Five reasons flatworms won’t make us immortal

It is currently being widelyreported 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 do is learn how to perform this trick for ourselves and we too will be immune to the ravages of time.

But before we all cancel our life insurance and begin a new diet of flatworm smoothies and telomerase tea, a note of caution: although this research might well bring genuine benefits and help us towards longer and healthier lives, when it comes to promises of immortality, worm enzymes are likely to be the new snake oil. Here are five reasons why:

1. We are not flatworms. We are many orders of magnitude more complex. And that complexity comes at the price of countless biological compromises and trade-offs. The history of medicine suggests no single treatment is the elixir of life, whether the monkey testicle grafts that were all the rage in the 1920s, or Vitamin C—an idea enthusiastically propounded by the double Nobel Prize-winning Linus Pauling up until the day he died (which he did, despite consuming huge quantities of Vitamin C).

2. Making cells immortal is a risky business. Some of our cells already start producing telomerase so that they can replicate indefinitely—we call this cancer. The effective immortality of cancer cells causes them to form tumors, with often fatal results for the organism of which they are a part (ie. people like you and me).

3. Even if you could halt ageing and even regenerate diseased organs and lost limbs, there would still be many kinds of catastrophic accident that you could not survive—being eaten by a shark, for example, or incinerated in a plane crash. The gerontologist Steve Austad has estimated that someone who remained in peak physical condition would still on average live only 5,775 years before a proverbial piano fell on his or her head.

4. And even that estimate is likely to be too long, as it assumes that our civilisation will remain stable and relatively peaceful for thousands of years to come. Only then would we be assured of a steady supply of flatworm elixir. But if our future is going to be anything like our past, then we can expect terrible wars, the rise and fall of empires, whole cultures and technologies to be lost—not to speak of the consequences of global warming.

5. And even if you survive all of that and make it to your billionth birthday, you would still be confronted with the end of the universe. Although they disagree on how, the majority of cosmologists believe that our very-long-term prospects are not rosy. Current theories include a Big Freeze (wherein energy spreads out until the universe is effectively empty with a temperature so close to absolute zero that nothing can happen anymore), a Big Rip (all matter eventually being torn apart into fundamental particles) or a Big Crunch (the universe collapsing in on itself). All of which put a damper on aspirations to physical immortality.

Stephen Cave, PhD, is a writer and philosopher. His new book, "Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilisation" will be published in April