The Hayflick Limit

The Hayflick Limit Jessica Franken (bio) In 1994, Mary Tyler Moore fell in love with a sixty-five-year-old lobster named Spike. A white-sheathed restaurant in Malibu; a dim, bubbling tank. He was easily five times the size of his tankmates, two- and three-pounders scurrying through his legs. His tremendous size drew others' eyes, as well, and Mary couldn't stop them from staring. At any time a man—heavy napkin tucked into his collar, rings on his fingers—could point to that astounding creature. Then steam, pain, a bright red body displayed. Mary offered the restaurant one thousand dollars so she could take Spike back to Maine for release. This delighted the media. Experts told her a lobster could not survive that journey twice. There were a hundred ways to fail and each would prove her naiveté—a punchline to the joke they all couldn't wait to tell. Maybe she felt dying in freedom instead of boiling in the pot was victory enough. Or maybe she thought—like I used to, like I want to again—that a tearing heart can remake the world. [End Page 107] ________ The day is nearly windless. My mom and I float on a bottle-glass lake in August, inner tubes around our middles, legs lost in the murk. We're saving bugs from drowning, and we've been at it for hours. They fall out of trees; they drop from birds or boats. We raise our hands gently under their small, struggling bodies and place them on the sun-dry dock. "We can never go back inside," my mom says. "There are too many to save." She's sixty-eight and I'm thirty-five, and neither of us have talked about cancer all afternoon. ________ Lobsters are referred to as "functionally immortal" (a phrase both pedestrian and grandiose). Their metabolisms don't slow with age; their joints don't calcify. Instead, they get stronger and more fertile the older they are. And, always, bigger—always ready for that next shell. In contrast, human cells can divide only fifty or sixty times before permanent death: the Hayflick limit. With each division, the ends of the DNA become shorter and more frayed. It's called cellular senescence (a phrase at once melodious and melancholy). In humans—in most animals—cells are programmed to die. But lobsters have an excess of telomerase, an enzyme which repairs those frayed ends so they stay long, supple, eternal. Cancer, too, is "functionally immortal." Cancer cells have forgotten how to die. The same cornucopia of telomerase that keeps lobsters motoring around the sea floor, stronger each year, keeps cancer cells dividing with inexhaustible vigor though we cut them and nuke them and boil them alive. ________ It's not the power of a god I want, scooping up these bugs; it's the certainty of a purist. I'm not built for the ambiguity overwhelm of this world where my life burns the earth and every choice means harm and there's microplastic in our water and surely some of it is mine and I have lost the convictions of my childhood and the sixth great extinction is coming and my mom has or doesn't have a cancer so rare it is nameless. I pull a mayfly by its wings out of the water. [End Page 108] "Are we taking food away from the fish?" I suddenly think to worry. "This is just one tiny piece of lake," my mom assures me. "And we're leaving the dead ones." She disappears into the inner tube's hole for a cool-down dunk, then threads herself back into place: be-diamonded with droplets, be-dewed. Her wet body, though I question and question, will not speak to me of what's to come. ________ Talk show host Rush Limbaugh said he'd pay two thousand dollars to eat Spike the lobster. He said lobsters are dumb and dumb things deserve to die. He found a clip of a lobster being cooked on The Today Show and laughed at the female host's expressions of empathy as the live lobster was sliced up. He turned...