Live Longer, Laugh Louder

During the early years of the Russian Revolution, its leaders were a great deal more preoccupied with shortening human life than lengthening it. But times change. Moscow now has an Institute for the Prolongation of Life, headed by Septuagenarian Biologist Olga Lepeshinskaya.*

Last week Comrade Professor Lepeshinskaya had some eye-opening news to pass along. In a lecture to the Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge, she reported that previous studies of some 40,000 centenarians in the Ukraine alone had turned up "numerous cases of people 150 years old and more, with their liveliness, memory and working ability still intact." This, she said, showed that "the age of 150 or 160 is not the limit to life."

Most people still persist in dying around 70 or even earlier, the professor said, because of "premature senility." One of the important factors producing this condition, she said, is a process in which albuminous molecules in the human body "collide and merge, losing half their electrical charge, and become denser, thereby causing a lowering of the metabolism." Working with frogs, she found she could step up the sagging metabolism with injections of mild soda solution, while tadpoles placed in a similar solution developed more quickly than in pure water.

Lepeshinskaya and some of her colleagues also took an intensive series of soda-solution baths, with striking results: "Quick disappearance of fat, especially on the stomach; the resolution of old scars, and a general increase in fitness." She did not specify whether she had used washing soda, baking soda or some other sodium compound, but the professor warned that the baths should be taken only under a doctor's direction: there was evidence that the treatment could affect the red-corpuscle count of the blood. To doubting Western biologists, the whole theory sounded like nonsense.

While calling for further investigation of the matter, Lepeshinskaya contrived a tactful twang of the party line. "Laughter and gaiety also improve health," she said. "Our country is the happiest in the world. Statistics show that the average length of human life in the Soviet Union is the greatest in the world. The life of the Soviet people flowers under the sun of the Stalin Constitution."

* Not in 100 years to be confused with glamorous Prima Ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya, 34, one of the two ranking stars of the unrivaled ballet company of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater.

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