FREE RADICALS IN AGING
FREE RADICALS IN AGING By Richard Lippman, Ph.D. Today, we know that free radicals aren’t activists out on bail. But many decades ago, when I was doing research in Sweden, most people thought free radicals was hippie politics! No one knew then that these molecules had devastating effects on the human body, nor of their role in aging. Indeed, even just 20 years ago, free radical chemistry and its toxic effects on the human body were unknown to much of the public and even many doctors and medical researchers. I first learned about the free radical theory of aging as an undergraduate student at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. After I began doing graduate research work in cell biology, myself and my colleagues held meetings and conferences at the University of Uppsala to discuss the exciting findings of Professor Denham Harman, whose experimental work at the University of Nebraska in the 1950’s showed mice life spans could be extended 50 percent with antioxidant supplementation. And the response of the press was? So, what! Raising funds for research I wanted to take Harman’s work onestep further and explore the relationship between free radicals and aging. I turned to the famous Professor Sven Brolin, chair of the University of Uppsala’s Department of Medical Cell Biology, and to Professor Gunnar Wettermark, chair of the Royal Institute of Technology’s Department of Physical Chemistry, for assistance in raising funds for research. 16
Eventually, I received significant medical and chemical grants from the Swedish Research Council to develop antiaging strategies based on Harman’s groundbreaking discovery of the action of free radicals and the role of antioxidants to inhibit them. That research took us into the role that free radicals play in the breakdown of aging human bodies and led to the development of one of the most potent antioxidant combinations yet known, a unique multilevel antioxidant cocktail called ACF228® (ACF = Aging Control Formula). This remarkable work resulted in a US patent, number 4,695,590 (1) and encouraged the publication of the book Stay 40 (2) as well as many scientific articles in leading medical journals (3, 4, 5). A cellular model The first task of the research team was to find a cellular model rather than an animal model to test for life extension, since the Harman model of waiting for mice to grow old and die was costly and took years of patience. At the department of Medical Cell Biology, the team had access to many different types of living cells in culture; cells of the heart, brain, liver, and central nervous system and I invented some special probes that would penetrate the cell interiors without harming them. The first probe, called CML (carnitinylmaleate luminol), measured superoxide radicals in live human liver cells (3, 4). We went on to test many different
