 Phenomena such as ageing were also believed to apply only to multicellular organisms. Bacteria and other unicellular life were thought of as ageless and “immortal”, due to symmetrical cell division leading to new offspring replacing the progenitor cell and removing any opportunity for ageing (Nyström 2002). Because ageing used to be defined as something that happened to organisms with distinctions between germ and soma, it was assumed that “unicellular bacteria are clearly not members of the exclusive club of aging creatures” (Nyström 2002: 596). However, a large body of research now investigates just how bacteria age, the differences between death and ageing, and what bacterial death means for the very evolution of senescence (Baig et al. 2014). In other words, bacterial ageing can model the core phenomena of what it means to grow old.