I don’t know. Like I said my bio is limited to having been awake in class as an undergraduate and doing some basic lab work like PCR and gel electrophoresis. Oh and sexing fruit flies. Who doesn’t love that fruit fly sexing?

The claim in the podcast I’m referring to is that the very long telomeres allow an exceptional regenerative capacity. Weinstein’s theory is that senescence is basically an anti-cancer defense. If a cell becomes cancerous and then burns through its telomeres dividing, it will grow to be a mole and then stop. Incidentally that’s supposedly why symmetrical moles are ok and asymmetrical moles are scary. An asymmetry suggests that one of the cells in the benign tumor has mutated to start dividing again. Obviously that would be bad.