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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 31 2017, @09:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-old-is-not-for-sissies dept.

Aging is a natural part of life, but that hasn't stopped people from embarking on efforts to stop the process. Unfortunately, perhaps, those attempts are futile, according to University of Arizona researchers who have proved that it's mathematically impossible to halt aging in multicellular organisms like humans. "Aging is mathematically inevitable - like, seriously inevitable. There's logically, theoretically, mathematically no way out," said Joanna Masel, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and at the UA.

Masel and UA postdoctoral researcher Paul Nelson outline their findings on math and aging in a new study titled "Intercellular Competition and Inevitability of Multicellular Aging," published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Current understanding of the evolution of aging leaves open the possibility that aging could be stopped if only science could figure out a way to make selection between organisms perfect. One way to do that might be to use competition between cells to eliminate poorly functioning "sluggish" cells linked to aging, while keeping other cells intact. However, the solution isn't that simple, Masel and Nelson say.

Two things happen to the body on a cellular level as it ages, Nelson explains. One is that cells slow down and start to lose function, like when your hair cells, for example, stop making pigment. The other thing that happens is that some cells crank up their growth rate, which can cause cancer cells to form. As we get older, we all tend, at some point, to develop cancer cells in the body, even if they're not causing symptoms, the researchers say. Masel and Nelson found that even if natural selection were perfect, aging would still occur, since cancer cells tend to cheat when cells compete.

https://phys.org/news/2017-10-mathematically-impossible-aging-scientists.html

[Abstract]: Intercellular competition and the inevitability of multicellular aging

So, either you die of old age or you die of cancer. Choose wisely !!


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2017, @02:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2017, @02:29PM (#590020)

    What backs you up is the existence of large creatures like whales - whose cells would necessarily have undergone many more divisions than our cells would have, and yet aren't having the same cancer per division rates as we do.

    Our cells probably don't have the same amount of "Error Correction and Control" as whale cells.

    we have several million whole DNA copies

    Works for the first zillion copies. But after while as more mistakes accumulate and spread how do we know which copies are still faithful to the originals?

    So the workaround is a limit[1] on how many divisions before a self destruct.

    And after a while there just aren't enough stem cells:
    https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25458-blood-of-worlds-oldest-woman-hints-at-limits-of-life/ [newscientist.com]

    In van Andel-Schipper’s case, it seemed that in the twilight of her life, about two-thirds of the white blood cells remaining in her body at death originated from just two stem cells, implying that most or all of the blood stem cells she started life with had already burned out and died.

    Maybe what you could do is donate stem cells to your future self. Genetic drift should not be a problem as long as stuff still works after all human chimeras can exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)#Humans [wikipedia.org]