Re: How to increase lifespan indefinetely...

Robert J. Kolker wrote:
> dkomo wrote:
>
>>
>>If organisms can continue to produce offspring later in life, there will
>>be a gradual evolution of longer lifespans, as selection for longevity
>>genes takes place. This could take dozens of generations, however. For
>>humans, increased lifespans will come about through advances in medical
>>technology long before such slow evolution produces an effect.
>
>
> Even if one selected individuals with longer lifespans having a
> differential fitness to reproduce there is a limit to how many times our
> cells can divide before copying errors bring about disease and death. A
> normal cell cannot subdivide indefinitely. Noise takes its toll.
>

People should know that such experiments have already been done by
Michael Rose on fruitflies. By selecting eggs from females at
progressively later dates in their reproductive cycles, he was
eventually able to breed flies that lived twice as long on average. And
as a nice illustration of the coupling between age of reproduction and
lifespan, these Methusalah flies bred much later in life than normal flies.

Of course, since an average fruitfly lives only 33 days, there is no
problem with the number of times their cells can reproduce. They are
probably very far from their Hayflick limits.

> There is probably an upper bound to how long a human can live, but no
> one knows exactly what it is.
>

Ray Kurtzweil predicts that humans will be leaving their biological
bodies behind at the end of the 21st century and downloading their
personalities into computers. This will be a form of immortality.


--dkomo@xxxxxxxx


.

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