Immortality
Immortality means living without death. Mainstream biology treats aging as loss of reserve capacity and rising failure rates in the body's repair systems. The bioenergetic framework doesn't pursue literal immortality; its aim is high function across the whole lifespan rather than indefinite survival, on the view that many signs of aging track the same chronic stress chemistry, and can be slowed wherever Thyroid, Progesterone, Light, and fuel oxidation are properly supported.[1][2]
Estrogen, at least when it is not opposed by a very large concentration of progesterone, creates all of the conditions known to be involved in the aging process.
The germ plasm doctrine and "immortal" cells
[edit]Early 20th-century genetics, following August Weismann, treated genes as the immutable essence of an organism: the "germ plasm" or germ line carried the immortal genes, while the rest of the body was merely temporal, essentially mortal cells wearing out. Tumor cells earned the label "immortal" specifically because they broke that rule, refusing to stay stationary and mortal the way normal adult cells were assumed to.[3]
That "immortality" is usually demonstrated by growing cancer cells endlessly in a culture dish. The framing runs deeper than it looks: a normal cell that can be coaxed into surviving and replicating indefinitely in a dish is, by that very fact, considered to have already transformed into cancer. The doctrine of intrinsically mortal normal cells developed directly out of how difficult it actually was, historically, to keep ordinary cells alive and replicating outside the body at all.[3]
The telomere theory, and why it doesn't hold up
[edit]The popular "telomeric clock" theory of aging says telomeres shorten with each division until cell division becomes impossible, producing the symptoms of aging, while "immortal" germ cells and cancer cells escape this fate through active telomerase that keeps their telomeres long. The theory doesn't survive contact with the exceptions: mice, despite their very short lifespan, keep active telomerase in their body tissues throughout life, while people normally don't; some cancers run long telomeres and some don't; and telomere length varies between organs in the same animal, and even between chromosomes in the same cell. None of that makes the telomere itself unimportant, only the idea of it as a simple mitotic clock.[4] A direct experimental case: normal human bronchial epithelial cells, which typically stop dividing after 30-40 population doublings (the textbook "Hayflick limit"), kept dividing for over 200 population doublings under low-stress culture conditions without ever activating a telomere maintenance mechanism, almost four times the supposed limit.[5]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Not the "female hormone," but the shock hormone," Ray Peat article
- ↑ "Aging Eyes, Infant Eyes, and Excitable Tissues," Ray Peat article
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Cancer: Disorder and Energy," Ray Peat article
- ↑ Ray Peat, "Hayflickers, Dolly, and Dandruff," newsletter.
- ↑ Peters-Hall JR, Min J, Tedone E, et al. "Proliferation of adult human bronchial epithelial cells without a telomere maintenance mechanism for over 200 population doublings," FASEB J. 2020;34(1):386-398.