The media, like the public, has an appetite for singular events and dramatic discoveries, which often runs counter to the more speculative and qualified truths that science produces in fits and starts. Worse, once an appealing idea takes hold, it becomes difficult to dislodge. Early on in telomere research, a study reporting that human skin cells usually divide eighty to ninety times in culture whereas cells taken from a seventy-yearold man might divide only twenty to thirty times, was viewed as evidence that the maintenance of telomeres might be implicated in the aging process. This “fact”
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