EUREKA!

Observer, Volume XL, Issue 7, 18 October 1919, Page 2

EUREKA!

New Glands for Old

IN all ages, dreamers, scientists, and mere human beings have sought the elixir of perpetual youth. Hundreds of them have died of old age in the search. Thousands of tales of the ancient party who took the elixir that pared the octogenarian's whiskers from his chin and gave pep to his shocking old legs, have been written. The rejuvenated septuagenarian who returns as a beauteous youth and marries the illustrious eighteen year young princess has been done to death. Surgeons and scientists have monkeyed with Nature in every age. They have discovered among other things that the thyroid gland is vitally the whole yarn, but up to now, except to cure goitre or allied diseases, they have left it respectfully alone. They have chopped the vermiform appendix, have pruned the necessary tonsil generally, have had a good slash at anything that seemed to them careless of God to leave in.

Many scientists of the knife have gone to Heaven where their instruction seems to have fallen on stoney ground. Recrudescing to the thyroid gland it has been proved through a number of generations that its normality, subnormality or supernormality affects the whole animal structure. The Thing in disease is responsible for the production of Giants—offspring of normal people. It is also responsible for the production of the homoeopathic monsters we call "dwarfs" the hydrocephalous mumbling distorted "cretins" and all the rest of it.

Cabled that Professor VoronofF has discovered that the secret of perpetual youth is per surgery, the grafting of the abdominal glands of the young on the interior works of the aged. He's going to leave the thyroid gland alone, God bless him, and will probably leave all the blind alleys of the body to themselves. But Voronoff, who apparently, has not yet been examined by two com-

petent alienists will, if he is successful- and the new gland for old racket is a cheap operation, make birth among human beings unnecessary, and it will be only needful to keep the sxipply of lower animals up, in order to obtain by vivisection, the necessary rejuvenating influence.

Voronoff has experimentetKby depriving aged goats of their worn out glands and substituting the young ones, which are necessary to enable William to eat the succulent jam tin and to digest the family washing. He affirms that having substituted the abdominal glands, of the young goat for the worn out stomach furniture of William, William skipped like a kid, although he doesn't say whether William bucked at the operation or the new gland.

Voronoff's discovery opens up a vast speciilation. Granted that the octogenarian politician will require to extend his usefulness for another forty years per medium of glandular exchange with a young monkey, it will be necessary at once to plant nut-bearing trees in the grounds of . Parliament House. The spectacle of Sir William Fraser on the topmost branch of a cocoanut tree frisking out a resolution is not without its humour. If for any reason Sir H. D. Bell should be fitted with a goat gland, and this form of rejuvenation became common, daily gallops to the bop of the Tinakori Hills, the prize for first place being a succulent table cloth or a bucket handle, would attract universal admiration. One is afraid that if Mr. Massey was glandularly renovated with the necessary apparatus culled from the explored interior of a chimpanzee or Dr. Newman (who is. singularly young for his time of life) were endowed with the assimilatory organs of an orangoutang, the cracking of jokes in Parliament would be entirely superseded by the cracking of nuts.

The spectacle of the sergeant at arms fitted with a complete set of new glands reaped from the common tiger, climbing into the strangers' gallery to arrest the rejuvenated octogenarian who was roaring like a lion would afford consolation to those unfortunately too poor to afford to be Voronoffed.

Imagine the effect in the female world—the woman who had lived for hundreds of years and was always eighteen! Then again, the "ad"— "Wanted an office boy," and the answer by a fresh faced cheeky youngster, who would state he was 480 years old last Tuesday and still going strong. No doubt Voronoff will reveal his secret to all other surgeons. If the supply of goats and monkeys' glands will bear the strain, the earth will be full of skipping octogenarians amd climbing nonagenarians. Perpetual youth!

The destiny of nations will depend on the supply of glands. The country that can corner the monkey supply will dominate the earth for the rest will die of old age. The goat, monkey, elephant, ass, tiger, lion or other lower animal having its glands removed for the benefit of humanity will die, so that every nation will have to keep enormous stud farms for the propagation of young monkeys. Mr. Voronoff is successor to the gentleman who exclaimed "Eureka," and one is rather afraid that Mr. Voronoff will persist on living for the next couple of thousand years. It occurs to one that the Creator didn't consult with Voronoff before the creation of man, otherwise he would have fitted him with perpetual glands. Can it be that Voronoff is allied to the human marvel, who can grow hair on every head but his own ?

That Voronoff will die at the trifling age of eighty or ninety, that we are to be deprived of the spectacle of a beardless Massey, frisking on the hills of Pukekohe like a , young

sheep or a childlike Fraeer hanging from a tall tree eating nuts? It v seems almost too good to be true! Should the New Zealand Parliament authorise the substitution of new glands for old Mr. Boyd, the Onehunga zoologist might be apprised early. There's a young gland in a cage out there we covet.