Telomeres – Too much of a good thing?
The first time I heard about telomeres many years ago, it blew my mind. What everyone has thought of, but no scientist is willing to say out loud is that <i>maybe</i> if the telomere count is reset (like it is for babies!), then we'd have cellular immortality. You could still die from accidents, disease, homicide, but not from ageing.<p>One sentence background info: Telomeres set a count on how many times a cell can divide before it ceases to divide and becoming old and useless; in humans, the count is 40-60 divisions and then you (the cell anyway) dies. Simplified, but that's the essence.<p>Yes, this is all extreme speculation, but if telomeres are the basis of ageing, can you imagine the upside for discovering a "cure" for that?<p>If only someone like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg were willing to throw a billion or $10 billion to answer this question. Ideally it should be government funding it -- like an Apollo moon shot or Manhattan project effort. But any kind of research with words like "immortality" in it will never get off the ground. It has to be funded by an individual or maverick organization.