Discussion

Roy Walford: a personal tribute

Steven N. Austad*

Department of Biological Sciences, University of Idaho, P.O. Box 443051, Moscow ID 83844-3051, USA

Sometimes when I’m looking at a slew of academic

curricula vitae for some professional occasion, it strikes

me how bloodless they are—little more than dry litanies of

proposals, papers, and presentations. However, for a

substantial number of scientists I have known, the c.v.

seems to pretty much capture the essence of their lives,

which oscillate between long hours in the lab and sleepless

nights at the computer with the tempo occasionally

interrupted by jetting off to meetings, workshops, and

lectures.

I think of these people as the anti-Walfords. Because as

everyone knows, Roy Walford’s c.v. doesn’t capture a

vestige of a ghost of a shadow of his life. That life includes

(as his daughter Lisa’s essay in this volume so well

describes) the poems and short stories and popular science,

he wrote, the guerrilla theater and social experimentation in

which he participated, as well as the swashbuckling treks

and tours he made.

It isn’t surprising that his spirit of wide-ranging

adventurousness bled over into his science. He has been

one of our broadest thinkers. If he thought that the immune

system played a critical role in aging, then the next thing

you know he produced a book on the topic. Or let me clarify,

he didn’t just “produce a book” like you might produce a

casserole, he produced a broadly integrated, meticulously

researched, gracefully written book that remained ‘current’

for years. If his observations on mice and rats led him to

believe that human aging could also be retarded by

restricting caloric intake, not only would he then write a

series of technical and trade books on the topic, but he

would also begin restricting his own diet. He represents a

sadly vanishing tradition of physicians who are so confident

in their hypotheses that they first try them out on

themselves.

My first professional contact with Roy was in 1987,

when I was trying to break into the aging field with a

paper on caloric restriction in spiders, an experiment I had

done for other reasons as part of my PhD. I was worried

that none of the hardcore medical types would take

research performed on such an obscure animal seriously,

and that I’d have to wait to make my formal entrance into

the field. But I soon had a letter from Roy asking if he

could use a figure from my paper in his upcoming book

(written with Rick Weindruch) on dietary restriction. I

was elated.

Not long after that, I met Roy in person at a professional

meeting. I’d heard rumors that he was restricting his own

diet and one look at him was enough to convince me it was

true. I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe someone

rather fey and willowy, but I was immediately taken by his

extraordinary verve and energy and remember asking

people who had known him for a long time whether he’d

always been like that or whether his restricted diet had

energized him. I never got an answer I felt I could rely on

from my inquiries, but I have watched Roy intently and

admiringly from a distance ever since. When I was writing

a book on aging a number of years later and felt that I

needed to express some doubts about what could be

inferred from Roy’s unintended experiment on human

caloric restriction during the Biosphere 2 social experi-

ment, I worried incessantly that I might somehow offend

him with what I said. I should have known better. Roy has

that quiet confidence that he is right that is really

impervious to offense from an honestly expressed differ-

ence of opinion.

Roy has also been a pioneer in the use of multiple species

for aging research—an area of special interest to me. I

notice that over his career he has worked on mice and rats,

naturally, but also hamsters, guinea pigs, gerbils, deer mice,

primates, and killifish. I was particularly intrigued in the

early 1990s by those deer mice he bred with George Smith,

which somehow during their inbreeding, seemed to have

lost some genes necessary for hair production, so that in the

end he had lines of mice whose hairless pates so exactly

matched his own.

Roy has also never submitted to what I think of as

scientific happiness, which is repeating successful work

0531-5565/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.exger.2004.03.001

Experimental Gerontology 39 (2004) 871–872

www.elsevier.com/locate/expgero

* Tel.: þ1-208-885-6598; fax: þ1-208-885-7905.

E-mail address: austad@uidaho.edu (S.N. Austad).

over and over and over. He has always moved in new and

unexpected directions. I am thinking in particular of how he

began a few years ago to draw together biochemical

similarities between caloric restriction and hibernation—a

direction that is likely to be quite rewarding eventually,

I believe.

In the end though, despite his wildly successful scientific

career, it is impossible for me to think about Roy and not

think of what he managed to cram into his life besides his

professional achievements. Oscar Wilde once famously

quipped that he put only his talent into his work, he put his

genius into his life. That’s how I will always think of Roy.

S.N. Austad / Experimental Gerontology 39 (2004) 871–872872