ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 1/1/2014
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Could Humans achieve Immortality?
So I was recently looking @ Bjork's wiki page and ended up on Jellyfish and I found many examples of how articles would say that this animal may hold the key to human immortality like
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Turritopsis dohrnii, the immortal jellyfish, is a species of small jellyfish which is found in the Mediterranean Sea and in the waters of Japan. It is unique in that it exhibits a certain form of "immortality": it is the only known case of an animal capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage.
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Shin Kubota is a professor at Kyoto University's Seto Marine Biological Laboratory. He began studying the gelatinous sea creatures in 1979, and there's one type with which he's particularly preoccupied: the scarlet jellyfish.
"They don't die," Kubota says, "they rejuvenate." He adds that they are one of three jellyfish species in japan that are considered "immortal."
"One day in my plankton net, there was a small scarlet jellyfish from (the) south, which had many sharp sticks stuck into its body," he recalls. "I thought 'poor thing' and removed all of the sticks, hoping it may become better and swim again. But it didn't and shrunk. However, it rejuvenated!"
It's less immortality and more regeneration, but Kubota believes these tiny marine animals could hold the secret to perpetual life.
When an adult scarlet jellyfish -- or medusa -- is injured, it goes to the bottom of the ocean floor. From there, it morphs back into its infant state, known as a polyp. Then the polyp becomes a new medusa, allowing the jellyfish to move between an adult and infant state in about two months.
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The lingzhi mushroom has been used in the practice of Chinese Traditional Medicine for over 2,000 years and is regarded as the "herb of spiritual potency" for attributed health benefits including the control of blood glucose levels, modulation of the immune system, hepatoprotection and more. It's also believed that the 'shroom increases longevity, thus why this particularly gigantic fungus has been dubbed the "mushroom of immortality".
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Flatworms are the darlings of the molecular biology field. What scientist doesn’t love a species that can lose an organ or body part — even its head — and grow it back?
It’s quite a trick. We’ll see if they can do it in space.
About 150 planarian flatworms, creatures that are happiest living in rivers or under a log, have first-class tickets aboard the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship, which will take them to the International Space Station for an experiment that could unlock the key to human immortality.
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Do you think it's possible?  could humans actually achieve what has been told as mere myth or legend?
edit: Oh, I just found a new article
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Instead, eternal life could be ‘switched on’ simply using a gene which destroys unhealthy cells inside the body.
Researchers at the University of Bern found that a genetic ‘switch’ could extend the lives of flies by 60% – and want to try a similar technique on humans.
The research, which appeared in the journal Cell, appears to extend life by ‘improving the selection’ of the best cells in the body.
Team leader Eduardo Moreno says, ‘Our bodies are composed of several trillion cells, and during aging those cells accumulate random errors due to stress or external insults, like UV-light from the sun
“Because some cells are more affected than others, we reasoned that selecting the less affected cells and eliminating the damaged ones could be a good strategy to maintain tissue health and therefore delay aging and prolong lifespan.’
To test their hypothesis, the researchers used Drosophila melanogaster flies.
However, the potential of the results goes beyond creating Methuselah flies, the researchers say:Because the gene azot is conserved in humans, this opens the possibility that selecting the healthier or fitter cells within organs could in the future be used as an anti aging mechanism.
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