A friend of mine is convinced that our code of the aging gene (or cell division) will one day be broken. It certainly wouldn’t benefit our overcrowded world, but do you think science will ever be able to achieve this effectively? Or could it be that this has already been found, but is kept strictly secret?
Asker: Muriel, 25 years old
Answer
Best,
Scientists are not in the habit of keeping anything “top secret”. On the contrary, they love nothing more than to make their findings or discoveries known to the world. In this way they also gain importance themselves, of course, or they may earn something from it.
Man will never become immortal. We are not built for that; Mother Nature’s “goal” is that we reproduce and thus make our genes immortal, but not our bodies.
There are many reasons why our bodies age. One of the problems is that our cells accumulate errors in their genes during successive cell divisions, which increases the chance of developing into a cancer cell. The longer a person lives, the greater the risk of cancer.
Answered by
prof. Dr. Luke Bouwens
Biomedical Sciences
Free University of Brussels
Pleinlaan 2 1050 Ixelles
http://www.vub.ac.be/
Pleinlaan 2 1050 Ixelles
http://www.vub.ac.be/
.