immortality

October 2012, P. 60, 61, 62, 76

               Scientists are looking for a way to preserve life.  Scientists have been looking at different types of animals, how long their life span is and their cells immunity, cells in humans that have a long life span, cloning, and how to create complex tissues and organs. Many people wish to live longer.  Scientists have found a species of jellyfish, called Turritopsis Nutricula, which can return from its sexually mature state back to a younger state.  Though they can still die from predation, Accident, and disease.   There was a woman in Africa who died from a disease, but not before scientists took some of her cells to look at. The scientists found that the women’s cells stayed alive for a very long time and the cells replicated, grew, and proliferated very fast.  Descendants of the women are living for a very long time because of their cells.  One possible way of immorality is cloning germ cells.  Germ cells from a mature animal can be reset to embryonic form.  These cells can be developed into replacement organs and then injected into an egg, where they are developed in to an embryo and are born.  Scientists can also freeze them and when an aging donor needs to have a damaged genome repaired they can use the stored cells.  Scientists have cloned more than twenty species so far.  There is an argument against human cloning, though, because the clones could, sometimes, be born with medical abnormalities.  Once scientists figure out a better way to clone animals without medical abnormalities, human cloning could become more acceptable.  Medical researchers are trying to create complex tissues and organs from a patient’s own cells also.

               This would affect the world in both a good and bad way.  The bad way is that we would start running out of space for everyone on Earth.   If we ran out of space on Earth than we would start dying from the lack of resources and then there wouldn’t be any reason to live longer on Earth when you are going to die soon anyway.  The good thing would be that everyone would get a longer life span so that they could pressure more of their life goals.  I think that we should care about this because if the world got over populated and we ran out of food and room than it would be very bad.  We have a short life span for a reason and if they are curing diseases and then giving people a longer life span then we will run out of supplies.  We have wars and diseases to wipe out some of the population, even if we don’t want wars and disease we have to have something to control the population numbers. I think that the scientists need to think about the future and figure out a way to have more supplies, including water, food, and land area, have less poverty, and become an eco-friendly environment before they start making people’s lives longer.

               I would recommend this article to others who have thought about this before because it would answer questions they have, including what scientists are doing for this topic.  I would also recommend it to people who have a career or job in disease control because this would show them that they can treat diseases with these cells that the scientists are creating, that replace damaged organs.  I would also recommend this to people who want to become a scientist.  It might interest them and they could go into this field and try and come up with new ideas about what might help the world’s population live longer, but in a resourceful way.  They could very well be the one of the people credited for the accomplishment when it is finally finished.  I would also tell people to just read this article to keep up with what’s going on because they might not know that scientists are even trying to help people have a longer life span.