LOST FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

By Christine Gorman

NO ONE WANTS TO BELIEVE IN THE health benefits of melatonin more than Fred Turek. A neurobiologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, Turek has devoted two decades of his life to studying this naturally occurring substance produced by the pineal gland. He feels certain that it functions as the body's own safe and highly effective sleeping potion. But lately Turek can't shake the feeling that the world has gone melatonin mad. Based on the flimsiest scientific evidence, the subject of his research is now being trumpeted in books and magazines and on television as a cure for everything from autism to aging to schizophrenia to a humdrum sex life.

What really gets Turek roiled is that many of these sensational claims are being made by doctors and scientists who ought to know better. So last week he took aim at those colleagues in the research journal Nature. "There has always been, and probably always will be, public enthusiasm for quick snake-oil cures to complex problems," Turek wrote. But some melatonin researchers, he added, have stepped over "the truth-in-advertisement line by exaggerating the significance of a few selected studies to the point where the public receives an unbalanced and potentially dangerous view of the present state of knowledge." Singled out for special condemnation was the best-selling book The Melatonin Miracle, which, Turek wrote, "clearly crosses the frontier of scientific objectivity."

On the respectable side of that border, scientists agree that the brain produces melatonin in response to the setting of the sun. For reasons that are not entirely clear, elevated levels of melatonin in the blood lull the body into sleep, while reduced levels during the day help keep it awake. So far, melatonin's best customers have been frequent flyers who use over-the-counter potions to counteract the effects of jet lag--by artificially shortening their "day" according to the number of time zones they have crossed.

But that's nothing compared with what The Melatonin Miracle promises. Its authors, Dr. Walter Pierpaoli of the Biancalana-Masera Foundation for the Aged in Ancona, Italy, and Dr. William Regelson of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, have taken the fact that the body produces less melatonin as it grows older to make extravagant claims about its antiaging properties. They write that ingesting small amounts of melatonin will allow people to turn back the clock and live 120 years or more. Their evidence? An experiment in which Pierpaoli transplanted the pineal glands of old mice into young ones, and vice versa. The glands of the younger animals seemed to rejuvenate the older ones. The younger mice who had received the old glands, by contrast, aged rapidly and died prematurely.

There's only one problem with that explanation, according to Turek. The strains of mice used in those studies do not produce melatonin. So whatever rejuvenated the aging rodents, it wasn't melatonin. "We didn't measure melatonin in the animals," Regelson concedes. "We didn't have the equipment at the time." Still, he dismisses Turek's objections, arguing, "If it isn't melatonin, what is it?"

His reasoning would be laughable if millions of people weren't spending their money--and gambling their health--on Pierpaoli's and Regelson's unproved claims. Melatonin research is truly at a promising juncture. But most investigators agree with Turek that the claims for melatonin are running far ahead of the science.

--By Christine Gorman. Reported by Alice Park/New York

With reporting by Alice Park/New York