Futurists like Ray Kurzweil want to defeat aging, and these organisms might be their best clue
David Jones / Flickr
What if our bodies didn't keep deteriorating — a process we know as aging — as we got older?
That's how some animals do it.
A 2014 study comparing the mortality rates of 46 species found that some organisms had a constant mortality rate — meaning they are equally likely to die at any one point in time. This is a far cry from the experience of people in affluent countries, who get increasingly likely to die as they age.
Other organisms enter a period of aging in which they are most at risk of death, but those who emerge from it continue on with their (healthy!) lives until the end of their life expectancy.
Dozens of tech leaders and scientists have been trying to capitalize on this research in recent years. Many of them are already racing to try to apply certain aspects of it to people.
Take Google's leading futurist, Ray Kurzweil: He thinks his diet can help him live forever, a goal he recently told Playboy we could be close to achieving by as early as 2029. Then there's Cambridge biologist, theoretician, and antiaging research group founder Aubrey de Grey, who says he has drawn a road map to defeat biological aging, which he recently called "the world's most important problem."
De Grey and Harvard geneticist George Church serve on the board of a company called BioViva, which announced this week that it had successfully lengthened the telomeres on the white blood cells of its CEO, Elizabeth Parrish, by "approximately 20 years" in a one-person experiment. (Telomeres are special structures at the end of chromosomes that shorten as we age; scientists still aren't quite sure of the precise role they play in aging.)
So far, the vast majority of these efforts are long shots. Very, very, very long shots.
But the research on which they are based is fascinating, and it should revolutionize our current thinking about aging.
What if we experienced aging, and then came out of it — or didn't age at all?
"Aging is not a relentless process that leads to death," Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Irvine and the director of its Network for Experimental Research on Evolution, told Business Insider last year.
"It's a transitional phase of life between being amazingly healthy and stabilizing," Rose said.
Here's a chart from that 2014 study comparing the aging process of a modern-day human against that of several other organisms. As you can see from that sharply rising red line, our mortality rate increases drastically over time — meaning the older we get, the more likely we are to die:
David Jones / Flickr
But lots of other creatures' life spans look nothing like this. Take a look at the "immortal" hydra, for example (second column, second row), a tiny freshwater animal that lives to be 1,400 years old.
The hydra is just as likely to die at age 10 as it is at age 1,000:
David Jones / Flickr
Or check out the desert tortoise, which is at a high risk of dying early in life but is less and less likely to die as it ages. If you are one of these critters who is lucky enough to survive your early years, you will most likely carry out your remaining (healthy!) days until you reach the end:
David Jones / Flickr
So what does all of this mean? Can we stop aging, or at least extend life?
Some scientists think maybe we can — if not to live as old as the hydra, then at least to routinely thrive past 100. That remains to be seen.
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