Discussion

Roy Walford: dare to live!

Brian M. Delaney

President, Calorie Restriction Society, Gardena, CA, USA

I am the president of a nonprofit organization with the rather

prosaic name, The Calorie Restriction Society. The purpose

of the group is to support and even conduct research into the

application of Calorie restriction to humans, and to provide

a forum where both scientists and laypeople interested in

CR can exchange information about recent CR research.

The organization owes its existence to Roy Walford to an

extent that can scarcely be captured in these few pages. It is

not just his research that inspired the group’s formation, but

also his interest in, and rare talent for, explaining the details

of research, both his and others’, to the non-specialist. But

there are, in addition, many other things about the man

himself that have drawn people to our group.

We considered calling the group the Walford Society, but

we realized that such a name would confuse people, since it

would have far too many connotations to be able to describe

what we actually do—would the focus of an organization

with that name be on gerontology, or something else Roy

Walford is known for? Perhaps making money in Las

Vegas? Sailing around the world? Experimental art? Street

theater? Political journalism? The responsibility scientists

have for explaining their work to laypeople? The continued

essentiality of the endeavor to be a Renaissance woman or

man even in today’s unfathomable depths and boundless

breadths of knowledge? Or perhaps simply the importance

of leading an exemplary life, a life worth living, and

therefore a life worth emulating?

Our official purpose is indeed captured by the name we

chose, but the nonprofit is, in many respects, a de facto

Walford Society, insofar as those in our group actually

trying to follow a Calorie-restricted diet decided to change

their eating habits because they wanted to buy themselves a

few more years of life, since that might enable them to have

enough time to live a life as rich as Roy Walford’s [on a CR

diet is such a large one, it needed the “boost” of someone

leading an exemplary life…].

My own encounter with Roy began via his numerous

published research papers. Or, to begin with the relevant

prehistory, it began in 1992 in Baja California with a

burrito, a beer, and Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. I was on one

of my “study vacations” from my graduate work in

philosophy, and something in the burrito, I believe, or

perhaps in the beer, resulted in acute abdominal pain

(or perhaps it was something in the Heidegger?), which,

several days later got so bad that my physician in California

sent me to the hospital. I wasn’t too worried until I was told,

“you have to have a meeting with a surgeon.” I had

imagined that what was ailing me was merely food

poisoning (or at worst a failure to understand the relation

of the nature of Being to the finitude of mortal time). But

suddenly there was talk of appendicitis, colitis, Crohn’s

disease, and even more disturbing possibilities. Before I

went under the knife, I very quickly got better, and left the

hospital with a determination never to have to return.

My resolution to take better care of my health meant, first

of all, taking a step back and learning more about just how

that might best be done. After settling in at the University of

Chicago, where I had transferred from the University of

California to continue my graduate studies, I began

spending several hours a day in the University’s medical

library, reading about nutrition and perusing other medical

research journals. This might be considered a strange way to

learn how to take care of one’s health, but, given the

plethora of often contradictory advice one finds in the

popular press, I figured I’d get as close to the source of such

advice as possible.

I actually heard about Roy—or, rather, “that interesting,

curious former med school student”—before encountering

his published work. One of my professors at the Committee

on Social Thought at Chicago recalled a medical student

from decades past with an interest in the humanities, and

remarked that it was a coincidence that I was doing the

reverse of what that medical student did: my discipline was

philosophy, my extracurricular investigations involved

medicine and the biological sciences.

That medical student was Roy Walford. Out of curiosity,

I looked up his work on my next trip to the medical library.

That decision to look up his work changed my life

0531-5565/$ - see front matter q 2004 Published by Elsevier Inc.

doi:10.1016/j.exger.2004.03.003

Experimental Gerontology 39 (2004) 881–883

www.elsevier.com/locate/expgero

E-mail address: president@calorierestriction.org (B.M. Delaney).

fundamentally. It was my interest in the person that took my

extracurricular study of medical and biological research in a

new direction. Reading about basic nutrition might enable

me to confirm my sense that eating several meals a day at

McDonald’s is unwise, but getting up to speed on the latest

findings in research gerontology might someday, I reasoned

somewhat fancifully, enable me to take control of my own

health in a far more radical way, however quixotic the

pursuit of practical applications of such basic research might

be. And if the guy doing this research reads Aristotle in his

spare time, I should read everything he has written anyway,

since he may well be a potential mentor, if not a soul mate.

In reading about gerontology, thoughts and questions

from other disciplines entered my mind. I became

particularly interested in the relation between scientists’

work and the public at large. The paths from basic medical

and biological research to its application in humans are of

course many and varied. In the case of gerontology these

paths tend to be especially complicated, indeed controver-

sial. The matter of the application of this research to humans

started becoming particularly complicated towards the end

of the 20th century, since the possibility of effective

application of the research seemed to be on the brink of

leaving the realm of mere science fiction.

The desire to find applications for research gerontology

is usually intense not simply because of the obvious

potential for profit, but because so many of us desperately

want to live longer, healthier lives. The phenomenon,

movement, or, simply, “industry” known as life-extension is

famous for unusually large, at times facile leaps from

research results to human application. Anyone interested in

taking control of his or her health will by now have come

across life-extension literature or advertisements at one

point or another. The first time I saw life-extension literature

was in a health food store, where I saw a little pamphlet

describing something I had just read about at the medical

library, the free radical theory of aging. There was a picture

of a young woman’s face, with a small part of her cheek

blown up into a close-up view, showing a few very delicate-

seeming collagen molecules, and some small red circles

representing free radicals. The red circles were little devil

faces with open mouths and vampire fangs getting ready to

chomp away at the fragile molecules in this poor woman’s

face. Then there were some green circles representing anti-

oxidants. They had smiley faces on them, and looked like

they were guarding the woman’s collagen against the evil

vampire faces. The next picture was a picture of shiny new

bottles of vitamin C and vitamin E, with an icon of a rising

sun on them (which bore a striking resemblance to an anti-

oxidant smiley face).

