My interest in this subject goes back more than three decades, when I began a book about it. The term "prolongevity" was coined in 1955 by historian Gerald J. Gruman to refer to the significant extension of natural life span by human effort. Unfortunately, the book was sidetracked by another project--founding and growing the Institute for Scientific Information. But my interest in the topic was recently piqued by Leonard Hayflick's excellent book How and Why We Age (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994).
Hayflick overturned the entrenched dogma in cell biology that normal cells can grow indefinitely outside the organism when supplied with necessary nutrients. This cell "immortality" concept was advanced by Alexis Carrel in 1912 and subsequently became a paradigm for the field. It fostered the belief that aging must be an extracellular process. In a classic 1961 paper (Experimental Cell Research, 25:585-621), Hayflick and Paul Moorhead discovered the opposite--that ...
