Free After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley Page B

went on, wiping the tears of merriment from his eyes. Consistently wrong. And yet almost certainly not nearly so wrong as people had thought. Wrong, yes, in supposing that it was all a matter of intestinal stasis and auto-intoxication. But probably right, in thinking that the secret was somewhere down there, in the gut. Somewhere in the gut, Dr. Obispo repeated; and, what was more, he believed that he was on its track.
    He paused and stood for a moment in silence, drumming with his fingers on the glass of the aquarium. Poised between mud and air, the two obese and aged carps hung in their greenish twilight, serenely unaware of him. Dr. Obispo shook his head at them. The worst experimental animals in the world, he said in a tone of resentment mingled with a certain gloomy pride. Nobody had a right to talk about technical difficulties who hadn’t tried to work with fish. Take the simplest operation; it was a nightmare. Had you ever tried to keep its gills properly wet while it was anaesthetized on the operating table? Or, alternatively, to do your surgery under water? Had you ever set out to determine a fish’s basal metabolism, or take an electro-cardiograph of its heart action, or measure its blood pressure? Had you ever wanted to analyse its excreta? And, if so, did you know how hard it was even to collect them? Had you ever attempted to study the chemistry of a fish’s digestion and assimilation? To determine its blood picture under different conditions? To measure the speed of its nervous reactions?
    No, you had not, said Dr. Obispo contemptuously. And until you had, you had no right to complain about anything.
    He drew the curtain on his fish, took Jeremy by the arm and led him back to the mice.
    â€œLook at those,” he said, pointing to a batch of cages on an upper shelf.
    Jeremy looked. The mice in question were exactly like all other mice. “What’s wrong with them?” he asked.
    Dr. Obispo laughed. “If those animals were human beings,” he said dramatically, “they’d all be over a hundred years old.”
    And he began to talk, very rapidly and excitedly, about fatty alcohols and the intestinal flora of carp. For the secret was there, the key to the whole problem of senility and longevity. There, between the sterols and the peculiar flora of the carp’s intestine.
    Those sterols! (Dr. Obispo frowned and shook his head over them.) Always linked up with senility. The most obvious case, of course, was cholesterol. A senile animal might be defined as one with an accumulation of cholesterol in the walls of its arteries. Potassium thiocyanate seemed to dissolve those accumulations. Senile rabbits would show signs of rejuvenation under a treatment with potassium thiocyanate. So would senile humans. But, again, not for very long. Cholesterol in the arteries was evidently only one of the troubles. But then cholesterol was only one of the sterols. They were a closely related group, those fatty alcohols. It didn’t take much to transform one into another. But if you’d read old Schneeglock’s work and the stuff they’d been publishing at Upsala, you’d know that some of the sterols were definitely poisonous—much more than cholesterol, even in large accumulations. Longbotham had even sug gested a connexion between fatty alcohols and neoplasms. In other words, cancer might be regarded, in a final analysis, as a symptom of sterol-poisoning. He himself would go even further and say that such sterol-poisoning was responsible for the entire degenerative process of senescence in man and the other mammals. What nobody had done hitherto was to look into the part played by fatty alcohols in the life of such animals as carp. That was the work he had been doing for the last year. His researches had convinced him of three things: first, that the fatty alcohols in carp did not accumulate in excessive quantity; second, that they did not undergo transformation into the