Who Wants To Live Forever

 

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.  ~John Barrymore

In the previous article I showed that despite all the fanfare of increased lifespan, we actually haven’t made a lot of progress, if any at all. The perceived extended lifespan is pretty much due to a few factors, lack of a world war for recent generations (therefore not killing off horrific numbers of young people), huge investment in palliative care, and earlier diagnosis of disease, leading to earlier use of the previous item in this trio.

Again with all the talk of ageing, I haven’t seen, correct me if I’m wrong, an accurate description of what ageing actually is in the popular media. Even in general discussion, I still hear from pretty much 99.99 % of all people that they think people can die of old age…

Let me state this very clearly, nobody has ever died of old age. The chronological passing of the illusion that we call time, has never caused anyone to die. We don’t even really have a concrete theory on what time is yet, let alone its influence on human life.

So what is ageing? Ageing is simply two things, disease and damage. When anybody dies it is simply that either disease and/ or damage have got to a point where it can’t be repaired or be endured by the organism.

So to stop ageing, we need to focus on two things, preventing the damage occurring in the first place, and if the damage has occurred repairing the damage. Simples.

To the extent that you achieve the above two points, you can, hypothetically, live indefinitely.

Don’t believe me? Nearly 15 years ago, scientists achieved this in a lab with a nematode (roundworm) called Caenorhabditis elegans.  I’ll get back to this in a moment.

You, yes you, are essentially an immortal anyway.  The germ cells that are in you, are the essentially the DNA from the very first primate, and is still going strong. These germ cells are what are used in sexual replication, and are the only cells that can undergo meiosis (essentially the combination of the DNA from Ovum and Sperm, it’s a little more complicated than that, but that will suffice here), as well as mitosis (normal cell division). Most of the other cells in your body that you are made of are called somatic cells, these can only undergo mitosis.

For these germ cells to essentially achieve immortality they need to pass on accurately their information encoded in the genes. To keep this information accurate, they need to guard its very precise sequence from any disruption. The germ cells have learned to do this very well; if they had not, you would not be here. So what does this have to do with worms?

Well, scientists looked at a few tricks that germ cells performed on maintaining their genetic meticulousness and applied it to the somatic cells in the aforementioned c. elegans. Guess what happened? Even with the limited knowledge we have of the techniques of the germ cells, the ones applied allowed a tripling of the roundworms lifespan. That would see a human living 200 years.

You can read a story about the research here http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/06/researchers-learn-how-mutations-extend-life-span/

So genetic engineering can allow vastly extended lifespan, although I wouldn’t advise undergoing the procedure, even when it becomes commercially available.  You can’t just manipulate a gene and expect it to have one outcome, your body is an interconnected system, it’d be like falling dominoes.

In the absence of genetic engineering, what can we do? Plenty.

Nature has dealt us a loaded hand; we’ve just forgotten to respect the game.  The game has a number of rules, of which I’ll focus on in upcoming articles, and as I promised I’ll point you in the right direction on how to tactically push the boundary but stay within the laws of the game.

I did say I would write about telomeres, but, as I was writing this, I thought that it deserved more than a cursory glance.  The science of telomeres is fascinating and as I’ll show in the next article(s), by following a few simple measures, we can, not only prevent them from shortening, but if already shortened, lengthen them again. As my man Russell Brand would say ‘’ ‘citing ‘’.