I assumed from the headline that this would be a stupid article, but I took the time to read it anyway and found that this assumption was wrong.<p>The premise sounds quite solid: The unique challenges of being a flying mammal require spending lots of energy. Which leads to lots of free radicals. Which leads to lots of DNA damage. Which increases selective pressure for DNA repair.<p>Evolution normally doesn't select for organisms that are able to survive aging, because, from the standpoint of natural selection, once your reproductive years are past, your survival doesn't matter.<p>That aging resistance would be an incidental benefit of general DNA repair mechanisms that evolved in response to a lifestyle that encourages free radical formation makes a lot of sense. The specific molecules and reactions involved in bats probably will provide important clues to the aging process in mammals, even if the adaptations in bats can't be translated directly into treatments for humans.<p>How immunity and disease fits into this picture is less clear from the article. But the aging angle alone is enough to make this research very interesting.
Consider it from the disease's perspective.<p>Ebola doesn't 'target' humans. Ebola's obvious symptoms and mortality rate in humans limit its ability to spread efficiently. The flu virus or cold virus has been far more successful in penetrating the human ecosystem. Perhaps Ebola has been selected for being stable in the bat ecosystem. The mobility of bats also makes them an excellent transmission vector, which a virus would ideally want to be non-symptomatic.
Given the massive die offs from the fungal infection that is completely devastating US bat populations, I'd say their immune systems may be unique, but they aren't miraculous. The outlook for North American bats is very grim. <a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_nose_syndrome" rel="nofollow">http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_nose_syndrome</a>
Why are bats the litmus test for rabies, then? That just seems a bit odd. And why is rabies so prevalent/dangerous in bats that even breathing the air in bat caves can get you the disease?