Tithonus and the Fruit Fly

The legend is that of Eo and Tithonus, a handsome mortal beloved by Eo. The goddess was so enamored of the young prince of Athens that she asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal. He did, but she failed to ask Zeus to prevent Tithonus from aging. 

As time went on—as the fates wound down the string of life—he did indeed turn into a paltry thing: He aged, dried, and shrunk to the size of a cricket.

 

 
It turns out that one of the best-known works of longevity fiction is actually set in Pasadena: Aldous Huxley’s “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” (1939). 

Huxley, grandson of the great Darwinist, Thomas Henry Huxley, took the title from the opening lines of Tennyson’s “Tithonus.”

The action of the Huxley novel takes place a short “motor-car ride” north of Los Angeles. On this as-yet undeveloped site, a boorish tycoon has built a large mansion (half the San Simeon of Hearst, half the Huntington Library) that houses valuable, ancient manuscripts.

An English scholar is sent to look into a sheaf of books and manuscripts that the mogul has acquired from an English earl; these date back over 300 years. The tycoon has hired a certain Dr. Obispo (sic) to inject him with an extract that will prolong his life.

The extract is prepared from the intestinal flora of carp, whose life expectancy far exceeds that of humans. 
  

Obispo’s biological experiments are based on the notions of Elie Metchnikoff, who won the Nobel Prize in 1908 for discovering phagocytosis. 

Metchnikoff suggested that we age because our intestinal bacteria generate toxic, oxygen-derived metabolites of fatty alcohols; these activate phagocytes of all stripes: macrophages and microphages (read neutrophils) and “neuronophages” (read glial cells).

Dr. Obispo tests the effects of feeding carp intestines to mice: “The effect on the mice had been immediate and significant. Senescence had been halted, even reversed. 

They were younger at eighteen months than they had ever been” (26), just like Guarentes’s starved mice or Benzer’s fruit flies.


http://www.fasebj.org/doi/pdf/10.1096/fj.08-0601ufm