Biologically Immortal? 8-Year-Old Never Ages, Looks Like A Newborn

. Biologically Immortal? 8-Year-Old Never Ages, Looks Like A Newborn Gabby Williams is 8-year-old, but looks the same as she did she when she was born, she hasn’t aged. Doctors say it could reveal biological immortality. Andit’s not only her looks that are those ofan infant, her needs are also affected, she still wears diapers and her mother has to change her, feed her, and cradle her Gabby, from Billings, Montana weighs only 11 pounds and shares a rare condition with only a handful of peoplearound the world. For the last two yearsa doctor has been trying to find the genetic answer to the aging process andhas been studying Gabby and two other patients who suffer from the same condition. A 29-year-old man in Floridahas the body of a 10-year-old and a 31-year-old Brazilian woman is the size of a 2-year-old. Both don’t seem to age. The TLC special 40-Year-Old Child: A New Case, which airs Monday, August 19, at 10 p.m. ET highlights the unusualcases and is a follow up to the 8-year-old’s story which was featured in a special last year. Medical researcher, Richard F. Walker says, “In some people, something happens to them andthe development process is retarded. The rate of change in the body slows and is negligible.” Walker, who is retired from University of Florida Medical school, has spent his whole career studying the aging process and now works at All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. He told ABCNews.com his focus is not the consequences, but what causes it. The people who suffer from “biological immortality” grow at a rate of one-fifth the speed normal people do and have a series of other problems, including deafness, inability to walk, eat or in some cases speak. Mary Margaret Williams, 38, Gabby’s mom, says her daughter has changed very little since being born, she has gotten a little longer and now wears 3-6month-old clothes. The last time she weighed 11 pounds, one pound more than the previous doctor check-up and she’s gotten a few more haircuts, other than that she hasn’t changed much sincethe 2012 show. Walker explains that physiological change or as he calls it “developmental inertia” is essential for human growth, “Without that process wenever develop. When we develop, all the pieces of our body come together and change and are coordinated. Otherwise, there would be chaos.” But he adds, the body does not have an “off switch” for this development, as in the case of the biologically immortal 8-year-old. According to Walker, we mature at age 20 and then continue to change. The first signs of aging come at 30 andstart showing at 40. In one of the girls Walker studied, he found damage to oneof the genes that causes developmental inertia, which is significant. He also suspects the mutations are on the regulatory genes on the second female X chromosome. “If we could identify thegene and then at young adulthood we could silence the expression of developmental inertia, find an off-switch, when you do that, there is perfect homeostasis and you are biologically immortal.” With this statement, Walker doesn’t mean that people would never die, there are still accidents and disease, but he argues humans wouldn’t have thelater years, people would remain physically active and able. This is whyhe believes his study of the 8-year-old’sgenetic make-up is important. “She fits the model model.” Walkers says