A Popular Science View of Negligible Senescence in the Animal Kingdom

Some animals, even mammals such as the naked mole-rat, show few signs of degenerative aging across a life span, a state known as negligible senescence. Such species typically live considerably longer than their more evidently aging near relative species. There isn't any one path to negligible senescence, as demonstrated by the wide variety of ecological niches containing species found to be negligibly senescence. Can we learn from their biochemistry to find ways to meaningfully extend the healthy human life span? Undoubtedly so in the very long term, at the point at which the cutting edge of research is building entirely new higher animal genomes with confidence, but it is too soon to say whether any of the novel age-slowing and age-reversing therapies of the next few decades will be informed by an improved understanding of the comparative biology of aging. Theoreticians in the 1960s who were trying to wrap their heads around the principles of why and how animals on this planet age argued that senescence is "inevitable." As time goes by, organisms grow old, and their probability of dying increases. But research into a wide range of organisms suggests this almost definitely isn't the case: there's a growing variety in how creatures grow old. On all branches of the evolutionary tree, some animals live fast and die young and those that are so old we don't even know how to measure their age. Female sand-burrowing mayflies have about five minutes to two hours to ma...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs