Want to live forever?

[kandrathe]

That fits quite differently from what I have seen other biologist say concerning cell division. There is something (Telemer?) that is attached to the genes in the cells that each time the gene is divided the portion lessens in lenght. Upon reaching a given length, the cell will no longer divide. This is why as people age skin and tissue will thin making it easier to injure and more difficult to heal from what I've read.

Telomere shortening in aging would most affect skin, stomach and intestine linings and some other cells that divide most quickly. But, death of cells due to telomere shortening can be overcome with telomerase. My view is that a longevity key is in a rejuvenated endocrine system that can keep a healthy level of enzyme function, and youthful immune system levels that would prevent mutations from developing into cancers.

Normal human cells have a finite lifespan in vitro, after which they cease dividing and undergo senescence (1). Tumour cells, however, will often divide indefinitely in vitro, and hence have overcome the normal limits to proliferation and are immortal. The molecular basis of senescence and immortalisation is not well understood, but one hypothesis for which there has recently been a large amount of evidence involves the shortening of telomeres. Human telomeres consist of large tracts of the 6 bp repeat TTAGGG (reviewed in ref. 2), which diminish in size as somatic human cells age, both in vitro and in vivo (3–8). Germline cells,
however, do not exhibit telomere shortening (9–11), and have been shown to have active telomerase (13), an enzyme which adds telomeric repeats to telomeres (12). It has been proposed that the expression of telomerase leads to stabilisation of telomere length and is a requirement for the immortalisation of human cells.
The telomere lengthening mechanism in polomerase-negative immortal human cells does not involve the telomerase RNA subunit, 1997 Oxford University Press, Human Molecular Genetics, 1997, Vol. 6, No. 6