Why do we age?

 

In 1997, a French mistress named Jeanne Calment went to doom after spending 122 years on planet earth. She is the oldest person in history. Dmitry Kaminskiy, a millionaire, promised to give one million dollars to anyone who could break Jeanne's record. Living to this age is merely impossible, maybe only a few likely to accomplish it. The human body isn't forced to adapt to extreme aging, simply isn't built for extreme aging. Why are we aging? How does aging counteract the body's effect to stay alive? We know what it means to age. But finding a proper definition of aging is still a challenge. The internal processes and interactions with the surroundings like toxins in the air, water, and our diet result in changing structure and function of body cells. Continuously, the failure of the whole organism might occur. 

Recently, researchers have sorted nine physiological traits ranging from genetic modifications to the cell's regenerative ability. The cell's regenerative ability plays a central role. As the years pass, Our body is prone to genetic damage in the form of DNA lesions. DNA lesions occur naturally when the body's DNA replicates. Cell organelles such as mitochondria are prone to this damage. Mitochondria produce ATP(Adenosine triphosphate), the central energy unit for all cellular actions. In addition to the production of ATP, mitochondria play a crucial role in programmed cell death. If mitochondria fail to perform, then the whole organs deteriorate. Other changes might occur in the expressional pattern of genes known as epigenetic alterations. Genes in new-borns are silenced at a low level which grows prominent in older people, which accelerates aging. Even when we avoid all those gene modifications, your cell will betray you. The process of cellular regeneration declines as we age. The genetic material that is DNA is packed within chromosomes. Chromosomes generally have a protective region at the extremities called telomeres. Telomeres shorten after every time our cell replicates. When telomeres become too short our cells stop replicating and die. With age cells become senescent, a process that hinders the cell cycle in time of necessity. 

As we grow old the cell growth gets halted and reduces the ability of cells to replicate. Stem cells have the property of without limit replenishing other cells. As we grow older, stem cells decrease in number and lose their regenerative potential affecting tissue renewal and organs' original functions. Some changes revolve around the cell's ability to function. As we age, Cells can't able to check the quality of proteins, causing the accumulation of toxic nutrients in the body. Those toxic accumulations lead to an excessive metabolic action that could be fatal. 

Still, why do we age is an unanswerable question. Ultimately, longevity depends on the diet we follow, physical activity(exercise). Can future scientific inventions such as cell-repairing nanobots or gene therapy increase our life expectancy? Do we want to live longer than we are living now?