Telomere shortening is a marker and there is a correlation, but aging is a process that happens on multiple levels and many of those aren’t fixable by DNA restoration.
We experience wear and tear, we accumulate damage, we accumulate waste, we lose body parts, we constantly fuse our bones together, we have body parts that grow surrounded by tissues capable of maintaining them but then operate outside of them, the list goes on.
But most importantly, death is such a beneficial feature, that it outcompeted everything else. Producing new generation of individuals regularly is a simple and terrifyingly effective solution to a vast array of problems. Many aspects of aging can be seen as adaptations to inevitability of procreation and death.
That aside, I like pointing people at professor Michael Levin’s work. Be very skeptical, as it’s a small field in a world that goes through reproducibility crisis, but it does fill me with a cautious hope.
Telomere shortening is a marker and there is a correlation, but aging is a process that happens on multiple levels and many of those aren’t fixable by DNA restoration.
We experience wear and tear, we accumulate damage, we accumulate waste, we lose body parts, we constantly fuse our bones together, we have body parts that grow surrounded by tissues capable of maintaining them but then operate outside of them, the list goes on.
But most importantly, death is such a beneficial feature, that it outcompeted everything else. Producing new generation of individuals regularly is a simple and terrifyingly effective solution to a vast array of problems. Many aspects of aging can be seen as adaptations to inevitability of procreation and death.
That aside, I like pointing people at professor Michael Levin’s work. Be very skeptical, as it’s a small field in a world that goes through reproducibility crisis, but it does fill me with a cautious hope.