StemCell Therapy

By Stephen S. Hall

On a crisp January morning, with snow topping the distant Aspromonte mountains and oranges ripening on the nearby trees, Giuseppe Passarino guided his silver minivan up a curving mountain road into the hinterlands of Calabria, mainland Italys southernmost region. As the road climbed through fruit and olive groves, Passarino, a geneticist at the University of Calabria, chatted with his colleague Maurizio Berardelli, a geriatrician. They were headed for the small village of Molochio, which had the distinction of numbering four centenariansand four 99-year-oldsamong its 2,000 inhabitants.

Soon after, they found Salvatore Caruso warming his 106-year-old bones in front of a roaring fire in his home on the outskirts of the town. Known in local dialect as U Raggiuneri, the Accountant, Caruso was calmly reading an article about the end of the world in an Italian version of a supermarket tabloid. A framed copy of his birth record, dated November 2, 1905, stood on the fireplace mantle.

Caruso told the researchers he was in good health, and his memory seemed prodigiously intact. He recalled the death of his father in 1913, when Salvatore was a schoolboy; how his mother and brother had nearly died during the great influenza pandemic of 1918-19; how hed been dismissed from his army unit in 1925 after accidentally falling and breaking his leg in two places. When Berardelli leaned forward and asked Caruso how he had achieved his remarkable longevity, the centenarian said with an impish smile, No Bacco, no tabacco, no VenereNo drinking, no smoking, no women. He added that hed eaten mostly figs and beans while growing up and hardly ever any red meat.

Passarino and Berardelli heard much the same story from 103-year-old Domenico Romeowho described his diet as poco, ma tutto; a little bit, but of everythingand 104-year-old Maria Rosa Caruso, who, despite failing health, regaled her visitors with a lively version of a song about the local patron saint.

On the ride back to the laboratory in Cosenza, Berardelli remarked, They often say they prefer to eat only fruits and vegetables.

They preferred fruit and vegetables, Passarino said drily, because thats all they had.

Although eating sparingly may have been less a choice than an involuntary circumstance of poverty in places like early 20th-century Calabria, decades of research have suggested that a severely restricted diet is connected to long life. Lately, however, this theory has fallen on hard scientific times. Several recent studies have undermined the link between longevity and caloric restriction.

In any case, Passarino was more interested in the centenarians themselves than in what they had eaten during their lifetimes. In a field historically marred by exaggerated claims and dubious entrepreneurs hawking unproven elixirs, scientists studying longevity have begun using powerful genomic technologies, basic molecular research, and, most important, data on small, genetically isolated communities of people to gain increased insight into the maladies of old age and how they might be avoided. In Calabria, Ecuador, Hawaii, and even in the Bronx, studies are turning up molecules and chemical pathways that may ultimately help everyone reach an advanced age in good, even vibrant, health.

The quest for genetic answers has brought international scientific attention to people like Nicolas Aazco, known as Pajarito, Little Bird in Spanish.

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Longevity - National Geographic

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