Old cells die through apoptosis or necrosis and new cells replace them through cell division and replication. Does this process decrease in frequency over time? Why does that happen?
In: Biology
By design.
Species that don’t have the previous generation make way for the younger one never develop or evolve. So most species have one way or another of getting rid of the old farts. Mostly that means [telomeres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere) at the end of your DNA that snap off when they get copied. You’ve got something like 1500 base pairs of just garbage non-encoded DNA data at the end. Every time a cell splits it snaps off 3-12. When you get really old and your skin and hair cells (which replicate a lot) run out of telomeres, they KEEP SNAPPING OFF DNA and digging into more important stuff. “Old age” is when your cells start to lose the code needed to function.
Lobsters don’t do that. When they get too big and too old, they can’t physically remove their shell to molt and they essentially suffocate trapped in their old skin. If they’re aided when they molt, we don’t know how long they could live.
Liz Parrish, the CEO of BioViva experimented with gene therapy to add more telomeres to the end of her DNA. I don’t think it worked.
Latest Answers