Hold off on the flatworm smoothies for the time being...
It is currently being widely reported that flatworms hold the key to immortality. True enough, they do have an astonishing ability to survive and regenerate even if something terrible happens, like being cut into pieces by a scientist at the University of Nottingham. This has many people excited at the prospect that we can harness the power of the worm in order to live forever. But we won’t.
The immortality-seekers’ idea is this: the cells in our human bodies can only replicate a certain number of times before the bits which protect our DNA (called telomeres) become frayed. The resulting unreliability in the replication process is thought to be a crucial part of what causes ageing. Flatworms, on the other hand, use an enzyme called telomerase to protect their telomeres, so their cells can replicate indefinitely. All we have to
Mo
I hear you on the idea of immortality not being all it’s cracked up to be. The end will probably not be pretty; all the more reason just to enjoy our today! Will look forward to your new publication. Mo
Ira S. Pastor
Good blog Stephen – I can’t speak for points 3-5 as they focus on issues related to “physical immortality” and indestructability – i’ll let the tardigrade fans think that part over – but as far as 1 and 2, while flatworms as a source of “elixir of life” may be useless, the knowledge achieved by their study could yield some very important insight for human health and eventual longevity – epimorphosis and morphallaxis are two of the most fascinating biological phenomena that involve complex mechanisms of cell reprogramming, morphogenenesis, and tissue re-organization, which humans are only beginning to understand anything about in the lab, but which these species have been evolutionarily perfecting for hundreds of millions of years – and don’t mistakenly get caught up in the whole regeneration-cancer axis just because they mention telomerase (one of an endless array of genomic stabilizers in the cell) – that is a phenomenon that gets entirely missused because most folks don’t see the in-vitro / in-vivo paradox yet – but some are looking at it from the other angle and making some startling insights that were seen in the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s, but then forgotten – best! – http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/noviedo2/docs/article-041409-cell-dev-bio.pdf – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706275/
aepxc
People who are looking for a cure for ageing are not really trying to make human beings invincible. They are, very specifically, just trying to find a cure for ageing.
3, 4, and 5, therefore, do not really apply.
The essence of humanity has been the striving for and ability to transcend the biological limitations of ourselves and our environment. Overcoming ageing fits nicely with this, and is not fundamentally different from our other medical advances. And while it could be argued that encouraging doctors to wash their hands is on the continuum to becoming gods bearing witness to the heat death of the universe, it is a bit of a silly argument to make – the problems we deal with at a given time are those that our knowledge allows us to deal with at that time.