Biological Reserves

Abstract

“Life,” wrote McNair Wilson,“interested John Hunter to the exclusion of everything else, and he studied life as he had begun to see it—namely, as the supreme resistance to the blind forces which surrounded it and impinged upon it . . . Life, on this showing,was self protective.” This “supreme resistance” of life leads in health to longevity, in disease or after injury to survival; and therefore it is of peculiar interest to surgeons. It appears to depend on an urge for continuing life common to all tissues, and easily demonstrated for certain cells in the laboratory by examining the resistance offered by renal and hepatic cells to a sequence of injuries produced by chemicals (for example uranium nitrate and carbon tetrachloride). Tissues differ from one to another in the tenacity with which they cling to life, some giving up before others. This may be of importance in the practice of the future, as the population of this and other countries ages. According to the Government Actuary’s projection, provided the general mortality rate continues to decline and' the fertility rate remains about the same, between 1951 and 1979 the total population of this country may rise by 1% to 52,250,000; the pensionable population may rise by 43% to 9,500,000, while the number of children may fall by about 4% to 10,500,000. Doctors (and incidentally hospital planners) will have to deal with and provide for more aged and ageing tissues and for fewer children; they will also be able to determine whether the tissues of children of the present generation, who are growing to be larger and who are maturing earlier than the children of 25 or 50 years ago, will in fact retain their “desire for life” to ages sufficient to project them into the pensionable groups (males over 65, females over 60), a possibility at present unresolved.