Countdown - The genetics behind death (part 2)

Can we make an immortal cell? What is the relation between stress and aging?

This is the second part of: Countdown - The genetics behind death (part 1)

Its been quite a time since a correlation has been formed (this is, two facts that are related but they are not necessarily the cause of each other) about the exposition to not-so-favorable environments and mortality. As in if we compare a lot of people that were born under rather difficult socioeconomic environments with people that had everything served in a silver plate all their life, the first group tends to die first. A mechanism that would explain this is the genetic stress, that modifies physiologic functions and makes the body less resilient to diseases. Guess whom are a renowned stress indicator, telomeres.

The mere fact that unfavorable social environments exist is really shitty, of course, but understanding with evidence what is happening there can give us the tools to revert the situations. In a study, 3 children that had different grades of exposition to violent situations got the length of their telomeres measured for five years (from 5 years old until they became 10 years old). Telomeres shorten as time passes by, but the children that had more exposure to hostile environments had a clear extra shortening. The more traumatic events a kid had to pass, the shorter the telomeres were.

All the time, the DNA in our cells is decaying a bit. This happens, for example, when we expose to UV light, situation that leads sometimes into some confused "cellular machinery" getting confused and mutating. But as soon as the effect is gone, they fix the f*ckups they did. Stress is a mutating factors, so when you curse at your team for not scoring, you're hurting your DNA in some cells. That damage also happens in telomeres, and it is way harder to repair, the cells responds by "eating" that DNA instead of fixing it.

This was measured a huge amount of time, like in cases of people raised differently. We could think "well, when we are children and developing nearly everything affects us, this changes nothing"... Or it does.

They took people of the same age that were or not war veterans. The first variable is very important, since we know that age modifies the telomeres length and if we changed that besides the levels of stress the reason of the results would be unclear; in science, always change the variables one at a time. War veterans, of course, had been exposed to more stressing situations in their life, and they presented shorter telomeres.

Everything results in a simple result: The more stress we've to deal with, the shorter our telomeres become. Yes, we are all going to die. Our cells will start to fail and our body will collapse. Telomeres get shorter until they reach a break-point. Somehow, the at which we reach death depends on how we live life.

We will all age at one rate or another. Here's where "hard drugs" in science like philosophy and introspective. Right when you discover that there's no escape from that fate, you can chose "how" to walk the only path you've. While it lasts, enjoy it, knowing that perhaps it was unfair the whole trip; but your choice at some point. Understanding that, sooner or later, as some sort of Universal Justice, death equalizes us all.

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