The Secrets of Immortality

Contemporary Research on the Perpetuation Of Life

By Romain Rolland and Edmond Bordeaux Szekely

Let us now turn to contemporary unilateral experiments for perpetuating the human organism.
Of Amoeboe (Woodfuf)
Woodruf, a professor at the University of Yale, has for long been studying monocellular animals living in a liquid in which they assimilate their requisite food and from time to time eliminate the surplus.

If they have enough food they are very prolific; They multiply by division in two. Up to now no one has studied the maximum length of life possible to monocellular animals.

They generally die fairly quickly because they consume the liquid in which they live.

Anti-oxidation

This liquid becomes saturated with the products of the slow oxidation proceeding in these micro-organisms which have not enough fresh food in their system in consequence.

Woodruf, however, renewed their liquid from time to time, with the result that these monocellular animals have already survived 8.500 generations which, compared with human life, corresponds to 25,000 years.

A man who survived the birth of his eight thousand five hundredth direct descendant would be a quarter of a million years old. These experiments show that cells are immortal. They die only where the external preconditions of life become unfavourable; This is not a natural death but the result of a coincidence of the external circumstances. The investigations made by Woodruf go far towards the solution of the problem of eternal life.

If particular cells are immortal in favourable circumstances, then the higher organisms made up of millions of cells are not necessarily liable to die.