I don't think it's possible to be "forever young." "Forever immature" is pretty common, though.
[Daily Nation (Kenya)] Aging people wishing an existence similar to "Nancy Drew" and "The Hardy Boys" have hope. A molecular biologist says it is possible.
Incidentally, "Nancy Drew" started as a sweet 16 in 1930. She remained an 18-year-old for decades.
Similarly, the 17 and 18-year old "Hardy Boys," beginning in 1927, retained youthful looks, and muscle tone well into this century.
The US-based CBS radio and television network reported experimental findings indicating scientists can stop some aspects of aging. That's not all. A reversal is possible.
Aging aspects scientists can tinker with include hair loss, infertility, and decreased brain functions like forgetting the days of the week.
That's beyond big boobs, flat stomachs, and taunt muscles, et cetera, that eternal youth seekers die pursuing.
Dr Ronald A. DePinho led the Boston, US team that published the tantalising news in the November 29 issue of the journal Nature.
Dr DePinho isn't in the league of quacks a la Gambian President Yahya Jammeh and his Aids cure. He's a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Dr DePinho's credentials are quite a chain. His tentacles also whirl in advisory boards of public and private institutions. His team's non-human laboratory collaborators were the usual suspects, mice.
As CBS put it, "Think of them as gray, balding mice that can't have kids and have memory problems."
By the time Dr DePinho's team was done the mice brain functions improved. They also regained fertility and youthful-looking fur.
"Basically, what this study teaches us is that there's a point of return in aging," CBS quoted Dr DePinho saying.
Human beings' thirst for eternal youth--not immortality, which is religious--isn't new. Records show it goes back to Greek and Roman mythologies.
Humans being of the same stock despite different hues and guttural noises, people who left no written records must have had versions of eternal youthfulness, better, agelessness.
Today the pursuit of agelessness has created a lucrative world industry. Methods of achieving it range from cosmetics to surgery.
In between are concoctions that cause stomachs to mutiny, exercises that punish the anatomy, and meditations that appeal to gods.
Dr DePinho's team turned to serious science. It engineered the mice to reduce levels of enzyme telomerase. The mice got problems that affect 80-year-old humans.
Technical details aside, the enzyme telomerase cuddles with telomeres, found at the end of chromosomes. When cells divide or say goodbye to each other for whatever reason, telomeres shorten and cells age.
Jump-kick the gene that controls the production of telomerase and, as Dr DePinho put it, a "dramatic reversal in the signs of aging" occurs.
According to CBS, Dr DePinho hopes the findings lead to an anti-aging pill. That's as long as additional research confirms them and doesn't find side effects. 
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