On the Verge of Immortality, Or Are We Stuck with Death? A New Direction For Research Could Provide the Answers–and More

Token funding for basic research on the biology of aging makes no sense, Hayflick argues, when it’s clear that aging is the condition that increases vulnerability to age-associated diseases. Physicians and other experts on aging talk glibly, he says, about age-associated diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses for which the elderly are at greater risk. And then they immediately utter the mantra that the greatest risk factor for age-associated diseases is aging. “But,” he adds, “they never ask themselves why all these major causes of death are occurring in older people.” If you try to answer that question logically, he continues, “you come to the conclusion that there must be something in old cells that provides the milieu or the opportunity for age-associated diseases that does not occur in young cells.” Isn’t it therefore highly probable, he conjectures, that “old cells may provide the condition that allows for the emergence of all age-associated diseases?”