Critical Focus | Lineage Without Limit: How Cells Can Resist Ageing
THE MICROSCOPE
2025, Volume 72:3, pp. 132–143
DOI
https://doi.org/10.59082/GAOJ2855
AUTHOR
Brian J. Ford
EXCERPT
It’s one of the first sad lessons of life: we die. Sappho wrote about its inevitability in Fragment 58, composed about 600 BC, and around 350 BC Aristotle wrote a lengthy treatise exploring the “vital heat” that drives human metabolism, commenting on its inevitable decay. Our modern microscopical insights explain why it happens. We now recognize that, within each cell nucleus, the telomeres progressively shorten. The genome becomes unstable as mutations accumulate. Cells progressively lose viability and, after about 50 mitotic divisions, they undergo apoptosis and die. It is inevitable … or is it?
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