[frankinstien]

For decades now the issue of aging and eventual death have been topics where some argue death is not something life implements as an adaptation. But looking at Salmon one can see that death in that organism is deliberate as the process is induced after the fish procreates. Well if it's deliberate in Salmon might it also be deliberate in other organisms? The reason this issue has even come up is I have another dog coming to that stage in life where they start to have health issues. Many argue the occurrence of cancer in the aged human population is due to prolonged exposure to carcinogens. If that were the case then why does it happen to dogs and even mice as they get older since they live much shorter lives and therefore are less exposed than humans with respect to time? 

Now I'll introduce the Thymus, it's an organ located in your chest and is responsible for T-cell production, and guess what? It shrinks over time and that shrinkage starts at birth! The less Thymus tissue you have the more vulnerable you are to infectious disease and cancers. The T-cells can detect cancer cells and as the Thymus shrinks it produces fewer T-cells and could get damaged from this shrinkage to produce malformed T-cells.

It would appear that death is deliberate since the Thymus is on an involution path that's genetically controlled. It would appear species have to reproduce frequently enough to cope with their genetic death sentence. So, we can see that life developed this approach as a species adaptation that is reinforced through natural selection. This means the life span of organisms is intrinsic to a species' viability.

Of all the mammals bowhead whales have the longest life span, 200 years! It would be interesting to study the bowhead's Thymus and its genetic differences from other animals including humans. If we can apply genetic tools to the bowhead Thymus, including AI, we might be able to triple human life spans...


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymic_involution#:~:text=Under%20certain%20circumstances%2C%20the%20thymus,infections%2Cpregnancy%2C%20and%20malnutrition.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222953/#:~:text=The%20incidence%20of%20most%20common,immune%20function%2C%20termed%20immune%20senescence.

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/bowhead.html#:~:text=Scientists%20agree%20that%20the%20bowhead,in%20the%20contemporary%20animal%20kingdom.

[DaltonG]

Early on in my pursuit of understanding the brains architecture and how one would go about emulating the brain in a computer, I kept running across statements to the effect that it was impossible - just too complex. So, having taken a course in embryology, I wondered if it might be possible to construct a brain by growing it and following the developmental stages. This led me to recognizing the decreasing potency of cells as they were reproduced and became more and more specialized. Something had to be controlling the production of specialized cell types at various stages. My imagination conjured up a method by which a template molecule crawled up the DNA helix opening the strands so that tRNA could transcribe stretches designed to produce the necessary structural proteins. This process would continue from the moment the template molecule encountered a start codon until a matching section hit the stop codon, then the cell would separate into two daughter cells. The mitotic process is known to shorten the telomeres with each cell division, thereby establishing a new starting point for the template molecule for the next cycle. The process moves the cell ever closer to becoming a specialized cell and would also control the population size of the particular cell type by virtue of the template molecules length.

Now comes an explanation for why the cells retain junk DNA. I don't know if this is true, but the junk DNA could be a logical means of establishing a counter mechanism. If genes were separated by stretches of junk DNA, they could correspond to how much protein should be produced during the cycle of reproduction. If this were true, then aging and death could be a byproduct of the mechanism for development and growth - telomeres get shorter and shorter until the cell can no longer reproduce. The cell, then, breaks down from natural ware and tear. The addition of more junk DNA by retroviruses over the generations could explain how humans have become larger over time. Thymus shrinking could be the result of cell deaths and related too earlier stages during the production of the thymus.

Part of the key to extending the life span of humans is wrapped up in lengthening those telomeres, but there's more to it than just that. The mitochondrial DNA also ages and die off. The medical wizards know that the telomeres can be rebuilt with telomerase for they see it happen all the time in cancer, so the mechanism does exist in the genome - probably engages during fetal production to offset the shortening of inherited DNA from the parents. You have to wonder if children born of very young parents would have longer life spans than those from older parents (?) I'll Google it and see if anyone has surveyed and published on it.

Ya know, so much research funding has become dependent upon government sources, there's a goods chance that funding research into longevity will drop to negligible levels. We hear so much rhetoric and fear mongering concerning global warming while the real threat is related to over population. The Population Bomb could explode during the life span of the next generation. Invest in Soylent Green!