The Destiny of the Body

Chapter XI

The Physiology of Senescence and Death

On life was laid the haunting finger of Death.

(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto VII, p. 203)

A breath of disillusion and decadence

Corrupting watched for Life's maturity

And made to rot the full grain of the soul:

Progress became a purveyor of Death.

(Ibid., Book II, Canto VII, p. 204)

"This is the scientific view of death. But it leaves death with all its mystery, with all its sacredness; we are not in the least able to the present time to say what life is — still less, perhaps, what death is. We say of certain things — they are alive; of certain others — they are dead; but what the difference may be, what is essential to these two states, science is utterly unable to tell us at the present time."

(Dr. Minot, Age, Growth and Death)

The phenomenon of senile decay and natural death has remained till this date an insoluble riddle to science. We have willy-nilly come to accept the fact that all things born must live for a while, grow old with time and eventually die. But physiology knows no reason why the body should ineluctably wear out in this way. As Dr. Maurice Vernet has so trenchantly pointed out, "Biologically speaking and in natural conditions, that is to say, accidental violence being excluded, there should not and need not have been death at all.... Viewed from the aspect of the body, death seems to us to be altogether meaningless (un non-sens absolu)"¹

The same idea has been expressed in different ways by some other eminent medical authorities as well: e.g.,

"There is no physiological reason at the present day why men should die." (Dr. William A. Hammond)

"Such a machine as the human frame, unless accidentally depraved or injured by some external cause, would seem formed

¹ Dr. Maurice Vernet, La Vie et la Mort, p. 225.

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for perpetuity." (Dr. Gregory, Medical Prospectus)

"The human body as a machine is perfect...it is apparently intended to go on forever." (Dr. Munro)

As a matter of fact, in contradistinction to all man-made machines, a multicellular body functions as a highly efficient machine which has somehow learnt the art of self-repair. And if this repair remains always commensurate with the wear and tear of biological functioning, life can then be terminated only through the intervention of some violent accident and never by the so-called senile degeneracy.

But still the body grows old and at length ceases to function. The physiological mystery of death lies in the fact that if the body is at all a self-repairing and self-renewing machine — which it undoubtedly is, as proved by the adolescent phase of a developing body — why it should not remain so indefinitely. Why does the body fall a prey to senile decay?

Before we can hope to answer adequately the aforesaid questions, we must first know what life is and what are its functions and manifesting signs. We have already had occasion to point out (vide Chapter DC: The Mystery of Life and Death) how difficult it is for science to define life adequately or to draw a well-marked line of separation between the inanimate world and the animate realm. However, for our present purpose we may reasonably state that living matter is characterised by the following five properties:

(a) movement, (b) respiration, (c) nutrition, (d) circulation, and (e) reproduction.

Six fundamental laws seem to govern the functioning of a living organism. In the formulations as given by Dr. Vernet,¹ these "Laws of Life" may be stated as follows:

(i)Law of organisation — All life realises in time and in space a specific organisation which is characteristic of the species concerned, of course under normal conditions.

(ii)Law of assimilation — A living organism has the power to transform and make similar to its own substance the materials that it borrows from its environment as its nutrition.

(iii)Law of regulation — Whatever may be the quantity or the quality of exchange operations that a living organism sets up with the surrounding world, an incessant regulation intervenes

¹ Dr. Maurice Vernet, La Vie et la Mort, pp. 113-14.

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to maintain the organisation in the specific equilibrium of its rhythms, functions and tissue composition.

(iv)Law of reproduction — Every living being, under normal conditions, possesses the power to self-reproduce itself identically.

(v)Law of specificity — Every living form is, in its fundamental excitability (response), specific to the species to which it belongs.

(vi)Law of reversibility — For every new existence, there occurs a cyclic return to the state of indifferentiation, and, throughout the course of life, there manifests a tendency to come back to the fundamental equilibrium state of the species.

Without seeking to elucidate these laws of life in terms intelligible to non-scientific readers, let us concentrate on the second law alone. For, it is this law of assimilation that proves sufficient by itself to characterise a living body, and it is perhaps some lacuna in the proper functioning of this particular law, that brings in the phenomenon of senescence and death.

In fact, the physical universe is in a state of dynamic flux; it is the contending ground of innumerable physico-chemical forces and reactions. Now, the essential difference between an inanimate thing and a living organism seems to lie in the fact that while external influences, whether physical or chemical, wear out and ultimately destroy the former, changing it into something else, in the case of the latter the temporary disruption induced by the foreign intrusion is not allowed to go to its destructive term, but rather used as an agent to provoke some counter-reaction in the living body that ultimately helps it in its self-reparative and self-maintaining activity.

