Will Humans Ever Live Forever?

I was told my great grand father died at the age of 105 but then, according to available data, the oldest person that ever lived in recent time was a French woman who lived from 1875 to 1997 and died at the age of 122. This is a good age for anyone looking to live long at our current time but should this be this longest a person can live?

Animals like tortoise can live for more than 200 years, trees can live for thousands of years outliving several human generations, and some organisms like Turritopsis dohrnii a jelly fish looks like they don't have a lifespan. It is not like we have the worst life expectancy, at least in the last century, humans have been living longer and both the average and the maximum lifespan has increased.

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Why do we die? Did I put that question well or maybe I should have said why do our bodies stop working at a particular age even though we do not die from an accident, a disease, or trauma? You might want to use the word old age but is that true because every autopsy done either on an aged person or a young person comes back with a cause of death, which means there is always a reason why our body or the heart stops working.

As we age, our cells are unable to recover from traumas and are unable to reproduce and when this happens, these cells become senescent which means that they go into resting or hibernation mode. At this point, they are damaged and they can also lead to the damage of tissues that they make up which can lead to the death of that tissue.

While the cause for cells inability to heal and reproduce isn't still known, we cannot but agree that it is as a result of molecular changes in the body. Cases of mutation caused by genotoxic chemicals, replication errors, UV light, free radicals, and ionizing radiation can lead to protein not properly functioning, or misread proteins which can lead to cell death because without protein, the cells cannot function.

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I was looking through a study, and it has been shown that there is a relationship between flawed mutilated DNA and the age of a person. One instance is telomere and cell division. When cells divide, the telomeres in the DNA of the cells become shorter and this continues until the telomere is too short that division cannot take place again.

In the race to live longer than what we currently have, humans have been trying a lot of things. In doing so, scientists have been looking into IGF1 hormones for longevity as a research on nematode showed that it increased the lifespan of the nematode. Scientists have also been looking at using IGF1 drugs to increase the longevity of dogs but this strategy doesn't look like it will work for you and I. Another problem with getting on longevity research is finding people who are willing to participate in the trial.

But then, why will I want to live till 150 years when I will have to be taking pills for blood pressure and so on. So it looks like there is more to target and solve before we can look at humans enjoying longevity. Scientists are also looking at other ways to help with longevity such as limiting calories, and getting the body to run on less food and this process is still being investigated.

While there are a lot of research by scientists, in other for us to come to an agreement on what would work for longevity, we need to agree on a maker and scientist need to show that an improvement in the maker will improve longevity. Asides from that, whatever we are introducing needs to be reliable, efficient and safe to take but then, I do not think we will need just one maker.

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REFERENCE

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^{https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6908713/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/brv.12959
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10798888/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-022-00291-z
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19793
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10522-008-9156-4
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9853412/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9261384/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6417653/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13543784.2021.1939306}