Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?


Christian Sommer was just a German marine-biology student in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, is on the verge of solving a timeless question; is immortality possible? Sommer went snorkeling everyday to get samples that he could catch in his net. When he went home he puts what he found in Petri dishes.  He caught hundreds of samples and out of them he caught immortal jelly fish. When they were put into the Petri dish, Sommer noticed that instead of dying like all of the rest of the samples, the jelly fish did not die. In fact they did not even age. Their aging was reversed until their earliest stages of life then stared their life over again. After a quarter of a century we now know that the jellyfish do this when under assault. Scientist are also trying to find if this can be used to be an advantage for humans. I believe that messing with the possibility of immortality is not right. If this is achieved, what would happen to the human population? Soon there would not be enough room on Earth for people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/can-a-jellyfish-unlock-the-secret-of-immortality.html?ref=earth&_r=1&

2 comments:

  1. Immortality is something that would be a huge disaster for thre earth if humans were able to have it. For jelly fish it is fasinating, but it doesnt affect the worlds food and natural resources like it would for humans. Humans dont need it. we live a great 70-80 years. Gaining access to this would mean living possibly hundreds of years. The earths population would skyrocket. There would be a shortage of food. Oil would be gone fast, and water would become a scarcity. It would be a disaster to become immortal. I hope the day never comes that we discover how to.

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  2. I agree that it is good for the jelly fish to have immortality, but if humans were able to figure out how to do it i think it would be a disaster. The humans resources are already scarce as it is and if you extended the humans life expectancy by a couple hundred years then it would make the population explode ad the resources wouldn't be able to support the population.

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