Ashkenazi Stem Cells: Key to Longevity?
We personally think it’s the power of complaining.
But to learn why some Ashkenazim live so long, researchers at Cornell University are about to start studying the stem cells of about a dozen older Jews.
According to the New York Post — in a story headlined “Bouncing bubbes of New York” — many Ashkenazi Jews “live to 100 without disease despite smoking, drinking and eating fatty foods.”
Ashkenazim are “a heavily persecuted population that descends from Imperial Russia and, through years of intermarriage, shares distinctive genetic traits,” the Post reports. One such characteristic is a “longevity gene,” which “appears to protect them from heart attacks, cancer and other life-threatening maladies.”
The Cornell researchers are “using the stem cells of centenarians and their children and comparing them with people who are unlikely to get to the age of 100,” said Dr. Nir Barzilai, an aging expert at Albert Einstein Medical School in The Bronx who has tracked hundreds of Ashkenazi Jews for his own Longevity Genes Project.
One of the Cornell participants, Lilly Port of Scarsdale, “turned 98 last Thursday and has never been sick,” the Post said. “She’s too busy traveling — to Italy, Hungary and St. Tropez in the last year alone — to worry about illness.”
And though she doesn’t smoke, Port doesn’t exactly hold back, the Post reported. “This Austrian native enjoys bratwurst, eats chocolate every day and drinks white wine ‘when I want to relax,’” she said.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
