The key to eternal life in each of us

The evolution of life on the planet Earth has contributed to the emergence of both long-living and principally immortal beings. Some living creatures have reached biological immortality, simply stopped aging and died of old age. Such creatures may die for other reasons (become a victim of disease, predator, or cataclysm), but never from old age.

For example, the cells of a 5000 year old austral pine do not differ from the cells of a young pine of a couple or three years old. Jellyfish "Turritopsis nutricula" is an immortal creature, because it has the ability to rejuvenate endlessly.

American Lobster has a genetic feature that gives him immortality - his cells can divide an infinite number of times without affecting the telomeres, so American Lobster is always young, strong and biologically immortal.

And we, people, as always, are not lucky. A human cell can divide only 50 times, after which the genetic code degrades so much that in order not to produce a "marriage", the cell starts a process of self-destruction. And if for some reason the self-destruction process fails, the cell is reborn into a cancer and begins to divide endlessly, absorbing nutrients and producing more and more negative changes, up to and including death.

However, evolution has provided for immortal cells in man. These cells are responsible for the reproduction of germ cells (sperm cells and eggs), they are called Gonocytes, and are the primary sex cell.

Gonocytes never age, it is necessary for the emergence of young offspring, because otherwise the biological age of the born child would be determined by the age of his parents, which is a dead-end evolutionary path of biological life.

These facts are already enough to conclude that biological immortality of living beings is not an anomaly or fiction, but a quite common phenomenon and even necessary in certain biological cycles.

Here you need to come to a certain result, and if you do not get immortality, then at least by orders of magnitude reduce the probability of death from age (old age). And here we can say about living creatures, whose probability of biological death from age comes to the plateau after a normal life cycle. There are even more such creatures than immortal living creatures.

For example, in the organisms of rodents called "Naked Diggers", the aging processes stop to such an extent that the probability of death with age is negligibly small. Therefore, such rodents live 20 times more than similar rodents of the same size.

In principle, today scientists have learned a lot about the aging processes in our body, and 20 years ago began active genetic research to control these processes.

For example, the experiments on telomerase introduction were confirmed and repeated many times, which contributed to completion of telomeres at the ends of genes in cells, which increases the number of their divisions. The life expectancy of experimental rodents was increased by 20% on average.

That is, for people there is already a potential genetically-therapeutic method to extend youth and increase life expectancy by 20%. Yes, testing on a person has not been performed yet, but in the near future it is quite real. One more method to increase life expectancy is already embedded in the genetic structure of our cells.

In 2016, Japanese scientist Yoshinori Osumi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology for the discovery and study of the mechanism of "autophagy". Autophagy is a natural mechanism for recycling cell waste, in which unwanted components are broken down into nutrients. Since Autophagy is a regulated process, this mechanism can be turned off. Disabling this mechanism is necessary if the cell's body is prone to frequent "starvation". The cell will then extract the nutrients it needs from the accumulated debris.

However, human history is a struggle for survival and sustenance, and Autophagy is genetically disabled in most of our cells.

There is a theory that in order to start Autophagy in the cells, you have to follow a certain diet, or even starve. Thus, experiments on mice have shown that if you limit your maximum diet to 65% during your lifetime, the life expectancy of laboratory mice increased on average by 1.5 times compared to those mice that were always fed and happy. Today we are actively developing methods to activate the process of Human Cell Autophagy. 

Most living organisms have mechanisms responsible for the maximum preservation of living cells from all kinds of effects. In most cases, they sleep, and are triggered only in stressful situations, for example, when there is no food for a long time, or the creature is exposed to cold, etc.

So, for example, the hydra has this mechanism running all the time, so it can live very long and not get old. However, scientists managed to disable one of the genes responsible for the protective mechanism, and the hydra began to naturally age - just like a human. All this shows that the principal molecular mechanisms of aging are similar in different organisms, which gives real hope to curb these processes in the human body.

And this is only a small part of the research that is being conducted today by scientists in the field of achieving life expectancy increase.

The biggest deterrent to such research is the general ban on the use of genetic engineering on human beings. It is conditioned by the fact that we do not know the whole picture of genetic interactions, because not just some processes are disabled, but others work. Today we can fatally harm ourselves, trying to find the key to "eternal life". But every year the understanding only increases, and by 2030 the first genetic experiments directed on longevity of the person can be solved.