Leonard Hayflick

Leonard Hayflick ( born May 20, 1928 in Philadelphia ) is an American gerontologist. He was known primarily for his work in the field of cell division, in which he showed that normal body cells can only divide fifty times and then die by programmed cell death (apoptosis). He refuted so that by Alexis Carrel in 1908 established theory that cells can divide indefinitely in vertebrates and are immortal.

Curriculum vitae

Leonard Hayflick received his doctorate in 1956 at the University of Pennsylvania. After that, he was a post-doc at Charles M. Pomerant at the University of Texas in Galveston. Then he returned to Philadelphia, where he was for ten years an Associate Member of the Wistar Institute. Then he got there as an assistant professor. He was appointed Professor of Medical Microbiology at Stanford University in 1968. In 1982 he accepted a position at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he was director of the Center for Gerontological Studies ( Center for Gerontological Studies) and Professor of Zoology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Micro Biology and Immunology at the College of Medicine.

Hayflick in 1988 went to the University of California, San Francisco. Here he is still a professor of anatomy.

Leonard Hayflick is a member of numerous national and international boards and committees. He founded the Gerontological Society of America ( Gerontological Society of America ) and was a founding member of the National Institute on Aging. Hayflick has received a number of honors and published more than 275 scientific papers. Some of his articles are among the most cited in the field of biomedicine.

Research

Hayflick discovered in 1961 together with his colleague Paul Moorhead that normal cultured human and animal cells can not divide indefinitely, but after a certain number of cell divisions (50 ) die off. This limit is in honor of the discoverer today Hayflick limit ( Hayflick limit engl. ) called. Hayflick, it became the first normal human cells dipoloide to cultivate. Up to this point, all cell cultures were aneuploid and unlimited proliferation potential. One of the cell lines (human fetal Lungenenfibroblasten ) from Hayflicks and Moor Heads former work is called WI -38 (Wistar Institute). These and derived cell line have now been used a billion times to produce human vaccines.

Publications (selection)

• Forever Young: Is our biological clock influenced? 1996, ISBN 3-8025-1310- X
• How and Why We Age Ballantine Books, 1994, ISBN 0-345-33918-5
• Continuous Cell Lines as substrate for Biologicals. 1988, ISBN 3-8055-4940-7

Article

• L. Hayflick: Entropy Explains aging, genetic determinism Explains longevity, and undefined terminology Explains misunderstanding both. In: PLoS Genetics, 3/2007, e220, PMID 18085826
• L. Hayflick: Biological aging is no longer a problem to unsolved. In: Ann N Y Acad Sci 1100/2007, pp. 1-10. PMID 17460161
• L. Hayflick: '' anti-aging '' is an oxymoron In: J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci 59/2004, pp. B573 - B578. PMID 15215267
• L. Hayflick: The future of aging. In: Nature 408/2000, pp. 37-39. PMID 11089985
• L. Hayflick: The illusion of cell immortality. In: Br J Cancer 83/2000, pp. 841-846. PMID 10970682
• L. Hayflick: Future directions in aging research. In: Proc Soc Exp Biol Med 165/1980, pp. 206-214. PMID 7443710
• L. Hayflick: Future directions in aging research. In: Basic Life Sci 35/1985, pp. 447-460. PMID 4062823
• L. Hayflick: The one billion dollar misunderstanding. In: Contemp Gerontol 10/2003; 10:65-69.