An anti-aging researcher faces the loss of his inspiration: his 96-year-old father
Leonid Peshkin calmly strokes his father’s thin, white hair. He gently exercises the old man’s arms to acivate his muscles and get the blood flowing. He speaks, voice raised to reach him through the fog of age, poor hearing, and illness. “Papa,” he asks in their native Russian, “are you in pain?”
Almost imperceptibly, Miron Peshkin, age 96 and silenced by a minor heart attack, delirium, antibiotic-resistant infections, and six months of medical care, shifts his head to indicate “no.”
The younger Peshkin, 48, studies the biology of aging at Harvard Medical School in Boston. A broad-shouldered man with a twinkle always lurking in his brown eyes, Peshkin has been obsessed with aging since childhood because he worried that his father — then as old as other kids’ grandparents — would soon pass away.
“How funny it is,” Peshkin said, “that I had to be super worried he was going to die when I was 10. And here I am almost 50, and he’s still around.”
Now, as Miron lies virtually motionless in a nursing home, Peshkin fights his own battles with aging a few miles away, in a fifth-floor lab just off the Harvard Medical School quad.
The lab’s main attraction is a mammoth, glass-fronted incubator stocked with tiny crustaceans called water fleas. Peshkin is raising them to try to understand their natural lifespan. Once he knows how unusual it is for these bugs to survive past the 40 days they typically live at room temperature, he will begin dosing them
