There is perhaps a new trend of babies who now permanently remain babies, I kid you not. Some quick excerpts from the article.
I have heard similar things about the Persian community in India. Persians in India are very very fair skinned and historically have been reluctant to intermarry with the darker skinned peoples of India, although perhaps also for religious reasons rather than racial ones. They eventually picked up a large number of genetic illnesses known only of Indian Persians.
All the same, even though Persian numbers keep dwindling, many Indian Persians now live very long with no sign of aging. The Tata Group’s Ratan Tata is one such person. So is Adi Godrej. So are many of them. Because at 75+ or 80+, they don’t look one bit old, it seems like they keep working in their old age, because they can’t retire early. They simply are expected to live too long.
But what seems to have happened here with an Ashkenazi family in America looks like an extreme case, where a baby born to a family will likely remain a baby. Some idle speculations suggest that she will live to a thousand years with her slow rate of ageing.
It’s very strange none of you noticed this passage in page 2 of the article:
But Howard Greenberg is stalling. He has long felt that he is protecting a valuable treasure in his red brick house. He’s even hired lawyers to examine the issue of the rights to Brooke’s genome. [bold mine]
Poor sap must have had the shock of his life when the US government recently announced human genetic material won’t be subject to IP laws.