Do mole rats hold the key to immortality?

Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying) byBill Gifford (Grand Central Publishing)

Someone alive today will live to celebrate a 1,000th birthday or so says gerontology theorist Aubrey de Grey, who has been snickered off many podiums during his controversial career.

His theory, which he calls SENSS, or Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence, contends that one day we will be able to engineer aging out of cells. Once we can implement de Greys idea to clean our cells of aging garbage, a kind of cellular housekeeping, then lifespan could even become infinite.

De Grey has a hopeful admirer in journalist Bill Gifford, author of the new book, Spring Chicken. In it, Gifford points out that MIT and the Technology Review have offered scientists $20,000 to try and refute de Greys theories. So far, three teams of scientists have tried. None, Gifford writes, has succeeded.

If the idea of exponentially increasing human lifespan sounds like the stuff of science fiction, consider this: Scientists have already doubled the lifespans of other species in the lab, including mice, worms and flies.

British theoretician Aubrey de GreyPhoto: Wikipedia

Researchers have also sequenced the genome of the naked mole rat, an animal that doesnt develop cancer, never suffers through menopause and lives 10 times longer than regular old subway rats.

Researchers believe that the longevity of mole rats comes down to the limited oxygen of its subterranean habitat. As such, its metabolic rates are abnormally slow and a proliferation of repair mechanisms keep their cells astonishingly youthful.

This is key, Gifford writes, pointing out that healthspan is far more important than lifespan. The real problem with aging isnt that we eventually die, its that we break down.

Aging is thought by some to begin while we are still in the womb. It speeds up after we finish growing, at about 20 years old, then accelerates after that.

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Do mole rats hold the key to immortality?