Forget dream of eternal life … we’ll never beat ageing

IT is the holy grail for scientists – to find a way to beat ageing and help humans to live forever.

But it will only ever be the stuff of science fiction, a study suggests.

Researchers concluded there is ‘no way out’ of death, even with a breakthrough in drugs or treatments.

The problem is that some cells become sluggish as we get older, so our bodies slow down and organs start to fail, while other cells speed up and cause cancer.

We could slow down the cancer cells, but this would worsen the effects of ageing by creating more sluggish cells. Meanwhile, speeding up slow cells could trigger cancer.

The Catch- 22 situation was found in a study by the University of Arizona based on a new mathematical model of ageing. Senior author Joanna Masel, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, said: ‘Ageing is mathematically inevitable – like, seriously inevita- ble. There’s logically, theoretically, mathematically no way out.’ It had been hoped the discovery of ‘telomeres’ could be the key to keeping the human race forever young. These are caps – much like the plastic ones on the ends of shoelaces – which stop the chromosomes that house our DNA from fraying, something that causes ageing and disease. However, drugs that stop telomeres from wearing away could be counter-productive, according to the US researchers.

They may prevent cells from becoming old and sluggish, but this creates more competition for cancer cells, which can often be lying dormant in older people. Those cancer cells may then launch into action to fight that competition. Dividing more quickly, they will form tumours and the cancer, which otherwise could have stayed dormant or slow growing, could become fatal.

Meanwhile, the problem with making cancer cells more sluggish is that it creates more of the cells that make us old and cause parts of our body to fail. Dr Masel said: ‘If you get rid of those poorly functioning, sluggish cells, then that allows cancer cells to proliferate, and if you get rid of, or slow down, those cancer cells, then that allows sluggish cells to accumulate. So you’re stuck between allowing these sluggish cells to accumulate or allowing cancer cells to proliferate, and if you do one you can’t do the other.

‘What we show is that this forms a double bind – a Catch-22.’

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers conclude that ageing is an ‘intrinsic property of being multicellular’.

Professor Masel said: ‘Things will get worse over time, in one of these two ways or both. Either all of your cells will continue to get more sluggish, or you’ll get cancer. And the basic reason is that things break. It doesn’t matter how much you try to stop them from breaking – you can’t.’