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(eqqman/flickr)Mortality
Is death a fact of life or a disease that can be cured (as some scientists claim)? We filter the modern search for the fountain of youth through personal stories of witnessing death...the death of a cell, the death of a loved one...and the aging of a society.
Life’s Limit
Until Leonard Hayflick came along, everyone thought cells were immortal. That they’d divide over and over again, forever. Hayflick torpedoes that theory and proved that there is limit. A very predictable limit: a magic number. To thank him, science textbooks everywhere now refer to that as ‘the Hayflick limit.’
While Hayflick’s discovery may seem like a buzzkill for those in search of immortality… fear not! Rules were meant to be broken, and Hayflick, now a Professor of Anatomy at the University of California, points out how one might tinker with this limit in the lab…and the potential dangers of doing so. The limit is different, it turns out, for different animals. There are tortoises that live for centuries, and lobsters that seem to be ageless.
Fountains of Youth
Dr. Cynthia Kenyon looks at the genes of tiny worms, and discovers that aging may be a battle between good and evil. A literal struggle between two genes (who she calls): The Grim Reaper gene vs. The Fountain of Youth gene. And by fixing the match, she and her team at UCSF have found they can take the worms, and more than DOUBLE their lifespan. She wonders if her research may be applicable to humans. And what would a society look like if we could all live twice as long? Well, Japan may be the canary in the coal mine, because it has the fastest aging population in the whole world. Reporter Jocelyn Ford takes us there, on a tour through street fairs, nursing homes, and robot factories, to see how a society supports an aging population.
Grandpa
How do we deal with dying? Most of us look away. But in the case of the Zagar family, they look closer. A father and son have a contest to take the best pictures of their dying grandpa, and the result is an up-close portrait of death. This piece was produced by Lu Olkowski.
Isaiah Zagar's Murals
Slideshow: Grampa dying (warning: contains graphic content)
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