If all the cell in our body are replaced at some point in our life, why do we get old and die?
In: Biology
When your body replaces cells, they make a copy of them to do so… So imagine taking a picture of a picture, do it hundreds of thousands of times and the quality drops to unsustainable levels.
Each strand of dna that contains the code to build the cell has what’s called telomeres. These are at the core a buffer for the dna. Each time your dna copies itself, a small bit is lost in transition, typically from the telomeres at the end. Once the dna strands lose too many of them, core dna becomes corrupted. This corruption prevents additional copies from being produced and results in a degrading effect, aging. And once the majority of critical body systems are unable to make copies, the entire system experiences a shutdown, death.
At least this is what I remember from highschool biotech from 10 years ago…
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