One of the world’s preeminent experts on aging on his life in research.
From Nautilis: “After all, for 60 years it had been known that human cells were immortal, capable of dividing forever if they were cultivated in the right medium under the right conditions. But some of Hayflick’s cells were not dividing. He could have chalked it up to the usual suspects: Maybe his sample had been contaminated, or there was a problem with the way he’d prepared the cells. A few weeks passed, however, and not only did his finding remain the same, but a pattern emerged: The cells would double around 50 times, then stop dividing.
Today, we take it for granted that human cells multiply a finite number of times. They stop at the aptly-named Hayflick Limit, when their telomeres—the protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes—get too short. But at the time, the scientific community deemed Hayflick’s discoveries—that normal cells are mortal, that they have memory and an internal counting mechanism, that cancer cells are uniquely immortal—preposterous. It would take nearly a decade of criticism and skepticism before his ideas were accepted as fact.
Hayflick’s ideas have revolutionized the way we think about aging: as a process intrinsic to our cells, and not the result of outside stressors. He went on to a storied career, developing a cell strain used in most human virus vaccines, serving as an anatomy professor at the University of California, San Francisco, as president of the Gerontological Society of America, and as a co-founder of the National Institute on Aging.
Earlier this month, Hayflick spoke with Nautilus about his thoughts on the biological cause of aging, his frustration with current research in the field of gerontology, his skepticism toward claims that we’ll be able to use science to extend the human lifespan, and his views on the relationship between research and commercial interest.” Click here for the full article.