science · 29 June 1924 · 100 years ago
birth
Born 29 Jun 1924; died 27 Apr 2004 at age 79.
Roy Lee Wolford, Jr. was an American pathologist and gerontologist who pioneered, and wrote books on, the idea of restricting food intake to extend life span. He practiced the concept rigorously personally with a diet limited to 1,600 calories per day, hoping to reach age 120. During his research in the 1960's at the University of California, he found that mice fed on a regimen restricting their caloric intake by about 40 percent resulted in nearly doubling their life span. He is also known as one of the eight people that lived from 1991 in Biosphere 2, in an experiment to see if humans could live for two years in the sealed, self-contained environment. He died at age 79 of complications from Lou Gehrig's disease, perhaps a result of low oxygen, high nitrous oxide levels in the Biosphere, causing loss of brain cells.
OnThisDay.net