This is the story of the cells that helped to overcome this obstacle, and their controversial origins at a clinic in Sweden. Because cells are mortal individually, if you grow them in a petri dish, sooner or later they will stop dividing and die. Secondly, it’s difficult to find cells that scientists can grow in the laboratory – an essential step in the production of many drugs and vaccines. The oldest person who has ever lived, Jeanne Calment, made it to 122 years and 164 days – uncannily close. In fact, if you multiply the number of cells in the human body by the average time it takes for cells to reach the Hayflick limit, you end up with 120 years. Instead, it’s possible that there are built-in limits to how old it’s possible to get. This strict cut-off is known as the “ Hayflick limit”, and it has two important consequences.įirstly, our current lifespans might not just be constrained by the way we live our lives – our diets, and so on. It turns out ordinary human cells can only divide between 40 and 60 times before they undergo a violent, pre-determined death. Then a young American scientist, Leonard Hayflick, made a discovery which shocked the world. Why a global vaccine is such a challengeįor decades, scientists had thought that the roughly 37.2 trillion cells that make up our bodies would keep dividing – and thus replenishing themselves – forever, if only they were given the chance. Why the elderly are harder to vaccinate.The quest for immortality took another blow in 1961, this time in a modern laboratory in Philadelphia. The book had been written by someone else. The real Flamel was no alchemist – he had worked as a scribe, and died in 1418 at the respectable age of 88. He took the book extremely seriously, and devoted a large part of his professional career to studying its contents.Īlas, it wasn’t true. Even Isaac Newton, widely regarded as one of the most brilliant minds who ever lived, believed the tales. In it, he claimed to have successfully made the philosopher's stone, a mythical object which allows its owner to turn base metals to gold and produce the elixir of life.Īs the legend of Flamel’s immortality spread, people began to report seeing him out and about. His name was Nicholas Flamel, and though he had been born in France nearly 300 years earlier, he was credited with authoring a book about alchemy, published that year. In 1612, the streets of Paris were alive with a tantalising rumour – that a man had achieved immortality.
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