Searching the Fountain of Eternal Youth

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During my research, I found out that the oldest organism that is still alive today is a bristlecone pine, somewhere in California's White Mountains, which is 4850 years old. Imagine that, this was a little tree when humans were discovering agriculture and so, and the Pyramids were not here yet. When we talk about trees, there is a different concept called negative senescence, as the risk of death decrease with age.

Remember, if you read my yesterday post, I was talking there about negligible senescence, as your body cells are able to regenerate and outdo the damage taken from the environment. This is a simple equation, about how long you are young and healthy. As long as your regeneration ability is bigger than the damage you take, you stay young, but when the damage is surpassing your cell regeneration, you start to age. Only then your cells and your body is more exposed to illness and misfortune. So, basically, you are not ageing and dying because you are getting ill, but you are getting ill because you are ageing.

Ageing is a disease and can be treated, up to some point in life. And the more careful you are about it, the longer you will stay healthy. And studying rats, bats and molerats, animals having a relatively common ancestor and similar weight categories, shows that environment and own decisions can not only prolong life but there is also a distinct possibility to evade ageing too.

Ageing is an evolutionary oversight, a result that appears as mutations accumulate, leading to a decrease in general fitness at old age, but evolution cannot get rid of them, as they are often linked to antagonistically pleiotropic genes that maximize reproduction at a younger age, even if they bring unfortunate unintended consequences later in life. Ageing is nothing else than synchronized, somehow related processes, and all that we need to do is to identify them and treat them adequately. Easier said than done, but the idea is that within a few generations, a longer, healthier life is within reach.

I am not sure if you get your attention, but I will try to expand this knowledge in a couple future posts.

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