Aging May Not Be Any More Inevitable - Ishraq Ahmed Hashmi

There is some truth to the biological reality of aging—and so, scientists are exploring things that suggest that rejuvenating cells, giving people transfusions of young blood, and with compounds similar to low-calorie diets.

In 1997 a French woman Jean Calment passed away at the age of 122. She was the longest living authenticated person on the planet as per the Gerontology Research Group. Her regular routine, for example, was having a glass of port wine and smoking a cigarette after the meals; besides, she consumed 2. This is according to Venki Ramakrishnan, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist and author of the book Why We Die, who notes that nobody else has lived past 120 since this strange woman passed on. As a matter of fact, though the number of centenarians is rising each year, the same cannot be said of individuals who are alive beyond the age of 110 years. “This could mean that there is a certain, innate life length that one could live.”

If such a limit exists, the best predictor would seem to be biological evolution. “Evolution wants to make sure that your genes have the maximum likelihood of being passed on,” is a common statement from Ramakrishnan. “It doesn’t really consider how many years you exist.” This can for example explain why there seems to be a direct connection between animal size and its respective lifespan of – the larger the creature the longer it will live. Many of them survive a period of not more than two days. Monarch butterflies are known to live for between several weeks to even several months. Bowhead whales that inhabit the Arctic live for more than 200 years. Greenland sharks are probably the world’s longest-living vertebrates, with age estimates exceeding 500 years. “If you are a small, slow ungulate, then it is useless to invest many calories in the creation and upkeep of body armor, because deer die from starvation and get eaten, too,” Ramakrishnan notes. “Larger species, on the other hand, will have the possibility of spending more time searching for a mate and reproducing.”

There are, however, a few exceptions that appear not to abide by this order of things. The hydra is a freshwater creature with twelve extremities; it is known to stop aging once it reaches the mature state. The immortal jellyfish is capable of metamorphosing in the opposite direction too, that is, aging backward. As per Ramakrishnan, it means that aging is a preventable process and that people may regain their youth if their biology is changed.

As a result, learning how the biological processes cause us to grow old and die is one of the most significant topics of interest today. That is why here, scientists are attempting to discover how to control the processes of aging cells, for example, kill them, namely, by using the program to destroy senescent cells which are aged cells that cause inflammation in the organism, or transform cells so that they could turn back into the previous development stage. Since the beginning of this year, over 300,000 papers on aging science have been published and there are over 700 Longevity startups, with investments exceeding $ billions, including Altos Labs, Human Longevity, Elysium Health, etc.

The most concrete idea to extend human life is to find chemical substances that will help to have the similar impact as the regular low-calorie diet, which is considered one of the most efficacious pathways to prolong life span. There is one called rapamycin which was initially identified on soil on Easter Island because of its ability to kill fungi. “They later realized that it could also act as an antitumor agent as well as an anti-inflammatory one,” explains Ramakrishnan. “It also has immunosuppressant properties — it can also make the same people susceptible to infections and delay their skin healing, for instance… But what is this magic formula? That would be the one that does not have the side effects; it will only have the [anti-aging] benefits”. Longevity researchers are also cognizant of a body of literature which proclaims that young blood can indeed reinvigorate old bodies—though, it must be pointed out, only in lab mice.

This discovery arose when scientists for the first time, implanted young and old mice, through parabiosis — a surgical procedure, in which two animals’ bodies are fused together and discovered that this process had the effect of rejuvenation and, slowing down aging, which increased the life expectancy of the older rodent by ten percent. Ramakrishnan points out that though scientists have not been able to pin point the components of young blood which preempt this effect, “there are some companies that went ahead and begun marketing young plasma to the billionaires.”

 “But, while we’re waiting for all these things to happen there are things we can do. ” concludes Ramakrishnan. “All this is probably similar to what your grandparents told you, and there is some reason to that too: Moderation in everything, healthy diets, enough sleep, and exercise are all inter-related; they actually complement one another If one does all of those in parallel, then it will work better than any rudimentary drug in the market, it has no negative effects, and the best part is, it is free.”