The apparent fixity of form and stability of body of a living organism is a gross error and illusion of the senses. As a matter of fact, every single cell in a metazoan body as well as the total organization itself is continually undergoing a countless set of chemical reactions that form part of a simultaneously occurring double process: (i) the process of disruption, analysis, breaking down and running down (katabolism), and (ii) the process of construction, synthesis, building up and winding up (anabolism). Thus, "a living organism is never the same. It is changing from day to day, from minute to minute, from second to second of its existence. Its instantaneous physiological state is the resultant of all of its antecedent states".¹

¹ S. Metalnikov, Immortality and Rejuvenation in Modern Biology, p. 59.

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Now, the characteristic feature of a living organism is a constant balancing of accounts so that the specific activity of each of its cells and of its correlated structure and organization continues. This "capacity of continuing in spite of change, of continuing, indeed, through change"¹ is a fundamental attribute of life. The living organism has been sometimes compared to a clock, as it is always running down and always being wound up. But unlike a clock, it can wind itself up, if certain conditions are adequately fulfilled. The chemical processes are then so correlated that "the pluses balance the minuses and the creature lives on."²

But unfortunately for the individual form, this miraculous vital capacity of self-repair and self-maintenance is not unlimited. In course of time, in the process of continual exchange of energy with the environment, this power of active assimilation gets stunted and atrophied, the katabolic operation has the upper hand over that of anabolism, and as a result fatigue and senile decay set in, culminating in the phenomenon of death when all metabolic activity ceases in the organism, turning it into non-living stuff. As X. Bichat has so graphically described the onset of the process of natural death:

"In the death which is the effect of old age all the functions cease, because they have been successively extinguished. The vital powers abandon each organ by degrees; digestion languishes, the secretions and absorptions are finished; the capillary circulation becomes embarrassed; lastly, the general circulation is suppressed. The heart is the ultimum moriens. Such, then, is the great difference which distinguishes the death of the old man from that which is the effect of a blow. In the one the powers of life begin to be exhausted in all its parts and cease at the heart, the body dies from the circumference towards the centre; in the other, life becomes extinct at the heart and afterwards in the parts, the phenomena of death are seen extending themselves from the centre to the circumference."³

But whence spring this circumscription of the capacity of an organism and the gradual corrosion of its metabolic functions, leading finally to the failure of life ? Are we to suppose that a

^{1 2} J. Arthur Thomson, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Ed. Hastings), Vol. 8, p. 2.

³ X. Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort, quoted on p. 135 of Death: its Causes and Phenomena by H. Carrington and J. R. Meader.

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multicellular body ultimately dies because, in course of time, it somehow fouls its 'internal environment' (milieu intérieur)1 That ageing processes do occur even in a body kept in good surroundings, with adequate and regular supply of nutritional requirements and protected from the invasion of other predatory organisms, is a well-attested physiological fact. But it has so far been very difficult to ascertain why organisms age in this way and what determines the species-longevity.

Various theories have been advanced from time to time to account for the phenomenon of senescence and death but none of these has stood the test of universal scientific validation. The more significant of these theories of ageing are as follows:

(1)The life-span of the members of a species is in direct ratio to the period of time the individuals take to reach the stage of biological maturity. (Buffon)

(2)The life-energy and the vital characteristics with which a living organism begins its career get used up with the passage of time. (Bichat)

(3)The cells composing a multicellular body are in constant internecine fight for existence, whose final result cannot but be the wasting away of the whole. This is the theory of cellular anthropophagy. (Cholodkowsky)

(4)The conjunctive tissues undergo hypertrophy with time and by and by invade and overwhelm the more vital epithelial tissue. (Demagne)

(5)The somatic cells cannot go on self-dividing indefinitely. For some reason or other, they progressively lose with time the power of self-fission, thus bringing about the phenomenon of senile decay. (Maupas, R. Hertwig and Mainot)

(6)With the passage of time there occurs an increase in the protoplasmic mass of the cells at the cost of the nuclear material. Senescence is the natural outcome of this process. (Minot)

(7)Senescence is due to the pigmentation of nerve-cells. (Muhlmann, Ribbert)

(8)The protoplasmic mass gets altered with time and exhibits a tendency towards flocculation. This is the colloidal theory of ageing. (A. Lumière, Marinesco)

