A "different" 16 year old.

**~~Norpheus~~** · July 10, 2009, 07:05 AM

A "different" 16 year old. Many people might already have seen this and know about her, but thats how it is with a modern little wonder.

http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=7943572

Shes 16, but remains on the level of a 16 months old baby. She has had a number of seirous sicknesses, but still recovered. A brain tumor just dissapeared (

) for example.
The doctors say the she is the only of her kind, there is however 2 indians that seem to have somewhat the same thing but on a different level. Neither do the doctors now what is causing all this.

I think this is very interesting, you can wonder how it ended up like this, and how it will be to the future. Will she end up as a 500 year old looking lik a 50 year old? Or die like normal men? The wiseman of the earth?

**Don in the North** · July 10, 2009, 09:30 AM

dead before 30. thats my wager.

**Vizsla** · July 10, 2009, 09:56 AM

This guy is comparing her DNA with the rest of her family.

He thinks he’ll find the gene that makes us age and we’ll all be able to live forever.

**Playfishpaste** · July 10, 2009, 04:08 PM

Originally Posted by Vizsla

This guy is comparing her DNA with the rest of her family.

He thinks he’ll find the gene that makes us age and we’ll all be able to live forever.

There's no gene that makes us age.

**Juvenal** · July 11, 2009, 06:56 AM

Originally Posted by Playfishpaste

There's no gene that makes us age.

It may be that Telomeres have something to do with it.

Telomere

A telomere is a region of repetitive DNA at the end of chromosomes, which protects the end of the chromosome from destruction. Its name is derived from the Greek nouns telos (τἐλος) "end" and merοs (μέρος, root: μερεσ-) "part".
A Russian theorist Alexei Olovnikov was the first to recognize (1971) the problem of how chromosomes could replicate right to the tip, as such was impossible with replication in a 3’ to 5’ direction. To solve this and to accommodate Leonard Hayflick’s idea of limited somatic cell division, Olovnikov suggested that DNA sequences would be lost in every replicative phase until they reached a critical level, at which point cell division would stop.[1][2]
During cell division, the enzymes that duplicate the chromosome and its DNA cannot continue their duplication all the way to the end of the chromosome. If cells divided without telomeres, they would lose the end of their chromosomes, and the necessary information it contains. (In 1972, James Watson named this phenomenon the "end replication problem".) The telomeres are disposable buffers blocking the ends of the chromosomes and are consumed during cell division and replenished by an enzyme, the telomerase reverse transcriptase.
Elizabeth Blackburn compared telomeres to the tips on the ends of shoelaces that keep them from unravelling.[3]
In 1975-1977, Blackburn, working as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University with Joseph Gall, discovered the unusual nature of telomeres, with their simple repeated DNA sequences composing chromosome ends. Their work was published in 1978.
The telomere shortening mechanism normally limits cells to a fixed number of divisions, and animal studies suggest that this is responsible for aging on the cellular level and sets a limit on lifespans. Telomeres protect a cell's chromosomes from fusing with each other or rearranging - abnormalities which can lead to cancer - and so cells are normally destroyed when their telomeres are consumed. Most cancers are the result of "immortal" cells which have ways of evading this programmed destruction.[4]