The Elixir of Immortality May Reside Deep Within Our Brains

The super-wealthy have always lent a certain amount of gravitas to what others might consider foolhardy pursuits. Thus it is with the modern quest for eternal life – championed by no less than Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and ex-Googler Bill Marris. Propelled by the deep pockets of California’s tech-elites, an unholy alliance of computer scientists and biologists is making serious progress on what was previously considered one of life’s unchanging attributes: the certainty of death. Last week, a study published in the scientific journal Nature has uncovered at least one source of aging among mammals similar to ourselves, and points in the direction of how to stop it. At least as early 2013, with the publication of a groundbreaking study from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, it was known a connection existed between a brain structure called the hypothalamus and the rate of aging. Now, a followup study from the same institution seems to have pinpointed the exact relationship between the two and revealed how the aging process might be halted, or in some cases even reversed. The key lies in something called neuronal stem cells, a type of undifferentiated brain cell residing within the hypothalamus. That there existed a correlation between the amount of neuronal stem cells within the hypothalamus and overall measures of aging is itself unsurprising, since many biomarkers correlate closely with aging. However, the study demonstrates this is not mere correlation, but in fact causation: Changing the amount of neuronal stem cells within the hypothalamus directly affects the rate of aging within the body. One of the underlying mechanisms controlling this process seems to be the release of microRNAs (miRNAs) into the cerebrospinal fluid, a process directly traceable to the quantity of neuronal stem cells within the hypothalamus. Injecting the extracted miRNAs into the cerebrospinal fluid of mice had the effect of forestalling the aging process. An important question remains: To what exact degree does this regulate the aging process in humans? Is this in fact the body’s primary mechanism for regulating aging, or one of several interconnected systems? Already it’s been shown that transfusing blood from young mice into older mice seems to halt many of the signs of aging, but it's unknown whether it's because of the downstream effect of the miRNAs or a separate and unrelated system. While questions such as the above will form the basis of many studies to come, one thing is clear: Gerontology is now one of the hottest topics in medicine. And thanks in part to the backing of some of the world’s richest individuals.

Many observers, including this author, believe it's a foregone conclusion these lines of research will yield practical therapies in the none-too-distant future. If this becomes a reality, the societal fallout is likely to be monumental. Keeping social security funded in the US is already an issue; how much worse will it become when we're living to 150, to say nothing of matters like overpopulation and pollution. Questions of who would be entitled to such treatments and at what cost are likely to be highly controversial. With many governments still struggling to come to terms with such prosaic matters as evolution and climate change, dealing with questions of eternal life looks entirely beyond their ken. But government intervention notwithstanding, the most likely outcome is a polarizing of society not only along financial lines, but biological one’s as well, with individuals who can “upgrade” themselves bifurcating into a substantially different kind of human than those who cannot.

The Elixir of Immortality May Reside Deep Within Our Brains

Tagged In

More from Extreme