Living forever is much in the news these days.Scarcely a week goes by without the papers, the television, and the internet holding out new and plausible hopes that the matter is now well in hand, a technical breakthrough away.Maybe you can get your telomere shrinkage reversed. 1Perhaps it's just a question of taking control of p21 gene expression. 2Possibly stem cell transplantation will do the trick. 3Politicians set their seal of approval on the promises of biomedical expertise.On the day that the decoding of the human genome was officially announced 85% complete, President Clinton declared "Our children's children may know cancer only as a constellation in the night sky."But living forever has always been in the news.The expectations that we are now encouraged to have of biomedical expertise have been experienced many times before.
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Shapin et al. (2000) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 2 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: