Immortality
is the ability to live forever. People aspire immortality simply because they are afraid of death. We are uncertain of what is life after death so that we do not want to face it.
According
to an article called “Live Forever! Can Science Deliver Immortality?” by Adam Leith Gollner. This article has an overview of
how humans have an idea to cope up with death and attempt to prevent aging.
He took
back what he said about Carrel. Fifteen years later after Carrel's death,
scientists realized that cells are not meant to live forever, they die like us.
But the predictions of Carrel regarding regenerative medicine may now be
getting closer to reality. In the near future, scientists say that if we need
to replace some body parts, we'll use artificial organs from the laboratories using
our own cells. "By putting in the parts you need, you’ll be able to extend life by several decades,” explains Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. “We may even push that up to 120, 130 years."
Our understanding of aging changes rapidly. Life-extending breakthroughs are being tested in other species. Like in 2011, it is reported that if you dye worms yellow with a pigment called Thioflavin T makes them live 60-70 percent longer than the normal. There is a molecular compound found in the human semen called Spermidine has been proven to prolong the life span of fruit flies, worms, and yeast. These experiments can affect our lives. Will longevity research yield breakthroughs leading to immortality?
Belief is a powerful panacea. If we believe that taking a drug fixes our problem, it will end up fixed. But if the patient doesn’t believe that it will work, it definitely won’t. Therefore, belief has the possibility to be as curative as the drugs or treatments.
The explanation of growing old is in many ways. One of the most discussed theories of aging is the oxidative model in the twentieth century. Denham Harman, chemist and bio gerontologist, suggest that aging is caused by cellular exposure to oxygen. Air makes things age. If we could prevent oxygen from invading our molecular structure, we could prevent aging.
Other experiments have rise to doubt that oxidative damage is the main cause of aging. “In simple language, we don’t get old, we rust from oxygen,” announced Dr. Harry B. Demopoulos in 1989. Demopoulos was one of the first to theorize that consuming antioxidants might slow aging because antioxidants seem to protect the body from free radicals. Consuming antioxidants won’t make us live longer but it can make us healthier.
Cynthia Kenyon, biologist at San Francisco, in which her findings appear to contradict what we assume we know about aging. Her work on roundworms has demonstrated that they can live four times than normal but then again it is not immortal. “That’s not immortal,” she concedes. “That’s not to say that you couldn’t. But we haven’t.” She is confident that her discoveries may translate to human applications. “We don’t know yet, but to me it seems possible that a fountain of youth, made of molecules and not simply dreams, will someday be a reality.”
Another scientist from San Francisco, Leonard Hayflick, an evolutionary biologist and anatomist who spent his entire career working with cells and debunking false scientific claims about immortality. The biological cause of aging, Hayflick says, “is the same as the cause of nonbiological aging—it’s the second law of thermodynamics.” Everything eventually breaks down, collapses, and falls apart. “Let’s take something infinitely simpler than your body and mine: automobiles,” says Hayflick. “Even if you put the car in a garage and don’t use it, it won’t stand there forever. Eventually, it will age and disintegrate. This is an inevitable law of physics.”
Scientists have done experiments with fruit flies, mice, yeast, and worms. What if we could find a way to activate genetic pathways in life? The results are unquestionable but still there is another issue of interpretation. “When single genes are changed, animals that should be old stay young,” Kenyon with her fellow worker summarized in an article about the increase in the life span in simple animals. “On this basis we begin to think of aging as a disease that can be cured, or at least postponed.” Not everyone agrees with their conclusion. It’s certainly a leap to go that aging in humans is a curable disease.
The scientific understanding of our aging is actually limited. The researchers still don’t know if there’s a universal biological process behind aging. One side believes that in all species we will be able to manipulate longevity genes. They are hoping that they can translate the findings they’ve made on a molecular level into human-ready medicines. On the other side, they don’t think that we’ll be able to intervene in fundamental human aging. For the rest of us, seeing aging is normal.
“I doubt that aging can be reversed,” says Hayflick. “Aging is a random, stochastic process that occurs after reproductive maturation and results from the loss of molecular fidelity.” The only simple truth about aging is that nobody really understands how it works.
Cancer cells, stem cells, and unicellular organisms that experience unstoppable growth are being called as cellular immortality. But this does not mean they are indestructible, they are not undying. Cellular immortality doesn’t mean we can orchestrate the immortalization of life-forms.
August Weismann wrote of how immense numbers of organisms “do not die” in his book “Upon the Eternal Duration of Life” in the 19th century. Somatic cells die but the germ cells are “potentially immortal” like they can transfer themselves into a new individual.
Immortalists said that jellyfish, corals, deep-sea creatures and sponges appear not to be getting old. It is not because that they lack of nervous systems or memory. They don’t age said the prolongevists, they may be practically immortal. They die when they are killed, as slowly as the age.
The freshwater hydra is an organism with regenerative capabilities. It can spring back to health even it is killed giving the impression that it doesn’t die. A hydra can bud off some of the cells into entirely new hydra. It can rebuild itself. But still, it wasn’t immortal.
Our understanding of aging changes rapidly. Life-extending breakthroughs are being tested in other species. Like in 2011, it is reported that if you dye worms yellow with a pigment called Thioflavin T makes them live 60-70 percent longer than the normal. There is a molecular compound found in the human semen called Spermidine has been proven to prolong the life span of fruit flies, worms, and yeast. These experiments can affect our lives. Will longevity research yield breakthroughs leading to immortality?
Belief is a powerful panacea. If we believe that taking a drug fixes our problem, it will end up fixed. But if the patient doesn’t believe that it will work, it definitely won’t. Therefore, belief has the possibility to be as curative as the drugs or treatments.
The explanation of growing old is in many ways. One of the most discussed theories of aging is the oxidative model in the twentieth century. Denham Harman, chemist and bio gerontologist, suggest that aging is caused by cellular exposure to oxygen. Air makes things age. If we could prevent oxygen from invading our molecular structure, we could prevent aging.
Other experiments have rise to doubt that oxidative damage is the main cause of aging. “In simple language, we don’t get old, we rust from oxygen,” announced Dr. Harry B. Demopoulos in 1989. Demopoulos was one of the first to theorize that consuming antioxidants might slow aging because antioxidants seem to protect the body from free radicals. Consuming antioxidants won’t make us live longer but it can make us healthier.
Cynthia Kenyon, biologist at San Francisco, in which her findings appear to contradict what we assume we know about aging. Her work on roundworms has demonstrated that they can live four times than normal but then again it is not immortal. “That’s not immortal,” she concedes. “That’s not to say that you couldn’t. But we haven’t.” She is confident that her discoveries may translate to human applications. “We don’t know yet, but to me it seems possible that a fountain of youth, made of molecules and not simply dreams, will someday be a reality.”
Another scientist from San Francisco, Leonard Hayflick, an evolutionary biologist and anatomist who spent his entire career working with cells and debunking false scientific claims about immortality. The biological cause of aging, Hayflick says, “is the same as the cause of nonbiological aging—it’s the second law of thermodynamics.” Everything eventually breaks down, collapses, and falls apart. “Let’s take something infinitely simpler than your body and mine: automobiles,” says Hayflick. “Even if you put the car in a garage and don’t use it, it won’t stand there forever. Eventually, it will age and disintegrate. This is an inevitable law of physics.”
Scientists have done experiments with fruit flies, mice, yeast, and worms. What if we could find a way to activate genetic pathways in life? The results are unquestionable but still there is another issue of interpretation. “When single genes are changed, animals that should be old stay young,” Kenyon with her fellow worker summarized in an article about the increase in the life span in simple animals. “On this basis we begin to think of aging as a disease that can be cured, or at least postponed.” Not everyone agrees with their conclusion. It’s certainly a leap to go that aging in humans is a curable disease.
The scientific understanding of our aging is actually limited. The researchers still don’t know if there’s a universal biological process behind aging. One side believes that in all species we will be able to manipulate longevity genes. They are hoping that they can translate the findings they’ve made on a molecular level into human-ready medicines. On the other side, they don’t think that we’ll be able to intervene in fundamental human aging. For the rest of us, seeing aging is normal.
“I doubt that aging can be reversed,” says Hayflick. “Aging is a random, stochastic process that occurs after reproductive maturation and results from the loss of molecular fidelity.” The only simple truth about aging is that nobody really understands how it works.
Cancer cells, stem cells, and unicellular organisms that experience unstoppable growth are being called as cellular immortality. But this does not mean they are indestructible, they are not undying. Cellular immortality doesn’t mean we can orchestrate the immortalization of life-forms.
August Weismann wrote of how immense numbers of organisms “do not die” in his book “Upon the Eternal Duration of Life” in the 19th century. Somatic cells die but the germ cells are “potentially immortal” like they can transfer themselves into a new individual.
Immortalists said that jellyfish, corals, deep-sea creatures and sponges appear not to be getting old. It is not because that they lack of nervous systems or memory. They don’t age said the prolongevists, they may be practically immortal. They die when they are killed, as slowly as the age.
The freshwater hydra is an organism with regenerative capabilities. It can spring back to health even it is killed giving the impression that it doesn’t die. A hydra can bud off some of the cells into entirely new hydra. It can rebuild itself. But still, it wasn’t immortal.
The scientists who made the discovery who are Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, and Jack W. Szostak are still trying to understand the role of telomeres in aging as well as the telomerase. Everybody wants to find that there’s a great simplifying principle, explains Blackburn but telomeres and aging are anything but simple. The research of Telomere offer insights into how we age and fighting cancer. For now, what it really reveals is that chromosomes deteriorate as cells divide.
The Immortality Institute is a nonprofit educational organization in which their mission “is to conquer the blight of involuntary death.” The members of the institute don’t see aging as a reality but it is a curable disease. They all believe that someday science will defeat death and they are actually trying to accelerate the process.
To sum it all up, it may not be possible to be immortal but through science we can prolong our lives and scientists are still researching until now. Maybe in the future, as written in the science fiction stories, our mind with all of our memories can be preserved but not in our physical bodies. We should face the reality: we will die.
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