Obituary for Hayflick in Nature Aging

Cell aging researcher Leonard Hayflick (1929-2024) has passed and Nature Aging has a nice obituary here.   

While I never met him in person, last year we did share some email exchanges when he messaged me about the terminology of geroscience and biogerontology.  And his research on, and advocacy for, research on the biology of aging has influenced my own research.  This article is one of my favorite papers of his, which I often cite.  

A sample from the obituary:

Len’s most notable discovery was his demonstration of the finite replicative capacity of normal human diploid cell strains. Len remarked that he was unaware at the time of the prediction of August Weismann in the late 19th century that “death takes place because a worn-out tissue cannot forever renew itself, and because a capacity for increase by means of cell division is not everlasting but finite” (personal communication with M.D.W.). But he was, however, quite aware of the then-prevailing consensus that cultured cells — if provided the proper conditions for growth — would proliferate endlessly. This view was supported by research that demonstrated the long-term continuous passage of cells in vitro, including the tumor-derived HeLa cell strain and chick heart-derived cells (which had been shown to continuously proliferate for up to seven years in culture, during which time the authors Carrel and Ebeling calculated that if all cells produced during this expansion had been retained, the total mass of the cells would have exceeded the mass of the sun1).

Cheers,

Colin