The Importance Of Damage Control

It may be the key to immortality, according to James Vaupel, director of the Laboratory of Survival and Longevity at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research:

“Every day we suffer damage and don’t perfectly repair it,” explains Vaupel, “and this accumulation of unrepaired damage is what causes age-related disease.” It’s not a trait that is shared by all living organisms. Hydra for example – a group of simple, jellyfish-like creatures – are able to repair almost all the damage they suffer, and readily slough cells that are too injured to heal. In humans, it’s damaged cells like these that can give rise to cancerous tumors.

“Hydras allocate resources primarily toward repair, rather than reproduction,” says Vaupel. “Humans, by contrast, primarily direct resources toward reproduction, it’s a different survival strategy at a species level.” Humans may live fast and die young, but our prodigious fertility allows us to overcome these high mortality rates. Now that infant mortality is so low, there’s really no need to channel so many resources into reproduction, says Vaupel. “The trick is to up-regulate repair instead of diverting that energy into getting fat. In theory that should be possible, though nobody has any idea about how to do it.” If the steady accretion of damage to our cells can be arrested – so-called negligible senescence – then perhaps we won’t have an upper age limit. If that’s the case, there isn’t any reason why we should have to die at all.

Previous Dish on longevity research here.

(Photo of Hydra vulgaris by Przemysław Malkowski)