Going through some very old cassette tapes in my garage, I turned up a minor piece of history reminding me of my long standing friendship with the late Tim Beddows, creator of the Network DVD label. In 1977, our family holiday took us to a rented cottage on the mid Wales coast. The views and the scenery were all very well, but being in Wales for a week had the added advantage of being able to watch an episode of The Saint. It hadn’t been on in our home region (ATV Midlands) for some five years. Forewarned of this possibility, Tim gave me his tiny open-reel tape recorder with a request to record the programme's beginning and end titles, simply so that he could have a copy of the music.
The tape I discovered today was a dupe from Tim’s tiny three inch spool, itself a pretty ropey recording to begin with. But it’s evidence of a kind, a link back to the past and a late, lamented friend. It’s somewhat ironic, in retrospect, to reflect that the episode broadcast that week on HTV was The Man Who Gambled With Life, number 18 in the last series of The Saint, and first broadcast in January 1969. Make a note of that date, as it’s relevant to what follows. The story, written by series script editor Harry W. Junkin, concerned the efforts of wealthy industrialist Keith Longman (Clifford Evans) to keep himself alive when faced with a deteriorating heart condition. Cryogenics was a recently arrived fad over in the USA, and Junkin, a Canadian, would have been well aware of the trend. His script feels rather more like an outing for The Avengers (and even namechecks Emma Peel as if in acknowledgement of the fact), but it still provided a reasonably entertaining fifty minutes, somewhat off the usual Saintly beaten path.
Fast forward now to January 1970 and an episode of Department S: Spencer Bodily is Sixty Years Old. Once again, the theme is longevity, and this time the premise involves participants in a long term experiment who have been using a drug known as BHT (or Butylated Hydroxytoluene) in order to slow down the ageing process. I didn’t get to see this episode until last year, but when I did, I immediately spotted a connection back to the aforementioned episode of The Saint. When Templar is first approached by Longman’s team, he is given a box containing a white mouse. Longman’s daughter explains that the animal’s life span has been significantly extended by injections of... Butylated Hydroxytoluene. The two episodes were the work of the same writer, Harry W. Junkin. So was he merely rehashing an old idea or was there something more to all this? I decided to find out…
First off, I wanted to know about Butylated Hydroxytoluene. It sounded plausible enough, but it could simply have been a scriptwriter’s invention. A quick Google search confirmed that it was real enough. BHT (as it is correctly referred to in Department S) is a known antioxidant, widely used in food preservation, and a key ingredient in various cosmetics. Its effect, is simply, to delay the onset of rancidity. In chemical terms, it inhibits the process of oxidation caused by free radicals. So far, so good. And looking into the matter a little further, there is plenty of literature about the reputed benefits of antioxidants in their natural state – foods including blueberries, dark chocolate, beetroot and broccoli are all natural antioxidants. But wasn’t Mr. Junkin delving into the realms of fantasy with his scripts? Not as far as you might think.
In June 1968, an article entitled ‘Biochemistry: The Elixir of Youth’ appeared in Time magazine. The piece described research into ageing being conducted by Biochemist Denham Harman of the University of Nebraska medical school. The article includes the following statement:
“Now researchers are beginning to wonder if the preservative [BHT] cannot also be used to prolong the life of man [...] With regular feedings of BHT, [Harman] was able to lengthen the life span of a strain of laboratory mice by 50%. “In human terms,” says Harman, "this is equivalent to increasing life expectancy from 70 years to 105 years.”
Here, without a doubt, is Harry W. Junkin’s original source material. In light of the fact that he turned in two scripts with a longevity theme within the space of a few months, can we presume that Mr. Junkin was intrigued by the possibility of extending his own life span? Unfortunately, if he took any steps in this direction, they were unsuccessful, as he was to live for only another ten years, dying in 1978 at the age of only 62. But hang on a minute: if that research was published back in 1968, how come we’re not all now living to 105?
What holds good for laboratory mice does not necessarily hold good for human beings, and no one was about to start adding another chemical to the human food chain without rigorous testing… and we all know, don’t we, that flouridation was nothing more than a communist plot to contaminate our precious bodily essences…
The sobering fact is that the elixir of life dream of Denham Harman, Harry Junkin and many others remains just that: a dream. BHT is still regularly added to many foodstuffs, but has been linked in various studies with forms of cancer (although ongoing research has more or less ruled this out), which may explain why some manufacturers are now voluntarily removing it from their products. Exactly how much you’d have to take to live to 105 isn’t stated in the Time magazine article, but you’d have thought that, if it were possible, some kind of Seven Seas style capsule might have been made available by now. In the absence of any such wonder drug, then, is there anything we can take away from all this?
Antioxidants are the subject of fierce debate in the scientific community. Taken as a whole, there seems to be no persuasive argument in favour of their efficacy, but neither have they been shown to have no beneficial effects at all. The best one can hope for is to ‘suck it and see’ as the saying goes. Over the past few months, I’ve upped my intake of blueberries from, well, zero, to a punnet every couple of weeks. Do I feel any better for it? I don’t think so. On the other hand, if I live to 105, you probably won’t be around to hear about it, and equally if it doesn’t work, I won’t be around to report on that either.
As to cryogenics (or, more accurately, cryonics), there’s still a glimmer of hope, but you’ll need something like $200,000 if you want to join the small, select band of 250 or so frozen individuals following the Saintly path of Harry Junkin’s script. Alan Whicker reported on the state of the industry in the early 1970s, but sadly for those pioneers, eternal life was only as good as the company running the freezer, and all but one of the early cryonics ventures failed: with terminal results for their clients. It’s often stated that Walt Disney has been cryonically preserved, but that’s an urban myth. Although I wouldn’t put it past him to re-emerge in the future as some kind of clone/AI hybrid...
There’s one final aspect of all this that we need to consider. Let’s imagine that Denham Harman really had cracked the secret of longevity back in the mid 60s. Did any government want its citizens living to advanced old age? Even without an elixir of life drug, we can already see the problems of an ageing population as the average lifespan gets longer. If there is some secret wonder drug out there, you’re never going to find it on the shelves at Holland and Barrett: but you can bet that both of this year’s presidential candidates have been shovelling it down on a daily basis. Which might explain a great deal...
Meantime, it's back to the blueberries. The second part of this article will appear in March 2066...
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