On its website, ABC News (8/17, James, 671K) reported on an eight-year-old child who weighs just 11 pounds. The child “has a mysterious condition, shared by only a handful of others in the world, that slows her rate of aging.” Physician Richard F. Walker “has been trying to find the genetic off-switch to stop the aging process has been studying” the child, “as well as two other people who have striking similarities.”
The New York Daily News (8/17, Taylor, 3.47M) reported that the condition is so rare that there it currently has no name. “Walker explained that ‘developmental inertia,’ or physiological change, is vital for” growth in humans. He “said he believes he found one of the genes responsible for developmental inertia.” According to Walker, “If we could identify the gene and then at young adulthood we could silence the expression of developmental inertia, find an off-switch, when you do that, there is perfect homeostasis and you are biologically immortal.”
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