Every December since 2006, two Goethe University Frankfurt professors – Dieter Steinhilber from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Theo Dingermann from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Biology – invite their students and other interested guests to a Christmas lecture. What all events have in common is a scientific approach to disease and individuals’ responsibility for their own health. The professors link medical aspects with the biographies of well-known musicians, who have the conditions in question.
UniReport: Prof. Dingermann and Prof. Steinhilber, do you personally like (the music of) The Rolling Stones? Did it play a role in your choice of topic for the Christmas lecture? And are you also going to play one of their songs?
Dieter Steinhilber: We chose gerontology as the topic of this year’s Christmas lecture and then thought about which musicians would be suitable. In our Christmas lecture we always link the lives of musicians with relevant topics in pharmacy and medicine. In this case, we instantly thought Keith Richards and Mick Jagger would be great illustrative examples: Although they are both around 80 years old, you don’t get any impression of frail old men on stage. Of course, another reason for selecting The Rolling Stones was that we like their music and they’ve written really great songs, some of which will also feature in the lecture.
What’s more, the original band members Jagger and Richards are still performing live – it’s amazing that they’re still fit enough to do that. Are they a positive example of what one can achieve in old age? Or rather a distortion of professional youth that doesn’t have anything to do with normal ageing?
Steinhilber: I think they’re a good example illustrating how one can preserve one’s abilities and skills at an advanced age and stay physically fit. It’s worth pointing that out as young men the Stones didn’t lead very healthy lives – consuming a lot of alcohol and drugs – but as they grew older, they turned their lifestyle around. Beyond that, they definitely do not represent those older people who want to preserve a superficial youth by means of cosmetic surgery. You can tell the age of each band member.
Growing older is a huge topic, especially in an ageing society like Germany. That raises medical and ethical questions. How long can human beings live? How long should they live?
Theo Dingermann: The question of how long one can live is a superficial one. Serious gerontology is less concerned with prolonging life, and instead focuses on improving ways of ageing as healthily as possible. This is where the challenges lie, which in fact aren’t new at all and are also closely connected to pharmacy.
Will research – and degree courses – have to address the topic of old age more in the future? Has there been too little of that to date?
Dingermann: It would be wrong to say that research into ageing is a new trend. Based on the knowledge at the time, anyone born in West Germany in 1950, for example, had an average life expectancy of 66 years. I was born in 1948 – I’m 76 today. In 1900, the average life expectancies for men and women stood at roughly 45 and 48 years respectively. Today they’re around 78 and 83 years respectively. And there’s still potential for these figures to rise. If we manage to extend the period during which we are healthy human beings, we will necessarily also get even older.
Info
More information about the Christmas lecture by Dieter Steinhilber and Theo Dingermann →
