HeLa cells are certainly the most famous. It should be noted that the HeLa stocks used in most labs now are radically different from original HeLa stocks.
Even in routine experiments, you have to keep a bunch of cells frozen in liquid nitrogen to replenish your "working stock" of cells. After around 30-40 passages (e.g. generations of cells), most immortalized cell lines start to get funky with mutations and exhibit different behaviors. You kill them off and go back to your frozen stocks to get back to the "original" genetics.
Nobody patented "a human cell". What can get patented is the method for creating this cell line. Here's the classic (and controversial, but for different reasons) patent related to the Mo cell line (T-lymphoblasts):
"Increasing human longevity has no meaning, it is ecological nonsense."
This is an interesting quote from the article given by another biologist Stefano Piraino, not the main focus of the article. If we did find the secret to immortality, it would be stupid to give it to everyone. In that case, who gets it?
You are somehow imagining that this will be administered in a strictly controlled manner. It won't. In fact, I will be very sad if it's not part of the regular capitalist marketplace.
Will it lead to overpopulation? Yes. Bloody wars? Yes. Almost completely stagnant population? Suicides left and right by 200-y.o. people? Perverse class imbalance? Complete overhaul of society as we know it? Yesyesyesnotreally.
Because once you institutionalise and put such and such rules in place (a bureaucracy), people stop thinking. They stop thinking and become not people, but things - and they do it to themselves, willingly.
This is what I was thinking myself. What's to stop people from going after such immortality? They might very well give an arm and a leg, those on the outside are going to feel maltreated, and might even start a revolution.
As far as the "immortality" for these jellyfish go though, they are rather easy to kill. They can't even eat a whole prawn egg, and their water temperature has to be just right.
The elite - most intelligent, most beautiful, most valued members of a ruling political party. It would be a 1970s dystopian sci fi movie come to life.
Taking but a moment to take a peek down the sci-fi fantasy rabbit hole :
It might potentially be fair to administer "longevity" to those willing to colonize another planet. This would solve the problem of distribution while creating a bit of an incentive to expand human civilization (which might well be an eventual necessity).
Unfortunately, there is only a small push for extra-planetary life. The fat cats on top would much rather sit back, and wait for an extinction level event.
Also, if humans do go extra/multiplanetary, most religious apocalypse' are MOOT.
More like geeks like to prove they've already heard of the idea behind something.
Dropping the name Betteridge or Dunning-Kruger or Godwin tells everyone "I heard about this phenomenon before it was cool and even know the name for it".
I don't think so. Geeks like to win arguments and value facts above opinions. Scientific arguments are generally irrefutable. Of course the only scientific of the 3 is the Dunning-kruger effect.
> "Geeks like to win arguments and value facts above opinions."
I'd rephrase that to be "geeks like to win arguments and like to think they value facts above opinions"
In my experience geeks are no more objective than any other messed up human being on this planet. We just have a giant collective superiority complex about our own supposed factualness.
This is related to the many, many posts you see on HN where programmers belittle professionals of other fields as if they were economists, political scientists, biologists, medical doctors, rocket scientists, architects, structural engineers, or what have you.
These are cells from a person, Henrietta Lacks, which can be grown in a dish and which keep dividing, for ever.