There's a super-fundamental discovery about ageing--and a possible "cure" to ageing--that longevity researchers seem to be WAY TOO cautious in discussing and pu

There's a super-fundamental discovery about ageing--and a possible "cure" to ageing--that longevity researchers seem to be WAY TOO cautious in discussing and pursuing. These are telomeres. Telomeres are a DNA pattern that sets a hard limit on the number of times a cell will divide (and thus repair itself). When the limit is reached, cells stop dividing (then accumulate damage and age). The limit for humans is something like 70 cellular divisions if I remember right. If you can find a way to lengthen or reset telomeres, you'd have cellular immortality. The first time I heard about it ten years ago, it blew my mind. To me, this is the biologist's equivalent of a proof that P=NP would be to a computer scientist. I expected enormous interest and research into this, and billions of dollars poured into it, but I'm amazed that it hasn't happened and most people still have never heard of telomeres. Why isn't there an Apollo-mission-let's-devote-the-resources-of-the-whole-country effort into this? I think it comes down to fear of researching or financing anything with the word "immortality" in it. You'd sound like a crackpot even though the science is sound. A brief intro on telomeres: http://www.news-medical.net/health/Telomere-What-are-Telomeres.aspx http://www.news-medical.net/health/Telomere-What-are-Telomer...