If you want to endow a character with long life, what are your options?
1. Get bitten by a vampire
Pros: Depending on which vampire mythology you buy into, your character may become incredibly beautiful in the process
Cons: Extreme allergic reaction to sunlight (non-negotiable), garlic, crosses and holy water (depending on your luck)
Tips for success: Gourmands and picky eaters need not apply. Get a good dental plan
2. Purge your body of senescent cells
In theory, you could live forever if your cells and tissues renew indefinitely. The flip side of that is unconstrained growth (also known as cancer) if the cell’s control systems are damaged. The body has two mechanisms to manage that risk: cell senescence and cell death. Both mechanisms are set in motion by unauthorized cell division (think of them as the fun police—if the cells are having too much fun, they step in to call ‘time out’.) Cell senescence also takes place when cells run out of telomeres (more on this shortly).
Senescent cells are cells that no longer divide. Despite their name, they’re not just lounging around the figurative cellular pool while others scurry around doing the real work. Senescent cells churn out hormones that stimulate the immune system to attack malignant and premalignant cells. That’s good news if you have cancer. However, senescent cells also inflame tissues and cause them to age.
Recently, researchers from Mayo Clinic found that if you purge the body of senescent cells, the tissues remain youthful. They used a special drug to force cells that became senescent and would have otherwise lingered around indefinitely into immediate cell suicide. The lucky mice that received the drug aged more slowly, though age-related diseases, if incurred prior to the drug, could not be reversed.
For more information, check out these two articles:
3. Extend the length of your telomeres
Telomeres are junk DNA at the end of your chromosomes. They don’t code for anything. However, in our precisely designed body, nothing is ever really truly ‘junk’. Each time a cell replicates, the double helix unwinds. RNA moves along the length of each strand, creating its mirror image and consequently replicating the DNA. However, each matching strand of DNA is actually a little shorter than the original because of the space taken up by the RNA.
Telomeres serve a critical purpose, allowing cells to replicate without losing genes in the process. With each cell replication, the telomeres are whittled away. When the telomeres get too short, the cell goes into senescence or death… or it rebels by becoming cancerous. Cancerous cells activate an enzyme called telomerase, which prevents the telomeres from getting any shorter, and thereby continue to replicate indefinitely.
Researchers from the University of Utah have confirmed that shorter telomeres are associated with shorter lives. It would seem logical (if anything in this crazy life can be said to be logical) that longer telomeres are associated with longer lives. In labs, scientists use telomerase to extend cell lives beyond their normal limits without the cells becoming cancerous. However, researchers caution that merely extending telomeres will not deliver immortality. At best, you’ll get an extra ten to thirty years.
For more information, check out this article:
4. Target the “universal hormonal control for aging”
If you were a worm called C Elegans, the researchers from the University of California at San Francisco have a deal for you. Become a mutant and live for twice as long with sustained vitality, including resistance to age-related diseases.
In a normal C Elegans, a functioning DAF-2 receptor on cell surfaces triggers events that keep the FOXO protein away from the genes. However, when the receptors are damaged through mutation, the FOXO protein in the cell activates, turning on antioxidants and caregiver proteins, accelerating DNA repair and boosting the immune system. Jointly, these activities delay the aging process.
In humans, the DAF-2 equivalents are the insulin and IGF-1 receptors. When food is plentiful, insulin signaling promotes growth and food storage. However, when food is scarce, the lack of insulin signaling activates FOXO, which triggers cell protection and repair in anticipation of rough times ahead.
I’m constantly amazed by the body’s capacity for backup plans.
Theoretically, it is possible to develop drugs that activate FOXO in human cells, thereby delaying aging and age-related diseases. You could also just knock out the insulin receptor entirely. (Of course, you’d run the risk of destabilizing the entire body.)
At least as important as ‘how’, is the question of ‘when’. I’m sure I speak for all parents around the world when I say that no one wants the first sleep-deprived year of a child’s life to last any longer than absolutely necessary. But to be in my twenties for twenty years, that I could really buy into….
For more information, check out this video:
