Excellent article on radical life extension and girls who never seem to age
I check out Zite (an app on my Ipad) at least once every day, and it's a rare day that I don't come upon at least one excellent article. Today it was "Arrested Development: The Girls Who Never Seem to Age," by Virginia Hughes.
For one thing, it gives one of the best short overviews what's being done in researching human aging and the concept of radical life extension.
But it also covers the work of Dr. Richard Walker (and his book, Why We Age).
Dr. Walker has had a career-long fascination with those issues, and went down a variety of not-so-productive paths until he came upon the strange, sad phenomenon of young girls who basically never really age, at least not as we know it.
"Aging is usually defined as the slow accumulation of damage in our cells, organs, and tissues, ultimately causing the physical transformations that we all recognize in elderly people. Jaws shrink and gums recede. Skin slacks. Bones brittle, cartilage thins, and joints swell. Arteries stiffen and clog. Hair greys. Vision dims. Memory fades. The notion that aging is a natural, inevitable part of life is so fixed in our culture that we rarely question it. But biologists have been questioning it for a long time."
I'll leave you to the article for the rest.
As I said, I found it on Zite, which is a compiler. The origin of the article is not totally clear to me. It apparently appeared August 7, 2014 on Pacific-Standard: The Science of Society, which I had never run upon before, but seems to be filled with fascinating stuff. And, if I read the attribution correctly, the article, under the title "Arrested Development" earlier appeared in Mosaic.