Human lifespan can reach 1,000, expert: The key in this immortal cell!

According to "Fairy Tales", Peng To is the 6-generation grandson of King Chuyen Huc. He is someone who lives to 767 years old and is still healthy. He passed through the Xia Dynasty until the end of the Yin Dynasty and was also invited to hold the position of Doctor. However, after the Shang and Zhou dynasties, in history books or legends, there was no record of anyone living such a long life.

However, later archaeologists discovered that, in ancient times, the ancients used the calculation of 1 year as 60 days, which means 60 days would be considered 1 year old. Therefore, Peng Zu's real age is only about 127 years old. However, for posterity, a person who can live healthy to more than 100 years old like Peng To is considered a miracle.

Humans can live to be more than 100 years old

From this story, many scientists began to pursue the study of human longevity genetic codes. In the modern world, thanks to new technologies such as artificial intelligence and medical technology, human life expectancy is increasing day by day. So according to their calculation, how long is the limit of human life?

As early as the nineteenth century, British statistician Benjamin Gompertz calculated the law of human mortality and called it the Gompertz-Makeham law. According to this law, a person's death rate will double every 8 years after that person turns 30.

To combat aging, people began to pursue the search for immortality.

The UK Statistics Office has predicted that in the future people will reach an average life expectancy of 100 years. According to this forecast, women in the UK will reach an average life expectancy of 100 years by 2055. , and men reach a life expectancy of 100 by 2080.

According to the study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, a team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) used extrapolation to analyze existing data. They collected life expectancy data on more than 1,100 "super-longevity" people in 13 countries. They also collected data on elderly people in Italy from 2009 to 2015. The results of the study show that people can live to at least 130 years old or longer. Although this rate is low, it is not absent.

This result is also quite similar to the research conducted by professors from the University of Moscow and the Russian Institute of Marine Biology based on marine organisms. In their study, the Greenland shark was the species with the longest life expectancy. Their average lifespan is 392 years, the highest up to 512 years. They also calculated that the longest human lifespan is about 168 years.

Finding the secret of "eternal immortality"

Since the development of biotechnology, scientists have always studied cells, they found that human aging is related to cell division. When cells age and die, that's when people come to an end. Specifically, it is a segment of DNA with a sequence that repeats many times at the beginning of each chromosome called a telomere. They play a key role in the biological aging process. In most cells, the length of telomeres decreases with age.

Each time a cell divides, the length of the telomeres decreases slightly. Eventually, when the telomeres get short enough, the cell dies. Elizabeth Blackburn, an Australian-American cell biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, likened telomeres to the ends of shoelaces. When the tip breaks or comes off, the shoelaces begin to fray and fail.

Dr. Ronald DePinho and his team have succeeded in the "rejuvenation of the whole body" experiment on mice.

Not satisfied with this result, a group of American scientists from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston set out to find the secret of immortality. Then, Dr. Ronald DePinho and his colleagues found a breakthrough in anti-aging that helps people maintain their youth forever. The content of this study was published in the journal Nature.

Dr. Ronald DePinho's team was able to reverse the effects of aging on animals through tests on mice. They created mice with a controllable gene for the enzyme telomerase. This enzyme called telomerase is the enzyme that helps telomeres maintain. The mice carrying this enzyme all aged very prematurely.

From these mice, the researchers determined that by reactivating the enzyme telomerase, telomeres were restored and the symptoms of aging were reduced. In just two months of being given a drug that increases the amount of the enzyme telomerase, the mice developed so many new cells that it could be called "reverse aging".

After Dr. Ronald DePinho's team announced the results of this study, the scientific community broke out a lot of controversy. However, in practice, the experiment is still only done on animals and is only theoretical.

Is immortal human good?

In 2015, Dr Aubrey de Gray - British gerontologist, founder of the US-based project to reduce the aging process (SENS) shocked the world when he announced that humans can live up to 1,000 years old at a scientific conference.

The reason this statement caused a wave of public opinion was because this number seemed to be beyond the reach of mankind. But Dr. Aubrey de Gray gave evidence of the immortal cell Hela. According to him, the premise of human aging is that cells die after about 56 divisions. However, Hela cells are different from normal human cells because they are immortal cells.

This cell was accidentally created by George Otto Gey, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Maryland, USA in 1951. He took a sample from a black woman with cancer named Henrietta Lacks. Then, scientists named the cell Hela and it quickly became an invaluable specimen to global medicine.

According to Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Hela cells are the key to human immortality.

Unlike normal human cells, Hela cells can survive and reproduce normally in the laboratory. Scientists have used them in polio vaccine research, microgravity testing, cloning, gene mapping and tissue culture.

For the medical community, possessing immortal cells is extremely important in research. So far, apart from Hela cells, no one has found any other immortal cells. Since the turn of the 21st century up to now, there have been 5 Nobel Prize-winning Hela-based research works. And Dr Aubrey de Gray believes that if the secret of Hela cells is discovered, humans can live to 1,000 years old.

But scientists also wondered if it was really good for humans to maintain immortality? They argue that there is no immortal life on Earth for a reason. If humanity could be immortal, the population would grow too much, the resources would run out, and all of us and the Earth would be severely ruined.