SFGate.com excerpts a profile of Cynthia Kenyon from David E. Duncan's latest book: "I think that [immortality] might be possible. I'll tell you why. You can think about the life span of a cell being the integral of two vectors in a sense, the force of destruction and the force of prevention, maintenance and repair. In most animals the force of destruction has still got the edge. But why not bump up the genes just a little bit, the maintenance genes. All you have to do is have the maintenance level a little higher. It doesn't have to be much higher. It just has to be a little higher, so that it counterbalances the force of destruction. And don't forget, the germ lineage is immortal. So it's possible at least in principle" Interesting in light of Kenyon's recent reluctance to critique Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS).

Link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/05/29/CMGD8CH62P1.DTL