Exploring Deeper Reasons for Aging: A Non-Expert's Viewpoint

[meucat]

Hello people

I wrote e little text to (try) explain non-expert people the reasons we age. I don't know if my point of view if correct, and so I would appreciate graduate student in genetics or biology take little time to read it and return here their comments about. I think there are more profound reasons for aging than most TV programs or books try to explain to us.

Text can be found at http://www.meucat.com/vi.html

Thanks very much

Miguel - Brazil

 

[O Great One]

The unobservable designer(s?) has(have?) programmed the aging process into us. That is why we grow old and die. It is programmed.

 

[scilover89]

The unobservable designer(s?) has(have?) programmed the aging process into us. That is why we grow old and die. It is programmed.

You mean genetic? Or god?

 

[Ouabache]

From your essay:

The BBC program successively demonstrated this fact using a videotape copied time and time again, until losing all its image in a videorecorder. Using the same principle, many scientists think that the aging process happens because, when cells divide (copies of the previous hroughout the time), they loose quality or 'brightness', and the organism like a whole (formed by trillons of them), begins to age and deteriorate itself.

Nevertheless, there are many facts to contradict this point of view, and one of them is the cloning of alive beings. If cells become increasily deteriorated with successive copies, how to explain that a new and young individual from cells of old individuals can be obtained?. There are cloning cases from animals who died naturally by aging (cats and dogs), even so, owners obtained 'copies' of them by cloning, again young and healthy with all their qualities.

I believe the accumulated mutations in our DNA hypothosis, has some merit. In the case of cloning from somatic tissue, there is a problem. The new young animals, also have the accumulated genetic mutations, the adult had. The don't survive very well. For example, Dolly the sheep was the first animal cloned from an adult cell. She developed a progressive lung disease at 6 years old and had to be put down (euthanized). Sheep typically live 12 years and don't develop these kinds of ailments until old age.

(see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2764039.stm)

If you haven't read it yet, I would highly recommend Michio Kaku's book called Visions. The chapter titled To Live Forever, addresses this idea and quite a few others, drawing from interviews he made with many leading scientists in the field.