talk about fat tails

if ever there was a case made for weighting statistical outliers more heavily versus the mean, it would be the story of a teenager named brooke greenberg. why, you say? take a look:














brooke, who is 16 years old, has never developed, physically or mentally, beyond being a toddler. her biological processes are described as being completely divergent; she is not following any coordinated developmental path. she still has her baby teeth, but her bones have the composition of a ten-year-old's. she's also been beset with medical problems (as serious as a stroke) that she recovers from almost instantaneously, and with no detectable after-effects. and the clincher? there is absolutely no medical reason why she is the way she is. there are no recognizable genetical abnormalities, nor anything other irregularities at different scales of observation, to account for her condition. for all intents and purposes, she is ageless, or, at least, age resistant.

already, certain institutions have decided that she is the fountain of youth, and have begunt to try and isolate the source of her 'immortality'. if it is traceable, it will almost certainly be years before anything further is discovered, and even longer before it can be given a utilitarian purpose. still, it's unsettling to think that, in addition to all of the other methods for manipulating our bodies that have exploded out of the academy in the past few decades, we may, at some point in our lives, be faced with the technique for prolonging life by an exponential degree. am i the only one here whose stomach doesn't settle too well around that scenario?