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Senescence or biological aging is the gradual deterioration of functional characteristics in living organisms. The word senescence can refer to either cellular senescence or to senescence of the whole organism. Organismal senescence involves an increase in death rates and/or a decrease in fecundity with increasing age, at least in the later part of an organism's life cycle. However, the resulting effects of senescence can be delayed. The 1934 discovery that calorie restriction can extend lifespans by 50% in rats, the existence of species having negligible senescence, and the existence of potentially immortal organisms such as members of the genus Hydra have motivated research into delaying senescence and thus age-related diseases. Rare human mutations can cause accelerated aging diseases.
Immortality is the concept of eternal life. Some species possess biological immortality.
Life extension is the concept of extending the human lifespan, either modestly through improvements in medicine or dramatically by increasing the maximum lifespan beyond its generally-settled limit of 125 years. Several researchers in the area, along with "life extensionists", "immortalists", or "longevists", postulate that future breakthroughs in tissue rejuvenation, stem cells, regenerative medicine, molecular repair, gene therapy, pharmaceuticals, and organ replacement will eventually enable humans to have indefinite lifespans through complete rejuvenation to a healthy youthful condition (agerasia). The ethical ramifications, if life extension becomes a possibility, are debated by bioethicists.
Maximum life span is a measure of the maximum amount of time one or more members of a population have been observed to survive between birth and death. The term can also denote an estimate of the maximum amount of time that a member of a given species could survive between birth and death, provided circumstances that are optimal to that member's longevity.
The free radical theory of aging states that organisms age because cells accumulate free radical damage over time. A free radical is any atom or molecule that has a single unpaired electron in an outer shell. While a few free radicals such as melanin are not chemically reactive, most biologically relevant free radicals are highly reactive. For most biological structures, free radical damage is closely associated with oxidative damage. Antioxidants are reducing agents, and limit oxidative damage to biological structures by passivating them from free radicals.
Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey is an English author and biomedical gerontologist. He is the author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007). He is known for his view that medical technology may enable human beings alive today not to die from age-related causes. As an amateur mathematician, he has contributed to the study of the Hadwiger–Nelson problem in geometric graph theory, making the first progress on the problem in over 60 years.
Biogerontology is the sub-field of gerontology concerned with the biological aging process, its evolutionary origins, and potential means to intervene in the process. The term "biogerontology" was coined by S. Rattan, and came in regular use with the start of the journal BIOGERONTOLOGY in 2000. It involves interdisciplinary research on the causes, effects, and mechanisms of biological aging. Biogerontologist Leonard Hayflick has said that the natural average lifespan for a human is around 92 years and, if humans do not invent new approaches to treat aging, they will be stuck with this lifespan. James Vaupel has predicted that life expectancy in industrialized countries will reach 100 for children born after the year 2000. Many surveyed biogerontologists have predicted life expectancies of more than three centuries for people born after the year 2100. Other scientists, more controversially, suggest the possibility of unlimited lifespans for those currently living. For example, Aubrey de Grey offers the "tentative timeframe" that with adequate funding of research to develop interventions in aging such as strategies for engineered negligible senescence, "we have a 50/50 chance of developing technology within about 25 to 30 years from now that will, under reasonable assumptions about the rate of subsequent improvements in that technology, allow us to stop people from dying of aging at any age". The idea of this approach is to use presently available technology to extend lifespans of currently living humans long enough for future technological progress to resolve any remaining aging-related issues. This concept has been referred to as longevity escape velocity.
Biological immortality is a state in which the rate of mortality from senescence is stable or decreasing, thus decoupling it from chronological age. Various unicellular and multicellular species, including some vertebrates, achieve this state either throughout their existence or after living long enough. A biologically immortal living being can still die from means other than senescence, such as through injury, poison, disease, predation, lack of available resources, or changes to environment.
Strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS) is a range of proposed regenerative medical therapies, either planned or currently in development, for the periodic repair of all age-related damage to human tissue. These therapies have the ultimate aim of maintaining a state of negligible senescence in patients and postponing age-associated disease. SENS was first defined by British biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. Many mainstream scientists believe that it is a fringe theory. De Grey later highlighted similarities and differences of SENS to subsequent categorization systems of the biology of aging, such as the highly influential Hallmarks of Aging published in 2013.
Rejuvenation is a medical discipline focused on the practical reversal of the aging process.
Enquiry into the evolution of ageing, or aging, aims to explain why a detrimental process such as ageing would evolve, and why there is so much variability in the lifespans of organisms. The classical theories of evolution suggest that environmental factors, such as predation, accidents, disease, and/or starvation, ensure that most organisms living in natural settings will not live until old age, and so there will be very little pressure to conserve genetic changes that increase longevity. Natural selection will instead strongly favor genes which ensure early maturation and rapid reproduction, and the selection for genetic traits which promote molecular and cellular self-maintenance will decline with age for most organisms.
Following is a list of topics related to life extension:
Antonei Benjamin Csoka is a biogerontologist at Howard University who works on the molecular biology of aging, regenerative medicine, and epigenetics.
In the life extension movement, longevity escape velocity (LEV), actuarial escape velocity or biological escape velocity is a hypothetical situation in which one's remaining life expectancy is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which longevity escape velocity would be maintained, technological advances would increase people's remaining life expectancy more than the year that just went by. The term is meant as an analogy to the concept of escape velocity in physics, which is the minimum speed required for an object to indefinitely move away from a gravitational body despite the gravitational force pulling the object towards the body.
Ageing is the process of becoming older. The term refers mainly to humans, many other animals, and fungi, whereas for example, bacteria, perennial plants and some simple animals are potentially biologically immortal. In a broader sense, ageing can refer to single cells within an organism which have ceased dividing, or to the population of a species.
The SENS Research Foundation is a non-profit organization that does research programs and public relations work for the application of regenerative medicine to aging. It was founded in 2009, located in Mountain View, California, USA. The organization publishes its reports annually.
The anti-aging movement is a social movement devoted to eliminating or reversing aging, or reducing the effects of it. A substantial portion of the attention of the movement is on the possibilities for life extension, but there is also interest in techniques such as cosmetic surgery which ameliorate the effects of aging rather than delay or defeat it.
The mitochondrial theory of ageing has two varieties: free radical and non-free radical. The first is one of the variants of the free radical theory of ageing. It was formulated by J. Miquel and colleagues in 1980 and was developed in the works of Linnane and coworkers (1989). The second was proposed by A. N. Lobachev in 1978.
The Lifespan Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF) is a non-profit organization with mission to support fundamental research on the main mechanisms of aging and age-related diseases and educate the public on the possibility of bringing aging under medical control in order to prevent, postpone and cure age-related diseases. It was founded in 2014 and is based in New York City, New York, USA.
This timeline lists notable events in the history of research into senescence or biological aging, including the research and development of life extension methods, brain aging delay methods and rejuvenation.
References
- ↑ Garth, Eleanor (2022-10-28). "Aubrey de Grey on longevity at scale". Longevity.Technology - Latest News, Opinions, Analysis and Research. Retrieved 2022-11-04.
