Nobody wants to grow old, hurt and fade away. Therefore, studies aimed at prolonging life and preserving youth are always of particular interest. They have been held since time immemorial, but it seems that only now scientists have come close to making a major breakthrough in this matter.
According to the legends, even in ancient times, recipes for prolonging youth were developed. Of course, they were kept secret, but all the secret is ever revealed. Many of them turned out to be very curious. For example, in one ancient Persian manuscript, the following recipe was found: “You need to take a man, red-haired and freckled, and feed him with fruits until he is thirty, then lower him into a stone vessel with honey and other compounds, enclose this vessel in hoops and seal it. In one hundred and twenty years, his body will turn into a mummy. The contents of the vessel had to be taken according to certain rules, which guaranteed the preservation of youth. Everything seems to be simple - you just need to endure one hundred and twenty years.
Also, legends about springs restoring youth were very widespread. Even Herodotus, who lived in the 5th century BC, mentions a wonderful fountain somewhere in Ethiopia, whose water prolongs youth and life. The authors of later Arabic manuscripts indicated that the search for a rejuvenating source should be in India. Even later, the conquistadors tried to find them in South America, which gave rise to a whole subculture.
The popularity of these legends was enjoyed by all sorts of fraudsters posing as great magicians-healers or alchemists who possess the secret knowledge of how to make the elixir of youth. Their activity ended either in vain or in the sudden death of the client: they say that it was the anti-aging drugs that brought to the grave of the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi.
However, one should not think that our ancestors were stupider than us. They just didn't know what aging was causing. It may seem strange, but even in the 21st century, scientists cannot give an exhaustive answer to this question.
IN A HEALTHY BODY
Despite the lack of precise knowledge about how the human body "works", the healers of the past were able to draw up a list of recommendations for prolonging youth. In particular, they advised to limit yourself to food, take hot baths more often and invite a massage therapist. The Roman physician Aulus Celsus, who lived at the beginning of our era, saw a leading role in exercise. His compatriot Mark Cicero believed that "a man who has been honing his mind and virtues of character all his life slows down his old age." Medieval physician Arnold of Villanova wrote about the importance of stress avoidance, diet and daily regimen.
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In the 18th century, when the natural sciences were developing, a consistent study of aging processes began. Life-doctor of the Prussian king Christoph Hufeland wrote the book "Macrobiotics, or the Art of Extending Human Life" (1796), which caused a lot of noise. In it, based on great medical experience and common sense, he proposed a number of measures to preserve youth: active development of mental and physical strength, preservation of mental balance, rejection of meat in favor of plant foods, etc. His advice seems archaic, but modern gerontologists quite agree with them.
However, a person is a capricious creature, therefore he wants to get eternal youth without any costs and restrictions. The rapid development of surgery at the beginning of the twentieth century pushed scientists to search for ways to rejuvenate "through the scalpel". For example, the famous revolutionary Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov (Malinovsky), the author of the utopian novel The Red Star, believed that old people can be returned to youth by transfusing the blood of young men: he died while conducting an experiment with exchange transfusion on himself. Other scientists of that time saw the source of the appearance of senile changes in the large intestine and suggested removing it at a certain age. Still others believed that in order to combat aging, one should resort to surgical sterilization, or, conversely, transplant endocrine glands from young donors. Alas,all these scientists were very far from a real solution to the problem.
GENE OF AGING
Gerontologists claim that by the beginning of the 21st century, more than two hundred theories of aging had accumulated. And each of them implies its own ways of prolonging youth. If we highlight the main thing in them, then two ideas dominate. First, it is believed that aging is not a natural process, but a disease. Secondly, it is recognized that the main mechanisms of the development of this universal disease should be sought at the gene level.
The researchers came to this conclusion by studying long-lived animals. The real sensation was made by the naked mole rat - a small rodent that lives in the dry savannas of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia and demonstrates a truly fantastic ability to survive. Naked mole rats never get cancer, can go without food for a long time, do not drink water, hold their breath longer than other mammals, and are insensitive to pain. But the main thing is that they live up to thirty years without aging a bit (for comparison, an ordinary mouse lives no longer than four years). Since these rodents belong to the same class of animals as we are, there is hope to find in their genome that fundamental difference (the presence or absence of a specific nucleotide sequence) that makes them the longest-living among mammals of this size and at the same time forever young.
Another important area of research is the comparison of the genomes of ordinary people with the genomes of people who are long-lived. More than 1,500 different genes are now known that, to varying degrees, affect the longevity of experimental animals and humans. At the same time, they change the degree of their activity under the influence of various factors: from the composition of food to the quality of sleep. They, of course, can be “turned on” and “turned off” by various medication methods, but such a procedure requires an individual approach and does not guarantee the preservation of youth.
RETURNED YOUTH
Nevertheless, scientists managed to find a way to the coveted "elixir of youth." In search of a factor that determines the limits of life of any creature, the researchers turned their attention to telomeres - the end portions of chromosomes that play a protective role in DNA. With each division, telomere cells shorten until they reach their natural limit, after which either cell division stops, or mutations arise, leading to the development of all kinds of diseases.
The connection between telomere contraction and the development of senile signs was established by the Soviet scientist Aleksey Matveyevich Olovnikov back in 1971. However, science has come to a real technology that allows to reverse these processes only today.
The first volunteer who decided to test on himself gene therapy that promotes the production of telomerase (an enzyme responsible for restoring telomere length) was the American Elizabeth Parrish, one of the leaders of the BioViva company. The drug was administered to this forty-four-year-old woman in September 2015, and researchers recently reported "interim" results, which turned out to be positive: Parrish's blood cells were "younger" by twenty years. Of course, there is a risk that some process during the restructuring of an adult's DNA will go "crooked", contributing to the development of serious diseases, but so far everything looks encouraging.
If Elizabeth Parrish truly regains her youth and remains healthy, then all of us will have a chance to do so. You just have to wait.
Anton Pervushin