Immortality
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Scientists are researching ways to achieve biological immortality by prolonging life indefinitely through increasing heartbeats in mice and exploring telomere lengthening. Telomeres, protective caps on chromosomes, shorten with each cell division until reaching a limit, but activating the telomerase enzyme may counter this and extend the replication limit and lifespan. Transferring consciousness and developing nano-bot technology are also proposed approaches to immortality.
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Immortality
- 1. Immortality How can it be achieved?
- 2. Biological Immortality: the indefinite prolonging of the life of a biological organism, disregarding potential external factors.
- 5. 1 billion heartbeats Scientists able to significantly increase heartbeat count in mice over 1 billion Humans already at up to 3 billion
- 9. Role of Telomeres • Fundamental to cell replication – ‘Caps’ at the end of Chromosomes – Prevent fusing of multiple chromosomes – Prevent general damage to genetic material
- 10. How they are relate to Aging • Telomere Shortening – Telomeres initially ~ 8,000 base pairs – Lose 60-200 pairs per division – Cells have a replication limit ~ 50 • Hayflick Limit
- 11. Opposing theories • Oxidative Stress • Lack of correlation between starting length of telomere and lifespan
- 12. Telomerase
- 13. 1
Editor's Notes
- For the sake of this presentation I am talking about immortality in this context. Essentially meaning that an organism can live indefinitely provided that it doesn’t encounter external factors such as fatal traumas or disease etc.
- There are currently four main paths scientists believe could lead to immortality at the moment. Basically three of them are really boring so I’ll just talk about them long enough to explain why I wont be talking about them in great detail
- The first is to do with healthy living, as in changes to lifestyle such as diet, exercise etc.
- The main focal point of this was to do with the 1 billion heartbeats theory. Essentially every organism complicated enough to have a heart seemed to have a natural lifespan limited to 1 billion of their heart beats. Scientists were able to significantly increase test mice life spans above this with changes to their diet, keeping healthy through medication and exercise. The problem is humans and other primates already far exceed this limit. Due to the abnormally long maturation period compared to other animals (human is fully developed until early 20s) due to the brain taking much longer to reach full development humans can live up to around 3 billion heartbeats.
- Least biologically related. Essentially recreating the brain through artificial neural networks so a consciousness can be transferred to an artificial body. Neural networks already exist, follows basic structure/function of a neuron (some form of stimuli results in a potential difference that can be interpreted by the brain or in this case some form of centralised computer system) however no where near as complex enough. Scientists estimate that somewhere in the 203-2045 region this could be made available. Seems incredibly optimistic, and not really much else to say about this.
- Nano-technology is finding itself more widely used in medicine, case of that girl who found a way to use them to find and destroy cancer cells. Scientists believe that once they are sophisticated enough they could replace rbcs, carrying out their functions as well as monitoring the body.-Repairing damaged cells-Removing cancerous tissue-Dealing with clotting, strokes heart attacks etc.Probs a long way off, not that interesting just robots doing some crap
- TELOMERES
- Genetic material exists for most of the time as just a bundle of stuffOnly organised into chromosomes during division.Telomeres are the “caps” of the chromosomes, they prevent the genetic material in the chromosomes from fusing to other chromosomesAlso act as ‘aglets’ for the chromosomes preventing damage or ‘fraying’ to genetic material
- The issue that arises is that with every replication these telomeres are decreasing in length. The telomeres start at a length of around 8000 base pairs, but every replication it loses 60-200 base pairs. This is due to the enzyme which replicates each strand of dna starting the replication a few base pairs in from the end, thus part of the DNA doesn’t get pair up.
- Telomerase is an enzyme present in younger cells which replace the pairs lost in replication. It binds to the end of the strand that is missed out by the DNA polymerase and uses it’s own bases to add the lost bases.This then raises the question why not simply give doses of telomerase or perhaps more permanently ‘turn on’ the gene(s) that produce telomerase.
- The answer is this. Cancer. Cancer occurs when the telomeres of a cell get to a critically short length. In some cases this leads the cell to ‘switch on’ said genes and start producing telomerase. As previously hypothesised this could potentially be the reason for their rapid replication rate. For all intents and purposes cancer cells are immortal and it is due to the organism dying, and thus the cells’ supply of oxygen and glucose cutting off, that cancer cells don’t live forever. And infact treatments to prevent Telomerase production are currently being used to kill off cancer cells, and has been successfully used to kill breast and prostate cancers.