“Reversing aging” is considered the ultimate goal in today’s health and beauty industry.
However, advertising regulators often challenge claims that beauty products can “reverse aging,” as these assertions typically lack credible supporting evidence.
Although wrinkle creams might market themselves as having “anti-aging” benefits, suggesting they actually reverse the biological clock would be misleading.
While humans may not have the ability to turn back time, jellyfish possess this remarkable capability. Specifically, one type, the “immortal jellyfish” (Turritopsis dohrnii), has captured the attention of scientists.
Resembling a pea-sized, whimsical Doctor Who, Turritopsis can regenerate itself even after sustaining fatal injuries. Rather than exploding into a colorful spectacle like the Doctor, this jellyfish quietly settles, retracts its tentacles, and transforms into a blob.
This transformation leads the jellyfish to enter its “polyp state,” an early stage in its life cycle. Turritopsis can then regenerate and produce new jellyfish, which emerge as genetically identical individuals.
The immortal jellyfish is the only known organism capable of such a feat, and it has only been observed doing so under controlled conditions. When this ability was discovered in the 1980s, researchers were astounded.
Now, you might think we perform a similar miracle when giving birth, right? While the immortal jellyfish doesn’t repair its body, it creates new jellyfish from its existing cells.
A significant difference is that our babies aren’t clones of us.
This is because new organisms are created by combining the DNA from both the egg and sperm. In contrast, the immortal jellyfish can produce new offspring without sperm during its regenerative phase, even though that is typically its preference.
Thus, the new jellyfish are essentially “babies,” perfectly replicating their progenitor. Furthermore, this unique process allows them to revert to a state where they can generate new jellyfish, akin to reversing menopause, and they can do so rapidly enough to evade death.
These extraordinary abilities lend some biological plausibility to the concept of reversing aging.
Scientists continue to study the immortal jellyfish in hopes of uncovering their secrets and applying them to age-related conditions like dementia.
In a 2022 study, Spanish researchers found that, compared to other jellyfish species, the immortal jellyfish exhibits heightened activity in genes associated with DNA repair, telomere maintenance (the protective ends of chromosomes that diminish with age), and the preservation of stem cells essential for tissue regeneration.
It remains uncertain whether these groundbreaking discoveries will lead to reversing human aging or ultimately bypassing death.
This article (by Jackie Bullock, MA) addresses the question, “Can aging actually be reversed?”
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Source: www.sciencefocus.com