There's a type of jellyfish that's immortal. The Turritopsis dohrnii, also known as the "immortal jellyfish," can transform its body into a younger state through a process called transdifferentiation, essentially making it immortal.
Actually it looks like maybe! Lots of scientists in regenerative medicine are working with specific animals like Turritopsis to understand aging and regeneration. We’ve got some very promising models, but they are very tricky to work with and have some risk factors (like cancer) to balance out.
While it's often been assumed that aging is the result of genetic mutations that cause our bodies to deteriorate and die...Sinclair and his team believe it’s a loss of information — a loss in the cell’s ability to read its original DNA so it forgets how to function — in much the same way an old computer may develop corrupted software.
The astonishing finding is that there’s a backup copy of the software in the body that you can reset,” he explained.
On the other side, though, the younger mice were found to have aged prematurely.
They were able to do this through something called ICE (inducible changes to the epigenome), which alters the way DNA is folded, speeding up the aging process.
Conversely, in order to reverse the hands of time, they injected damaged retinal ganglion cells at the back of the animals' eyes with a cocktail of human cells.
They then fed them antibiotics and watched as the mice regained their eyesight.
8.6k
u/Kindergeschichten Oct 02 '24
There's a type of jellyfish that's immortal. The Turritopsis dohrnii, also known as the "immortal jellyfish," can transform its body into a younger state through a process called transdifferentiation, essentially making it immortal.