In Penna's model for biological ageing we reduce after equilibration the influence of acquired diseases and get, similar to reality, the observed increase of the Gompertz slope for the human mortality curves.

As cell proliferation is limited due to the loss of telomere repeats in DNA of normal somatic cells during division, telomere attrition can possibly play an important role in determining the maximum life span of organisms as well as contribute to the process of biological ageing. With computer...