Why could the body not keep making healthy, young cells forever?
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We do not know quite what advantage the aging mechanism have. It could easily just be a mistake of evolution, an artifact of how our cells work creating this defect. However it is more likely to be a distinct advantage, we do see animals which do not age and the mechanisms they use is also present in humans, but not as active. The most likely benefit to aging is reduced cancer rates. Cancer is when a cluster of cells divide too fast. However this also means they age faster and stops dividing much faster. And when we compare animals to each other there is a strong correlation between aging, the length of the telomeres and cancer rates. This is a big issue in the effort to create anti-aging drugs. If they can not be controlled then they tend to cause cancer and premature death. It is likely that evolution have found a pretty good balance between dying of cancer and dying of old age. We might be able to improve on this if we can control the aging process though.
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