of the feverproducing foreign proteins that are usually associated with them. (See figs. 3 and 4, pp. 42, 43.) Although the development of the Anderson centrifuge has cost the American people several millions of dollars, it already has had and it will doubtless continue to have profound effects on both clinical and basic biomedicine. Therefore the money spent on the centrifuge represents a very fine investment. In addition, one must remember that the development was achieved, relatively speaking, at minimal cost to the taxpayer in view of the significance of the returns on the investment.

VI

Anderson's zonal centrifuge is an example of an extremely important engineering device that was developed for biologists and medical scientists as the result of close interplay between biologists, engineers, chemists, and physicists. Are there any other devices requiring such interplay that are now crying to be developed? One that is now receiving a good deal of attention is the 1Å electron microscope. Conventional electron microscopes are limited in their resolution on the one hand by spherical aberration, if the aperture is too large, and on the other hand by diffraction if the aperture is too small. Thus, practically, a point-to-point resolution of better than 5Å needs an invention.

Fortunately the techniques of strong focusing that have been developed by high-energy accelerator physicists may solve the problem of the 1A electron microscope. And at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at Argonne National Laboratory, as well as at several universities, projects have been undertaken to develop such a microscope. If it proves feasible, a 1Å microscope may revolutionize biochemistry, as well as ordinary chemistry for one would then be able to see selected molecules, atom by atom.

The 1A microscope, Anderson's zonal centrifuge, automated clinical biochemistry-not to speak of the huge mammalian experiments that will be required to assess, let alone understand, the subtle effects of insults to the biosphere imposed by our civilization's waste productsare massive, expensive, and interdisciplinary science-engineering activities. Since this new big biology is so expensive (though not nearly as expensive as space research) such activities are best done in big, interdisciplinary Government laboratories. In this I echo John R. Platt, who calls for national laboratories for biology like the AEC laboratories, where large interdisciplinary, integrated attacks on welldefined objectives have been carried on for many years.

Is it feasible to redeploy some of the existing Government laboratories around many of these problems? Our experience at ORNL suggests that it is. We began as a laboratory devoted primarily to heavy chemical engineering. But during the past 20 years, our Biology and Health Physics Divisions have grown more rapidly than has the rest of the Laboratory, until now these two divisions, with a total of 327 technical people, constitute one of the largest activities at ORNL. Many of the biologists interact strongly with the physicists, chemists,

John R. Platt, "National Laboratories for Biology?", Science 136, 859-861 (1962)

and engineers of ORNL; Anderson's zonal centrifuge and P. R. Bell's medical scintillometer are outstanding fruits of this collaboration. Moreover, our interest in biology, originally confined to radiation effects, is now much more broadly concerned with various physical insults to the biosphere.

So I would visualize, along the lines described by Platt, that other laboratories that started originally with a strong bias toward the

Figure 4. Influenza Virus Concentrate After Purification with Zonal Centrifuge.

physical sciences and engineering will gradually address themselves to the problems of biology, especially those that are in the style of big biology, or those that have already reached the feasibility threshold and that can be reduced to engineering development. I can only hope that as more areas of biology are brought to the feasibility thresholdby continuing vigorous attack on basic biology-the style and resources of the large interdiscipilinary laboratory can help alleviate man's most elementary suffering-disease and premature death.

RESEARCH ON AGING: A FRONTIER OF SCIENCE AND SOCIAL GAIN

By James E. Birren, Ph. D.

Director, Rossmoor-Cortese Institute for Study of Retirement and Aging;
Professor of Psychology, University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, Calif.

SUMMARY

Research on aging has great implications for the health and wellbeing of adult man and the quality of his life in contemporary society. Few topics in the life sciences have more scope and significance than questions about the nature of aging in man and in other living systems. Having a national commitment to cultivate as high a proportion as possible of adults of sound body and mind who are able to function independently requires that we take definite steps to encourage research into the nature of aging. To carry out our commitment to the health and well-being of the population also requires that we strengthen the administrative context within which research is done so that we may gain from proven ideas at the earliest date. Research on aging finds itself in a new context. The public is restless for a higher quality of life for the adult and for the older person.

Several key questions in research on aging and a number of important national developments in programs for the aged demand attention. These questions can be distinguished as those of scientific problems, administrative organization of research, and public policy. New patterns of scientific effort and administration are needed and are very slowly emerging, but all too slowly I am afraid. Groups of scientists are becoming eager to study man's development over the lifespan, including research on the interrelations between physiological, psychological, and social factors in aging. If an optimum environment is to be created so individuals can realize their full biological and psychological potentials not only in youth and middle age but old age as well, we must have facts. We require an adequate national source of fundamental knowledge on which future services and sound administration of programs can be based. Right now planning for the aging is done on a fire brigade basis. We deal with specific problems, treat specific diseases, and build special facilities without fundamental understanding of the meaning of aging biologically, psychologically, and socially. This is a prescription for wasted effort.

How do we acquire these understandings? We need now to develop the concepts, the thinkers, the research facilities, the places of new therapy and observation. The Nation has few germinating resources to undertake this assignment. I propose several policies and administrative arrangements to give needed strength to our national effort. A. The Federal Government should establish university-based Institutes for Research on Aging at strategic places. We need headquarters not only for new research on aging but also to seize opportunities to add a gerontological perspective to biomedical research already in progress. The influences of the physical and social environment on againg should be included in the scope of research.

B. Research manpower is needed. Institutes for Research on Aging should serve as the centers for training the variety of investigators committed to studying influences on the lifespan and the role of disease as well as physiological, psychological and social changes of aging. What a loss if the need for aging studies was recognized years from now and society had to mark time until investigators could be trained.

C. We need lifelong systems of health maintenance. Technical excellence exists in medical and basic science specialties, but we need a multisystem approach in terms valuable to physicians and social thinkers-in terms of whole organisms and their environments. Missing is basic knowledge of how the human system becomes vulnerable as it ages.

D. Such a broad task requires new means of organizing scientific research since our usual administrative mechanisms simply are not geared to integrative studies of life. Research in aging has been faltering despite its potentials, despite indications that it could be at a take-off point. Administrative action should be considered now to: strengthen a national center for the study of aging within the National Institutes of Health on a scale that befits what we foresee as the national need for information on processes of aging; and establish, in conjunction with university institutes for research on aging, regional data banks organized to facilitate lifespan research. These data banks would also be a natural part of a health "preventicare" approach, that is, longitudinal multiphasic screening of populations.

Research on aging is a vast frontier of science that has prospects for eventual gains in man's well-being.

AGING AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON

Aging is a pervasive property of living things. Both plants and animals show characteristic changes with advancing age, such that one may recognize an individual as being "old." Being old implies that an animal has a short remaining life expectancy. Cuttings taken from old plants will show lower survival or less successful grafting than will cuttings from young members of the same species. Not only is aging commonly observed in other forms of life, its occurrence in man presents profound issues of research, administration, and personal values. Many animals in the wild state rarely have the chance to live to a late life; that is, they do not often live after the age of reproduction has ceased. However, when such animals are moved to a favorable environment they may survive longer and show a pattern of aging. Thus, animals that do not have the opportunity of showing aging in their predatory natural environments do have an inborn potential for aging that they display if the environment becomes favorable. This leads to the seemingly paradoxical point that aging is a product of favorable environments. In human terms it is only in technologically advanced countries of the world that there is the privilege of aging populations. In such countries, as in the United States, the intelligent layman along with the scientist asks the question, "What causes aging?" since it hardly takes a scientific observer to note that most living systems. change with age and eventually die. Our concepts of aging have become refined in recent years as a result of the research of investigators