Venice, California, is as good a place as any to stay young forever. The sun shines 11 months a year, the temperature never strays too far from perfect, and the famous (or infamous) boardwalk is home to more than its share of eccentrics, surfers, bikini-clad roller skaters, and body worshipers. Roy Walford, professor emeritus of pathology at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, would have to be considered one of the eccentrics, although he manages to stand out even among the denizens of Venice Beach.
Walford lives in a one-story, redbrick industrial building, one block from the beach. The windows are boarded over. The entrance is in back, off an alleyway, through a wrought-iron gate. Inside, Walford waits behind his desk with a shaved head and a dramatic Fu Manchu mustache of the kind more commonly seen adorning the members of outlaw motorcycle gangs than scientists.
For Walford to seem out of character is hardly new. This is not a person who has led the closeted life of an academic or buried himself in a laboratory, despite the obsession with which he has pursued his science. For the better part of 50 years he has dedicated his life and his research to the belief that threescore years and fifteen is woefully short for a human life span and that we should all live decades longer. And he’s had some success. His most important work has focused on the relationship between eating and longevity. In a seminal series of experiments beginning in the 1960s, Walford studied the effect of depriving laboratory mice of calories and discovered that the less they ate—within reason—the longer they lived. The research convinced him that it might be worthwhile to apply the same lessons to himself. So since the early 1980s, he has followed what he describes as a near-starvation diet. Walford believes that his diet of a mere 1,600 or so calories a day—about a third to a half less than a man his size would normally consume—will give him the best possible chance of living to 120.
