Leonard Hayflick

Leonard Hayflick (born 20 May 1928) is a Professor of Anatomy at the UCSF 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 on Aging (NIA). The recipient of a number of research prizes and awards, including the 1991 Sandoz Prize for Gerontological Research, he has studied the aging process for more than fifty years. He is known for discovering that normal human cells divide for a limited number of times in vitro^[1] (refuting the contention by Alexis Carrel that normal body cells are immortal). This is known as the Hayflick limit. His discoveries overturned a 60-year old dogma that all cultured cells are immortal. Hayflick demonstrated that normal cells have a memory and can remember at what doubling level they have reached. He demonstrated that his normal human cell strains were free from contaminating viruses. His cell strain WI-38 soon replaced primary monkey kidney cells and became the substrate for the production of most of the world's human virus vaccines. Hayflick discovered that the etiological agent of primary atypical pneumonia (also called "walking pneumonia") was not a virus as previously believed. He was the first to cultivate the causative organism called a mycoplasma, the smallest free-living organism, which Hayflick isolated on a unique culture medium that bears his name. He named the organism Mycoplasma pneumoniae.

In 1959, Hayflick developed the first inverted microscope for use in cell culture research. To this day, all inverted microscopes used in cell culture laboratories worldwide are descended from this prototype. His microscope was accessioned by the Smithsonian Institution in 2009.

Hayflick developed the first practical method for producing powdered cell culture media in 1965. This method is now used worldwide for the production of many tons of powdered media annually for use in research laboratories and commercial production facilities. The technique is not patented and Hayflick receives no remuneration from this invention.

Hayflick is the author of the book, How and Why We Age, published in August 1994 by

Hayflick and his associates have vehemently condemned "anti-aging medicine" and criticized organizations such as the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.^[3] Hayflick has written numerous articles criticizing both the feasibility and desirability of human life extension,^[4][5] which have provoked responses critical of his views.^[6]

Biography

Leonard Hayflick was born 20 May 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1956. After receiving a post-doctoral fellowship for study at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston under the tutelage of the renowned cell culturist Charles M. Pomerat (1905–1964),^[7] he returned to Philadelphia, where he spent ten years as an Associate Member of the Wistar Institute and two years as an Assistant Professor of Research Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1968, Hayflick was appointed Professor of Medical Microbiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California. Hayflick resigned from Stanford in 1976 in protest to the behavior of a few of its administrators who were later shown to have wrongly accepted the beliefs of an NIH accountant who was unable to understand the unique concept of title to a self-duplicating biological system. Hayflick sued the NIH, who later agreed that the issue was in dispute.^[8][9] The behavior of Stanford and the NIH was later condemned by 85 prominent biologists who viewed him as having been "exonerated" by subsequent events.^[10][11] In 1982 he moved to the University of Florida, Gainesville, where he became Director of the Center for Gerontological Studies and Professor of Zoology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology in the College of Medicine.

In 1988, Hayflick joined the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco, where he is currently Professor of Anatomy. Hayflick is a member of numerous national and international scientific and public boards of directors and committees. He is now, or has been, on the Editorial Boards of more than ten professional journals. Hayflick was Editor-in-Chief of the international journal "Experimental Gerontology" for 13 years.

He is a member of twenty scientific and professional societies in which he has held several high offices including President of the Gerontological Society of America from 1982 to 1983. He was a founding member of the Council of the National Institute on Aging, NIH, and chairman of its executive committee. He was a consultant to the National Cancer Institute and the

Hayflick is known for his research in cell biology, virus vaccine development, and mycoplasmology. In 1962 he discovered that, contrary to the prevailing belief at the time, cultured normal human and animal cells have a limited capacity for replication. This discovery, known as the Hayflick limit, overturned a long-held belief bolstered by Alexis Carrel's work in the early 20th century that claimed that normal cells would proliferate continuously in culture. Hayflick found that only cancer cells are immortal and that normal cells have a mechanism for remembering what replication level they are at. He interpreted his finding that normal cells are mortal, to be an indication of aging at the cellular level. Hayflick demonstrated for the first time that mortal (normal) and immortal (malignant) mammalian cells existed.

Hayflick developed the first normal human

Hayflick is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Honorary Member of the Tissue Culture Association and, according to the Institute of Scientific Information, is one of the most cited contemporary scientists in the world in the fields of biochemistry, biophysics, cell biology, enzymology, genetics and molecular biology. Hayflick is the author of over 275 scientific papers, book chapters and edited books of which four papers are among the 100 most cited scientific papers of the two million papers published in the basic biomedical sciences from 1961 to 1978.

The inverted microscope that Hayflick modified for use in his tissue culture and mycoplasma work and on which all other such microscopes have been modeled has been acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

See also

External videos
Childhood in Pennsylvania, Leonard Hayflick interview, 1:43, 1st of 187 parts, Web of Stories.[9]

• Biogerontology
• Hayflick limit
• Senescence
• Tissue engineering

References

Further reading

• Meredith Wadman, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, 2017.
• See also Hayflick's comments on Wadman's book, Errors in "The Vaccine Race" book

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Leonard Hayflick.

• Hayflick's Tragedy: The Rise and Fall of a Human Cell Line. Science, 9 April 1976: 125-127.
• Extensive biography from Max Planck Institute for Human Development