The telomere is often also referred to as a "poly-A tail." At the end of a genetic sequence there are repeating series of AAA AAA AAA AAA that continue on for a finite length depending on the cell. As the cell replicates, one of the codons gets lopped off. Once you reach the end point, the cell lineage dies.
The trick isn't just having the poly A tail fail to cleave at the end of the DNA replication process, but to have that one cell divide and the better of the parent and daughter cell survive if there is any differentiation in the genetic code between the two.
And 1000 years? Not unreasonable. A professor at Alabama-Birmingham had taken cat (and now horse as well I believe) somatic tissue samples which had a life expectancy ex-vitro of approximately 3 weeks and had the tissue still alive and fully functioning 2 years after the start of the experiment. That translates to a 34x increase in life span for that particular tissue type.
That said, getting a tissue culture to stay alive and functioning for 34x the normal life expectancy and then translating it fully to an advance mammal to increase the experimental subject's life expectancy in any capacity would be the same as Pasteur telling the world he found a way to curtail infection after a surgery, then expecting him to perform a liver transplant with 100% success rate. The two things are not inherently equal achievements nor are they translatable feats of genetic manipulation. Not by a damn sight.
The 1000 year hypothesis might be in reference to our ability to engineer new parts and pieces for a person as the old ones wear out. The life expectancy of a mammal, and some other animal types, is governed by what is loosely referred to as the "Million Heartbeats Rule". Looking at the overall population of a given species and/or as defined a subspecies as the experiment wishes to delineate, you then look at the amount of time it takes for each individual within that population to have reached one million heartbeats. The elapsed time of the million mark gives you a general idea of the life expectancy, all things being equal.
Of course the life expectancy can be hugely optimized by favorable environmental factors, and the overall life expectancy of a population can be artificially extended by selectively choosing the individuals within the phylogeny of the population that has the longest lifespan, and then only allowing those individuals of both sexes to breed. It's a multi-step generational approach that has been successfully tested in a variety of short-life span animals such as good old Drosophila melanogaster and the common lab mouse. There is of course a point at which life cannot be extended without additional manipulation of the population's genetics beyond artificial selection.
So what you have then is a point at which most of an animal's systems begin to break down. As long as you can engineer replacements for everything that supports the CNS, you can extend life indefinitely. Finding solutions for diseases that affect the CNS is your Holy Grail.
Keep the mind healthy, engineer the supporting organs and systems, and you've got the recipe for a 1000+ year life span.
So simple, in theory.
Of the original 5 point list as shown by the original post; #1, 3 and 5 are the most likely. However they are presented in the bulleted form to strike your attention much like Ripley's Believe It or Not would have done.
Smelling a disease? Perhaps a misrepresentation of the respiratory properties of a diseased cell or tissue set. Put a person in a controlled environment and by judging what their exhaled gas mixture is you could present a possible diagnosis of the disease if you had a full baseline to start from. For years certain 'smells' of a person's breath were indicators of diseases.
Ever so slightly fermenting apples? A sign of an infected appendix. There are also diagnostic smells of other conditions that include smells of certain fruity cheese smells for strep throat, hints of acetone for something, and there's one more but I'd have to go hunting in Taber's to find it.
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