(9)A progressive induration and ossification taking place in the body are the causes of old age and natural death. (Homer Bostwick, De Lacy Evans)

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(10)The intestinal contents are supposed to be full of millions of types of micro-organisms secreting toxins or poisons whose re-absorption in the bodily system provokes the setting in of the process of ageing. (Metchnikoff)

(11)Senile decay is due to the process of progressive cellular differentiation. (Delage, Minot)

(12)Senescence is mainly due to the destruction of the higher elements of a multicellular body by microphages. (Metchnikoff)

(13)The glands of internal secretion are the agents for the onset of the ageing process. (Horsley, Lorand)

(14)There is an intimate connection between reproduction and death. The primary object of living is to bring ever new specimens of the species into being. Thus the body contains two types of protoplasm: germinative protoplasm and somatic protoplasm. The former is essentially immortal and continues its existence in the offspring's body while the latter is doomed to decay and perish some time after the animal has attained to reproductive maturity. (Weismann, Hansmann, Gotte, et al.)

These are some of the theories of senescence¹ mentioned in their briefest outline. Most of the theories advanced so far fail to take into account the real and fundamental underlying mechanism of senile decay; instead they try to bring into focus one or other of the factors that come into play as a result and not as the cause of ageing. It is amply clear that the scientific world as a whole has not arrived till this date at any definite conception about the real nature of the mysterious process of senescence and natural death. But, as far as can be judged from an external analysis, biological thought seems to list the following as contributory factors:

(1)The extreme complexity of the organization of a metazoan body rendering the task of self-recuperation well-nigh impossible and forcing the organism to accumulate what has been termed physiological arrears and biological debt;

(2)lack of complete coordination and cohesion among the various elements of the bodily organization, giving rise to physiological disorders and malfunctionings of different sorts and eventually wearing out the internal organs and tissues;

¹ Vide Ed. Retterer, De la durée des êtres vivants, Chap. 13, "Théories du vieillissement. — Critique".

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(3)exposure to environmental stresses and strains, unbearable for the organism beyond a certain limit, and thus inexorably leading to the ultimate breakdown and dissolution of the structure;

(4)specialization of the somatic cells for diverse and specific functions, resulting in their loss of "embryonic versatility", so much so that the organism as a whole, owing to the loss of plastic adaptability, fails to cope with the varying demands of the ever-changing situation and eventually falls an easy prey to death.

The absence of internal harmony and co-ordination, the inability to withstand the shocks of the 'not-self and a progressive loss of adaptability and plasticity — these, then, are in the main the symptoms of the malaise as manifest on the bio-physical plane. No doubt, they are suggestive and significant; but they reveal no more than the frontal aspect of the malady.

And, then, what is it that becomes missing at death? What are the indubitable criteria with which to distinguish a dead body from the same body which was living a moment before ? How to know that life has indeed ebbed away and the body has passed into the state of absolute death? Here, too, medical science finds great difficulty in pronouncing unequivocally. Indeed, some of the common signs and symptoms of death as ordinarily listed are:

Cessation of breathing and of the beating of the heart; insensibility of the eye to luminous stimulus; pallor of the body; complete muscular relaxation; reduction of the temperature of the body; rigor mortis or statue-like rigidity; etc., etc.

But the curious fact that has come out of detailed scientific investigations is that none of these signs or symptoms are definitive and absolute; every single test of death — death in the sense that the body has irrevocably passed into the state of inanimate stuff and the vital functions cannot be brought back to activity again — has proved to be utterly unreliable, with the single exception of putrefactive decomposition. But putrefaction sets in quite a long time after 'life' has actually 'departed' from the body. And even this process of decomposition can be prevented with the adoption of some preventive measures. Hence we come back to the crucial question:

What is life and what is death?

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Prof. Joseph Le Conte emphasised this very point when he wrote:

"... But death? Can we detect anything returned to the forces of nature by simple death? What is the nature of the difference between the living organism and a dead organism ? We can detect none, physical or chemical. All the physical and chemical forces withdrawn from the common fund of nature and embodied in the living organism seem to be still embodied in the dead, until little by little they are returned by decomposition. Yet the difference is immense, is inconceivably great! What is the nature of this difference expressed in the formula of material science? What is it that is gone and whither is it gone? There is something here which science cannot understand."¹

In order to seize the problem of life and death at the base, we must now turn to metaphysics founded on an integral vision of things.

¹ Carrington and Meader, "Death", pp. 158-59.

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