Longevity is one of the hottest new topics, it just came up recently when Elon Musk… No, it has definitely not come up recently. Before Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other modern emperors of technology and commerce the Chinese Emperors of the Ming & Qing Dynasties were firm believers of Daoist longevity theories. Some even poisoned themselves to death ingesting elixirs brewed by alchemists in order to prolong their life span. (Source: Havard).

History often teaches us a lesson. And didn’t Methuselah (Noah’s grandfather)  make it to the “biblical age” of nearly a thousand years probably without the help of the pharmaceutical industry? So why that recent buzz about “eternal life”?

Big Money flows down the river of longevity research

What is fairly new is the fact that big investment funds, sometimes backed by acknowledged investors collect millions, maybe soon billions of dollars to be invested in research and production of medicine or technology that could potentially prolong the lives of the ones who can afford this (Source: longevity.vc) As a side note: Some funds are already invested in companies that extend the life extension scheme also to our “furry friends” and best companion, the dog. Cats soon to follow I hope. (Source: celevity)

In which fields is all this money invested?

The main fields of research and investment are (ranked by priority):

• Drug discovery (majority of initiatives)
• Gene Therapy
• Immunotherapy and related

This means that most investors believe that a “cure for aging” has to come from outside the body to cure a process within the body. For all cineasts there are a couple of books and subsequently movies that iterate this theme from many different angles, most of them involving castles in Eastern European rural areas (From Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”, 1897 to “A Cure for Well-Ness”, 2016 and many others). But is this necessarily so? Before I try to answer this question, first let’s ask ourselves some more fundamental questions.

The biological clock ticks, doesn’t it?

Is there a biological rational towards a “given life span”? Yes, there probably is and the secret probably lies in our chromosomes as always “it’s the genes, stupid”. (Source: Oeseburg et al). At the two ends of our chromosomes (the macroscopic structure made of proteins and DNA, the latter holding our genetic information) we find “caps” of highly repetitive sequences, called “telomeres” (Greek for “end part”) that do not code for anything, but seem to protect the genetic information farther within the chromosome from damage. 

During our life we need to renew our cells, so cells divide and propagate and it seems that with every cell division we lose some “layer of protection” from the telomeric region. Our genetic information thus becomes more and more vulnerable to accidental loss or change of genetic material. This seems inevitable.