We have another unexpected encounter, another fleeting kiss of incongruities.  All is chaos and continuity, at least sometimes.

RICHARD SHAVER AND ALBERT EINSTEIN

Richard Shaver — the visionary pulp fictioneer and painter — and Albert Einstein — the mathematical mystic and physics pioneer — were very different men.  They moved in different circles.  But they were both soulful and sympathetic geezers; and I’m touched, somehow, that they corresponded.  The exchange was brief, and puzzling for both, but that was probably inevitable.  Shaver sent Einstein his theories on aging, and Einstein told him they were wrong.  And life swirled on.

And here’s what they wrote.  The letters are undated, but probably from 1944.

Dear Sirs:

I think I have discovered the cause of age.  Please hear me out by reading this letter carefully.

If you admit that age has a cause — then you must admit that this cause is removed by the process of birth.

If the cause were a radioactive poison — as the symptoms of radium poisoning indicate (they are same as age, under certain conditions), then you must admit that the phenomena of birth is the phenomena of removal of this poison by filters through which the food supply of the young passes.  The mother’s body remains old because the poison is retained in its fabric, in contact with the young replacement cells — aging them quickly.  Since this aging takes place in every living thing, we must admit that the cause is omnipresent, is everywhere.  Only the sun gets around the Earth that much.  So the cause must be the sun.  Since radium poisoning produces the same symptoms as age in even a young person — premature age — then we must look to the sun as a source of the radioactives which cause age.

It would be remarkable if the sun did not project such poisons as radium down upon us in a finely divided state.  Well, it does.  Consequently, we age.  We all die in time from the cumulative radioactives from the sun finding their way into our bodies.

Now to prove that birth itself is but the protecting of the young life seed from this poison by filters in the mother’s body (long enough for the new life to get a good start), we need only place some mice under conditions which would exclude this poison did it exist — and observe how long they live.  If they live longer than the natural life span of caged mice — we have done something to defeat age.

All right, I have done so.  My protected mice live long, much longer, two, three, and when very special care is taken, four times longer than ordinary mice.  My results are staggeringly indicative that this attack upon age is the correct one.

The experiments performed by Alexis Carrel and by some hydroponics experts, raising living cells in a protected condition, feeding them only artificially prepared food and triple distilled water to keep out all alien material, show — if so interpreted, that life so protected by filtration and distillation, does not die or even cease growing, but keeps on growing at an alarming rate.

That Alexis Carrel and others did not attribute their success in defeating age in these living bits of matter to the exclusion of some poison is only because this is a new and unusual view of the cause of age.  They just didn’t happen to think of it.  Their puzzlement over the cause of the immortality of their chicken heart muscle and tomato roots in nutrient solutions is apparent in their reports.  When the theory of radioactives as the cause of age is applied to their experimental results, the mystery disappears.

Hoping to arouse some interest in this explanation of age and this remedy for age,

                                                            I remain, your friend

                                                             Richard Shaver

Dear Sir:

Your idea cannot be right because it does not make understandable why the sperma-cells which multiply independently from the rest of the organism through the generations do not undergo the process.  The simplest case for which your theory is obviously insufficient is the unicellular organism which propogates through simple splitting of the cell.  I remember also the experiments with embryonic cells of the heart which are not degenerating in a number of years much greater than the life span of the corresponding animal.

                                                     Sincerely yours, signed

                                                     Albert Einstein

(Posted by Doug Skinner.  The letters are extracted from Ray Palmer’s partwork, The Hidden World.)