Ana Aslan (1897 – 1988) was a Romanian scientist whose long and fruitful life was dedicated to the fight against aging. Her proposal of a cure that would slow down the aging process, Gerovital, became known throughout the world and it was used by famous and common people alike.

Ana Aslan was born in Braila in 1887, as the youngest of the four children of an intellectual family, Sofia and Margarit Aslan. She followed the Romascanu School in Braila and, after her father died when she was only 13 years old, she moved with her family to Bucharest. She graduated the Central School from Bucharest at 15 and, the next year, she fulfilled her dream of flying, using a small Bristol-Coanda aircraft. As her mother didn’t grant her permission to follow the courses of the Medicine University, she stayed in a hunger strike until she got the approval.

During the First World War, she activated in the military hospitals, taking care of the wounded soldiers. After she returned to Bucharest, she worked under the supervision of the famous neurologist Gheorghe Marinescu. In 1922, she graduated the Medicine and started working in a clinic from Bucharest, under the coordination of proffessor Daniel Danielopolu. In the following years she also activated as a cardiologist at CFR Hospital, department chief at the Universitary Clinic of Filantropia Hospital and in the Internal Medicine department at the main hospital in Timisoara.

While she was in Timisoara she used procaine, a local anesthetic (often referred to as Novocain) on a young man suffering from rheumatism. Noticing the results, she continued her research and applied it to old men from asylums, recording the positive effects this substance had on the development of distrophic problems, related to old age.

In 1952, she invented and patented the H3 vitamin, also known as Gerovital (a combination of the Greek word “gero”, meaning “old”, and the Latin word “vita”, meaning “life”), based upon Novocain. In 1956, she presented her invention at the European Gerontology Congress at Karlsruhe and at the European Gerontology Congress at Basel, but her innovations were received with skepticism. During the following two years, the product was tested upon thousands of people and the results were favorable – they indicated that the aging process was slowed down by 40%. However, there were and still are critics claiming that Gerovital is nothing but a drug and that there are dangerous side effects such as low blood pressure, respiratory difficulties and convulsions.

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