The gulf between the research world and the public

interest could not have been greater here. Perhaps the ivory

tower was too high in the case of gerontology for the

wisdom created in it to trickle down accurately. But the

abuse of science being perpetrated on the public outraged

me. The public was being fleeced out of millions upon

millions of dollars. Why? Everything I had read led me to

believe that claims in the popular press about how one could

slow aging were for the most part nonsense, and that if there

was anything that might stand a chance of slowing the aging

process in any significant way, it was Calorie Restriction.

Yet it was precisely that one possible (if difficult to

implement) life-extension regimen that was getting essen-

tially no press at all outside of research journals. The

popular press and even governmental bodies charged with

the public welfare were still talking about the “U-shaped

curve” to describe the relation between body weight and

mortality, whereas professional scientists knew that exam-

inations of the relation between body weight and mortality

were meaningless without the ability to take into account

other relevant factors, like smoking, the prevalence of

undiagnosed wasting disease, and so on, that can affect

mortality.

As I was pondering this phenomenon, I remember

thinking that this philosopher/medical student, Walford,

might well be the ideal person to take on the charge of

explaining to the lay person some of this research in

gerontology, since, given his background and interests, he

would have likely seen the import of this task. But a full

professor at a top-notch university usually wouldn’t have

time for such matters. Nonetheless, I sat down to begin

writing a letter to this man, hoping I might be able to

convince him to address this issue in a popular work, or at

least in an article. As I was thinking about what to write, I

met someone (at a health food store, as it happened) who

said that it might be difficult to get a letter to him, since he

was “locked in some enclosure in the desert,” and “by the

way, he’s already written precisely the book you want him

to write—in fact, two of them.”

Many things are remarkable about Roy’s first books

geared towards the lay reader, Maximum Lifespan and

120-Year Diet. One remarkable thing about them is simply

that a person engaged in so many other activities found the

time to write them! But what was most inspiring to me

initially was that Roy accomplished so much in one fell

swoop with these books he portrayed—or perhaps more

accurate, “manifested”—a life worth living in introductory

chapters and anecdotes interwoven into the main text; he

argued effectively, and boldly, for the application of a

particular finding in research gerontology to humans; and,

finally, he explained with crystal clarity some fundamental

principles that would empower the reader to assess other

attempts to apply basic research to humans.

These two books inspired me to start an internet-based

group, Sci.life-extension (yet another prosaic name!).

The group became a meeting place for people from various

backgrounds who were interested in discussing life-exten-

sion, or “applied gerontology,” as we sometimes called it.

The group very quickly divided into those interested in

trying CR and those interested in popping (and often selling)

anti-oxidants and other pills. Those interested in CR decided

we should form our own group. At the suggestion of one of

B.M. Delaney / Experimental Gerontology 39 (2004) 881–883882

Sci.life-extension’s members, we decided to meet at an anti-

aging medicine conference in Las Vegas in 1994. About

eight of us, including Roy and Lisa Walford, got together in

a conference room, and the CR Society was born.

The group has grown to over a thousand people from all

walks of life. Whether they are professional scientists or not,

most are inspired by, or guided by Roy Walford’s writings

(which now include a book he wrote with his daughter Lisa).

By stepping down from the ivory tower, he encouraged

others to climb upwards. He explained some basic

principles for assessing scientific research that have enabled

tens of thousands of people, perhaps many more, to make

sense of scientific literature which is often extraordinarily

complicated. That there is a group of people following a

difficult diet is one thing. More significant, in my view, is

that there is a large group of people who are no longer

intimidated by scientific research. They may not be able to

understand it like a trained professional scientist can, but

they have started going to medical libraries on their days off

instead of watching TV. While there are many physicians

and professional biologists in our group, it is often the

computer scientists, psychologists, or even artists who offer

the most interesting analyses of new research results.

Of the many projects our nonprofit is engaged in, one was

inspired by Roy Walford most directly: our effort to gather

biomarker data on our members. It was an email from Roy

that got this idea underway. Others in our group had realized

that the very existence of a large number of people on this

diet was a potentially valuable scientific resource, and had

begun thinking about how to take advantage of this

resource. But it was Roy who wrote, in an email to me a

few years ago, that this effort could be organized as a kind of

“people’s science.” We, ourselves, could try to gather this

data and make sense of it. Indeed, it was this project that

compelled us to incorporate as a nonprofit, in order to be

able to receive donations more easily, since some money

would be needed to make this project happen.

This project, and our other projects, are now gathering

steam, and are beginning to bear fruit. None of this would

have been possible without Roy Walford’s exemplary life.

He has lived the Enlightenment motto, “sapere aude”—Dare

to know! He has played a vital role in encouraging many of

us not to be intimidated by new fields of knowledge, to try to

reverse the trend to which the Enlightenment ultimately

gave rise: to know more and more about less and less until

one knows everything about nothing.

Perhaps more importantly, he has refined the Enlighten-

ment motto itself. This has been most inspiring to me

personally, and will guide me for the rest of my life. Sapere

aude, yes. But even better: “vivere aude”—dare to live!

B.M. Delaney / Experimental Gerontology 39 (2004) 881–883 883