Discussion

Roy Walford: a tribute

Richard A. Miller*

University of Michigan, 5316 CCGCB, Box 0940, 1500 East Medical Center Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0940, USA

My bookshelf has two hardback copies of “The Immuno-

logic Theory of Aging” written by Roy Walford and

published by Munksgaard in 1969. The first of these, more

dog-eared, I bought with my own money in my first year or

two of graduate school. I knew I wanted to study aging, but

did not know where to start. My thesis advisor had

suggested a PhD dissertation project with an immunological

twist, but a few months wrestling in the library with the

Journal of Immunology had convinced me that immunology

was too hard for me and that I had better find another, easier

path to gerontological success. By the time I’d gotten my

degree, though, enough had soaked in from Roy’s book

about the special privileges afforded to immunological

cognoscenti wishing to make a splash in the gerontology

world, to make me bite the bullet and tackle immunology for

my postdoctoral work. Immunologists get to play around

with a system that is suspended in liquids in its natural state,

and therefore willing to do tricks in tissue culture; a system

that protects against the diseases old people get; a system

that has attracted enough attention among the gerontologi-

cally unwashed that we do not have to start from scratch in

making clones, mice, reagents, and theories; and a system

that we can get paying jobs for teaching about. No medical

school needs a biogerontologist (or so they think); but all

medical schools need immunologists. Roy, along with

Takashi Makinodan and a few others, was the first to note

and promote the powers of modern immunological

approaches as tools for the analysis of aging, and those of

us who followed in his footsteps will always owe him a debt

for this aspect of his work.

The second copy of the book arrived as a gift, with a nice

inscription from Roy, in 1987. By then I was a designated

hitter when an NIA site visit squad needed an immunology

maven to chime in on a P01 or T32 grant, and I’d seen a lot

of Roy, and UCLA, from the wrong side of the site visitors’

table. I would have to check my records, but I suspect that

Roy got enough of those applications funded to put me on

his “friendly person” list. Several of us have vivid memories

of being locked in a room with other site visitors not as

informed or as excited about aging and calorie restriction,

trying to convince them that yes, it might actually be a good

thing to give the cute little mice less food than they would

wish to consume on their own, for the sake of scientific

inquiry. I had given a talk at UCLA, at Roy’s invitation, and

enjoyed the thrill of seeing (and eating too much of) a lavish

buffet of high calorie food, adjacent, in Roy’s supercool

swinging duplex, to early drafts of the Official Good-For-

You Anti-Aging Cookbook, in which potato chips and sour

cream dip were noticeably less conspicuous. (For the

record: Roy did sneak an occasional nosh from the buffet,

but only when he thought most guests were not looking and

thus would not be unduly influenced by his bad example.) I

had once been awed, as a mere graduate student in the early

1970s, wandering into the bathroom at my first Aging

Gordon Conference, to see Roy Walford (yes! the Roy

Walford!) carefully shaving his head with a New Hampshire

prep school safety razor (shaved head equals more heat loss,

lowers body temperature, makes you live longer) and had

admired equally the manual dexterity and good lab

technique required for this trick and the commitment to

gerontological theory to which the tonsure testified. So

receiving a hand-inscribed copy of the Immunological

Theory of Aging was a real treat, a sign that while not

myself a bigshot, I was demonstrably at least a friend of a

bigshot.

To be honest, the Immunological Theory of Aging is no

longer the most-often consulted reference work on my shelf.

That honor goes to The Retardation of Aging and Disease by

Dietary Restriction, Roy’s other magnum opus, written with

his former student and colleague Rick Weindruch. Someone

had to read all those pre-internet articles no longer

accessible to those of us who have decided that if it’s not

available electronically, it does not exist, and we are all

fortunate that Roy and Rick had the gumption to do it at all,

as well as the chops to do it right.

One of Roy’s ideas, which I first encountered at a 1980s

Westwood site visit, seemed odd to me at the time, and has

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

doi:10.1016/j.exger.2004.03.011

Experimental Gerontology 39 (2004) 917–918

www.elsevier.com/locate/expgero

* Tel.: þ1-734-936-2122; fax: þ1-734-647-9749.

E-mail address: millerr@umich.edu (R.A. Miller).

unfortunately taken a decade or two to sink in, but now that I

have seen the light it seems so obvious that I cannot

understand why so few agree with Roy and me. This is the

idea that if a CR diet slows aging, it must start to work soon

after imposition of the CR regimen and keep on working

while the controls get old fast and the experimental rodents

get older slowly. The traditional way of studying a restricted

rodent, still, alas, the overwhelming favorite approach, is to

compare young, old, and old restricted subjects, to prove

that the old restricted fellows look rather young. Well, they

sure do, and there are .1000 papers to prove this. Roy

proposed that smart researchers should instead compare

young controls to young restricted, to see what the CR diet

did before aging got in the way to complicate things, and he

argued that such experimental designs had a far better

chance of distinguishing cause from (complex) effect. This

same principle applies equally well to analyses of anti-aging

pathways in mice that owe their longevity to genetic

blessings rather than to stingy quartermasters. To misquote

both Alexander Pope and George Martin, the proper study

of the biogerontologist is the middle-aged, or at any rate it

ought to be.

Roy’s most recent career shift, from lab-bound grant

writer and mouse farmer to Arizona Astronaut Biospherian

Physician-Scientist, provides still further inspiration for

those of us convinced that there must be another metier out

there that’s more fun than arguing with Deans over space

and arguing with referees and peer reviewers over the merits

of our favorite ideas, merits which are obvious to us but less

so to the troglodytes to which our papers and grants are

consigned. My subteen daughter has spent, over the years,

as much cooling-off time locked into her airless room as

Roy did voluntarily confined to the Biosphere, but of the

two of them only one has turned what to an outsider seems a

punitive hellhole (just kidding, Roy; it sounds really really

nice) into a productive intellectual adventure.

William Sloane Coffin, also approaching the end of an

inspiring career of service, teaching, and creativity, was

quoted thus in a recent New Yorker profile: “I feel strongly

that Oliver Wendell Holmes is right. Not to share in the

activity and passion of your time is to count as not having

lived. I don’t claim virtue. I claim a low level of boredom.” I

think it’s safe to say that Roy Walford has also chosen a path

on which boredom has never made much of an appearance.

R.A. Miller / Experimental Gerontology 39 (2004) 917–918918