Can We Postpone Aging?

by Brian Lottman

Brian Lottman, president of Lottman Financial Group Inc., is a Certified Senior Advisor specializing in retirement and estate planning. Organizations such as the Monrovia Community Center, Wellington Court and a City of Hope chapter have invited Brian to speak on topics including senior health & lifestyle concerns. Lottman Financial Group, Inc.

At the University of Miami in the 1960s, Dr. Leonard Hayflick was counting the number of times the human fibroblast cells split. That is how we create new body parts when we split our chromosomes. Hayflick was counting fibroblast cell splits in a chemical dish under a microscope.

At 50 splits, the human fibroblast cells stopped splitting. This is called Hayflick’s Limitation. Inside us, there’s a time clock, like in human fibroblasts at the 50^th split, when we stop.

Later, Hayflick got the fibroblasts to split 51 times and then to immortality. How?

He gave it cancer. If we could find the key to what makes cancer cells split to immortality and give it to normal cells, maybe we could prevent the aging process.

Ten years later, doctors in Texas found the key. At the end of a chromosome, there is a cap called a telomere. Every time a chromosome splits, the telomere gets shorter until it doesn’t cover the chromosome. Unprotected, the chromosome dies. Our aging time clock is called the telomere.

But what does the cancer cell have that the telomere doesn’t have? An ingredient called telomerase (te-lom-mer-ace), which forbids the telemore from shrinking.

This is not science fiction. Experts predict that within 5 to10 years from now, we’ll go to doctors to get injections of telomerase to postpone the aging process. They have already done it in mice and rats. They have not tried it on humans yet, but it could happen soon.

Imagine what would happen to the United States economically, socially, etc. The graying of America is big today, but watch what’s going to happen in the next 10 years.