Immunological Surveillance and Ageing

All men are mortal and nowadays an increasing proportion are being given the opportunity to die a natural death, which could be defined as one which is preceded and eventually provoked by the increasing vulnerability of old age. Everyone resents old age to some degree and the myth of an elixir of youth has been extant for centuries. Every advance in medicine and biology in the last hundred years has been scrutinized for its bearing on the understanding of senescence and the amelioration of the indignities of old age. In the field of microbiology and immunology, Metch-nikoff was preaching the virtues of changing the bacterial flora of the large bowel in the 1890s and the most recent discussion of genetic and immunological aspects of ageing is probably in a paper of mine published in August 1970.