There's something so deeply wrong about this article's perspective:

Brooke's sisters are named Emily, Caitlin and Carly. Brooke is the second youngest. She will be 18 in January.

Other girls her age are driving, going out dancing and sleeping with their first boyfriends. But for Brooke it's as if time had stood still. Mentally and physically, the girl remains at the level of an 11-month-old baby.

"Brooke is a miracle," says her father, Howard Greenberg. "Brooke is a mystery," says Lawrence Pakula, her pediatrician. "Brooke is an opportunity," says Richard Walker, a geneticist with the University of South Florida College of Medicine. They all mean the girl from Reisterstown, a small town in the US state of Maryland, who may hold the answer to a human mystery. At issue is nothing less than immortality: Brooke Greenberg apparently isn't aging.

She has no hormonal problems, and her chromosomes seem normal. But her development is proceeding "extremely slowly," says Walker. If scientists can figure out what is causing the disorder, it might be possible to unlock the mysteries of aging itself. "Then we've got the golden ring," says Walker.

He hopes to simply eliminate age-related diseases like cancer, dementia and diabetes. People who no longer age will no longer get sick, he reasons. But he also thinks eternal life is conceivable. "Biological immortality is possible," says Walker. "If you don't get hit by a car or by lightning, you could live at least 1,000 years."

via SPIEGEL ONLINE.