> A handful of girls seem to defy one of the biggest certainties in life: ageing. He has identified four girls with this condition, marked by what seems to be a permanent state of infancy, a dramatic developmental arrest. He suspects that the disease is caused by a glitch somewhere in the girls’ DNA. His quest for immortality depends on finding it.
I'm sad this comment hasn't been upvoted higher. The comment explain how the mutation could be possible.
The key is that the mutation would prevent reproduction. If you never age, you never reproduce.
You can think about different cancers. A mutation that causes fatal childhood cancer doesn't get passed on. A mutation that causes prostate cancer can spread.
Aging/death and reproduction seem to be closely related. I suppose maxander would counter that some mutation, given the many people who have lived before, should preserve reproducibility and youthfulness if fractional plasma is able to, but I'd counter that maxander is measuring (or guessing really) the probabilities wrong.
I met a child-like animator, who worked for Disney in Anaheim California (tiny hands). He appeared somewhere around age 9 at his mid 20s, due to a pituitary dysfunction from a car accident.
Important caveat for one of the patients mentioned in the article: “Her telomeres were considerably shorter than those of healthy teenagers, suggesting that her cells were ageing at an accelerated rate.“
Aging is weird. Maybe there’s something to be learned from these cases, but it’s very unlikely to be straightforward. Unless you’re a roundworm. We can make those live hundreds of human-relative years. But in those cases it’s a tiny number of genes involved, we have near zero evidence that the same is the case for higher organisms.
> A handful of girls seem to defy one of the biggest certainties in life: ageing. He has identified four girls with this condition, marked by what seems to be a permanent state of infancy, a dramatic developmental arrest. He suspects that the disease is caused by a glitch somewhere in the girls’ DNA. His quest for immortality depends on finding it.