Take That, Death

My cousin has to make a succession plan for his tortoise.

Bubbles is already 16 years old and she could live another century.

So my cousin, middle-aged, plenty of decades left in his life, has to figure out who gets Bubbles when he's dead.

The next question in the search for longevity is how can we make you or me more like Bubbles? We have to first crack the process that makes her age slow and my cousin much faster.

Scientists have one answer that Susan has written about.

Like, there's one cement analogy.

I'm so glad you want to know about that, Ben, because my editor tried to cut it so many times.

Your

editor was wrong.

Susan then said kind words about her editor.

But the cement analogy begins with two tasks your cells take on throughout your body.

Your cells are supposed to do their job, be a heart cell, be an eye cell, do their thing, and also repair damage.

Part of the heart, part of the eye gets damaged.

Nearby cells switch into repair mode.

They create kind of sticky building stuff.

That is our cement.

They slather it on, like reinforcing an unstable pillar.

And then usually they go back to being their own kind of cell.

Repair over, back to work.

But as we get older, some cells become slower at switching back.

Over time, they get a little bit less adroit in returning back to their original functions.

The repairs take longer.

And not only that.

The cement that they're leaving in their wake itself kind of creates a little bit of damage that over time is a problem.

The repairs start to look like damage, so the cells return to repair mode.