Science And Society, Weird

Fountain Of Youth?

17 Comments

This is interesting. A seventeen-year-old girl who has the biological age of one year old. The question is, how does development relate to aging? What will happen to her in another forty or fifty years? It would be nice to not have to wait that long to discover the secret. And of course, it’s tough luck that she didn’t get stuck in a seventeen-year-old’s body.

17 thoughts on “Fountain Of Youth?”

  1. This is really heartbreaking. Even if she develops normally, but at an extremely slow pace, her parents won’t live long enough to see her graduate grade school.

    I never heard this story, but it’s taking place just a few miles from me… wow.

  2. “It is also believed it could lead to treatments which will allow us to all live longer. ”

    Bambi, et al., will put a stop to that. Can’t have people living as long as they do now longer and placing a burden on Bambi’s plans to bankrupt America and turn it into a socialist hell Medicare and SS.

  4. …of course, according to a couple sci-fi short stories I read (authoritative, of course), if we keep the cats kittens, they will learn and gain intelligence at a torrid pace, and become smarter than us. The earth will harbor a space faring civilization, but it won’t be humans–it’ll be the genetically engineered kitten overlords!

  5. Her lifespan may not be that long. She has different ages in different parts of her body. That doesn’t sound good.

    I think there may be many psychologically damaged people that would like to have a permababy (is that my word?… contact the OED.)

  7. This is assuming that the aging process is developmental in nature, that it is a specific genetic program. I see no reason to believe this. The actual damage mechanisms that are called “aging” are adequately described as the “7 deadly things” in SENS. The actual underlying cause is most likely the accumulation of mitochondrial DNA mutations.

  8. I for one welcome our new genetically engineered kitteh overlords…

    If a simple genetic mutation was all it took to not grow old, why has such a mutation not already taken over some species of our acquaintance already?

  9. I have a friend who was a “cyberwarrior” who would track the traffic of kiddy porn, so sometimes I have thoughts that disgust me, because she was so focused on it for so long.

    What happens when she reaches the age of consent?

  13. Oh, and uh, Douglas, I’m pretty sure her parents will continue to protect her the way parents of other kinds of severely retarded kids protect them even after they become “adults.” There really is no age of consent in cases like this.

    Really, some thoughts should remain unexpressed.

  14. “Jeff, Red Dwarf is not a documentary.”
    That’s funny. I had completely forgotten about the “Cat” in Red Dwarf. I was thinking of a couple short stories in Analog magazine. Apparently the kitten takeover is a recurring meme. Must be part of their insidious, nefarious, cute plan. Also, it’s good that this blog discusses space; otherwise I’d now be pegged as terminally nerdy.

  16. So teaching her body to grow older, could teach us to teach ours to grow younger? Or vica versa.

    The universe does love irony.

Comments are closed.