Chicken Breaks the Longevity Records Comment

Dear Readers,

In a recent issue of Vibrant Health Now, I mentioned Dr. Alexis Carrel’s experiment keeping chicken cells alive for 34 years. A reader e-mailed me back, siting this more current reference. Below is the link to the reference and an excerpt from the article. The article suggests recent study finds that cell division can reach a maximum of 50 replications, not infinite divisions as Dr. Carrel’s earlier study suggested.

I would like to thank Jaye Macfarlane for sharing this information!

I still have faith that we as humans can far outlive our estimated life span of 100 years! Madame Clement is documented to have lived to 122, and Methusula lived to 979! There is strong evidence that we can live 38% longer by reducing our caloric consumption as Dr. Roy Walford found in his studies. I am going for the record!

Please refer to our previous article on life extension with the chicken cells study reference here.

Article Excerpts

It has been said in high places that stem cells, the mother cells that are center stage in a national debate, may live forever in the right environment. But are these cells really immortal? Or are they, staring out at the world from that petri dish, experiencing just a brush with immortality, say extra innings?

…. But apparently I bought into a fiction rather than a fact. The immortality of Carrel’s chick embryo heart cells has long since been recognized to be legend, at best, and fraud, at worst, the professor wrote, listing several references for me to check for myself. The story can be one of simple laboratory error or political intrigue the latter referring to the relatively unsubstantiated proposition that one of his lab techs was trying to do him in because of his politics.

…. Oxford University Press, 1997. Hayflick could not confirm Carrel’s result. His own cultured chicken cell lines invariably became extinct after 15 to 35 rounds of cell division. Scientists now generally believe that Carrel’s cell line was not really continuous. His method of feeding cells used serum prepared from chicken blood in a way that inadvertently included fresh chicken cells. The old cells, it now seems obvious, must have been dying but, unbeknownst to Carrel, were being replaced repeatedly with new cells.

…. Most human cell lines, unless they are tumor lines, begin to die off after about 50 cell divisions. The 50-division threshold is known today as the Hayflick limit after the discoverer of the aging process in human cells.

Full artucle here.

Stay Forever Healthy!
Wayne Gendel