WALFORD, Roy L(ee, Jr.) 1924-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 29, 1924, in San Diego, CA; died of respiratory failure and complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, April 27, 2004, in Santa Monica, CA. Physician, adventurer, and author. A gerontologist and researcher at the University of California—Los Angeles (UCLA) who drew national attention as one of the scientists who inhabited Biosphere 2, Walford was concerned with finding ways to extend life, which he believed he had accomplished through a strictly controlled diet. Throughout his life, he was known to his friends, family, and colleagues as a quirky personality. For example, after completing his medical degree at the University of Chicago in 1948, he and a friend earned over forty thousand dollars gambling in Las Vegas, taking the money to buy a yacht to sail the Caribbean for a year and a half. He also wrote a spoof of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, loved riding motorcycles, and was considered to be a "cultural provocateur" by his friends. After completing his residency at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles, Walford was chief of laboratory service at Chanute Air Force Base before joining the UCLA faculty in 1954. Rising to the position of professor of pathology and hemopathology in 1966, he also worked as an attending pathologist at area hospitals while conducting research in the lab. Walford felt, however, that science was more than just lab work and would break up his studies on lab rodents with field research in such places as India and Africa. His most famous exploit, however, came in 1991 when he was the oldest scientist to participate in Biosphere 2, a three-acre enclosure located near Tucson, Arizona, that was designed to see whether a small human colony could survive in a self-sustaining structure on another planet such as Mars. Unfortunately, the experiment went awry when nitrous oxide began to build up in the atmosphere. The scientists all became ill and had to abandon the structure. However, during their stay Walford was able to demonstrate that a low-calorie, controlled diet among the Biosphere 2 staff greatly improved their overall health. It was just another example of what Walford had been researching for many years by that point. He had already demonstrated in mice that low-calorie diets greatly extended the animals' life spans and vigor, an experiment that was shown to work in other species of animals, as well, including primates. Walford himself followed a 1,600-calorie-per-day diet that he felt improved his life greatly. However, he attributed his stay in Biosphere 2 and his prolonged exposure to high levels of nitrous oxide to his onset of ALS. Despite this, he asserted that his dietary practices greatly extended his survival after contracting the disease. Walford's theories are published in his books, which include Maximum Life Span (1983), The One-Hundred-Twenty-Year Diet (1986), Anti-Aging Diet (1994), and The Anti-Aging Plan: Strategies and Recipes for Extending Your Healthy Years (1994), the last written with Lisa Waldrop. He was also the author of several medical books and contributed to many other publications.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, May 3, 2004, Section 2, p. 13.

Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2004, p. B18.

New York Times, May 4, 2004, p. C15.