Immortality Dies as Bacteria Show Their Age

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work," Woody Allen once said. "I want to achieve it by not dying." Although that's unlikely for Allen and other higher organisms, many biologists believed that immortality was possible for microbes. Now, however, a new study suggests that bacteria get old, a finding that may give scientists a new tool to understand aging. "It's one of those exciting results that makes you take a fresh look at what you think you know," says gerontologist Thomas Kirkwood of the University of Newcastle in Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.