A bird's eye view of the role of nontrivial dynamical phenomena in physiological systems is presented. Many levels in the physiological hierarchy are affected. It appears that physiology has a particularly high affinity to chaos. The old central place of physiology in the circle of sciences can perhaps be regained if the two disciplines join resources. Even physics may turn out to be dependent on the chaotic micro dynamics of the brain.
It is proposed that a centralized clock controlling ageing is located in the pineal gland with the calcification process occurring there providing a highly accurate bio-inorganic timing mechanism and the secreted melatonin carrying a signal to all cells in the organism. An explicit programme of data gathering and experiments suitable for the falsification of the proposal, which is consistent with presently known anatomical and physiological facts, is presented. The underlying motivation comes from evolutionary biology and the invariance, that is the allometry, of life expectancy curves.
An epigenetic approach starts out from the direct (rather than the underlying genetic) causes. An epigenetic approach to aging has little chance of succeeding before a minimum amount of knowledge has been accumulated on the "genetic programming" that is currently believed to underlie aging. Two recent advances, one empirical and one theoretical, jointly brighten the prospect. The empirical one is the discovery that melatonin functions as an aging-controlling hormone in mammals. In 1979, Dilman and co-workers isolated a biologically active pineal extract (epithalamin) in rats which, as they later showed, stimulates melatonin production. Pierpaoli and co-workers in 1987 directly administered melatonin to mice. Both groups observed a surprising 25-percent increase of life span in conjunction with a postponed senescence. A similar effect was also achieved with an engraftment of young pineal tissue into the thymus of old mice by Pierpaoli's group. Beneficial effects of epithalamin in humans were reported by Dilman's group. The second advance is a deductive evolution-theoretical approach to aging discovered in 1988. In populations living in a niche with a fixed carrying capacity, any individual is in the long run replaced by a single successor. It follows that, as the expected cumulative number of adult progeny of the same sex approaches unity as a function of life time of the progenitor, the latter's survivability must approach zero if the sum is to remain unity. A physiological prediction follows: a centralized physicochemical clock--like a sedimentation process--must exist somewhere in the organism controlling a secreted substance that reaches all cells. In this way, the pineal coacervates and the pineal's hormonal product melatonin were arrived at on an independent route again. While melatonin as a drug has been used on human volunteers for decades, its anti-aging effect has yet to be proved. Detailed hormone profiles in different age groups and under different life styles have to be performed. A modified Hayflick in vitro experiment is also needed to elucidate the mechanism by which melatonin works in cells.
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