Leonard Hayflick
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Leonard Hayflick, Ph.D.., is Professor of Anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, and was Professor of Medical Microbiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a past president of the Gerontological Society of America and was a founding member of the council of the National Institute of Aging. The recipient of several research prizes and awards, including the 1991 Sandoz Prize for Gerontological Research, he has studied the aging process for more than thirty years. He is best known for discovering that cells have a programmed moment of death. This is known as the Hayflick_limit. In 1965, as one explanation for aging, he suggested that the number of times a human cell can divide is limited. (Experimental Research, 37:614-636, "The limited in vitro time of human diploid cell strains"). This is now known to be caused by the shortening of telomeres as cells divide.
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External links
- Extensive biography from Max Planck Institute for Human Development: link (http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/aktuelles/hayflick.htm)