forever young: eternal trial

Eternal youth. Immortality.The eternal life sweepstakes. Is it the brainwave entertainment industry, or a periodical foray by big pharma? “EASY, RELAXING, 100% SAFE, PROVEN, GUARANTEED, BUY NOW …”Order Yours Now And Receive The Mind Power Bonus”. Well, if laboratory mice can have their life extended through starvation diets, are we on to something? But, can we have our cake and eat it too….

There is a controversy regarding existing limits in life span or if it is prescribed through the DNA code and genes, and the influence of external factors affecting longevity, which seems to indicate a ceiling of about a hundred years life expectancy Perhaps the answer will come later following the advancement of biosciences involved with DNA damage repair and gene silencing. A hundred year mortgage? It would certainly be like Milan Kundera’s “lightness of being”.

In Kundera’s novel Immortality, death is pervasive, and more particularly, death and immortality, which “form an inseparable pair,” he wrote, “more perfect than Marx and Engels, Romeo and Juliet, Laurel and Hardy,” . In Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway meet in heaven and debate whether themselves or their books are their source of fame “Instead of reading my books, they’re writing books about me,” Hemingway says. “That’s immortality,” Goethe says. “Immortality means eternal trial.”

Immortality or close to it, would certainly refashion the notion of romanticism, that idea that embodied the idea of genius destined to die young. Yeats would still be sailing to Byzantium, and we’d still be stuck with a press hound like Byron and shamanistic celebrities like Jim Morrison well into a hoary age. They tuned in, dropped out and came back.Looking at death and in particular at the imagined death of an artist, there is always this excursion into   the darker side of romantic imagination; the pervasive trope of death  and its reflection in the images of the artist in a commemorative culture. Eternal, or life of Biblical endurance as in  Genesis, would remove  the revealing  violent side of the imagery of death and dying which erupts at the intersection between artistic discourse and biographical myth, through such as figures like Byron and Shelley. Yet, would there still be a chasm, a wide   gulf between  images of a scandalous poet and musician in fiction and their tamed effigies in the realm of material culture and modern consumerism?

In both Judaism and Christianity, or any religion  there is no canonized  biblical support of “soul immortality” as such. The focus is on attaining resurrection life after death on the part of the believers. Can the body be immortal, but not the soul?; like zombies and the walking dead, whether it will be safe to extend life is another issue.

Judaism claims that the righteous dead will be resurrected in the Messianic age with the coming of the messiah, with maybe a few non-jews thrown in for variety. They will then be granted immortality in a perfect world. The wicked dead, on the other hand, will not be resurrected and continue to be a burden on the taxpayer. Adam and Eve condemned to mortality. Christian theology holds that Adam and Eve lost physical immortality for themselves and all their descendants in the Fall of Man, though this initial “imperishability of the bodily frame of man” was “a preternatural condition.” So now what?

According to the book of Enoch, the righteous and

ked await the resurrection in separate divisions of sheol, a teaching which may have influenced Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and Dives. Christians believe that every person that believes in Christ will be resurrected; Bible passages are interpreted as teaching that the resurrected body will, like the present body, be both physical (but a renewed and non-decaying physical body) and spiritual.( elena rey )

However, contrary to generally held belief, there is no biblical support of “soul immortality” as such in the New Testament, as well as the Koran. So, long before modern science made such speculation feasible, people wishing to escape death turned to the supernatural world for answers- soothsayers and fortune tellers- and back to the mythology of the pre-Christian world and into the realm of James Frazer and his Golden Bough. Examples include Chinese Taoists,  medieval alchemists with their search for the Philosopher’s Stone, or  modern religious mystics, who believed in the possibility of achieving physical immortality through spiritual transformation.

Eternal life can also be defined as a timeless existence, which is also not known for certain to be achievable, or even definable, despite millennia of arguments for eternity. Wittgenstein, in a notably non-theological interpretation of eternal life, writes in the Tractatus that, “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” (rey)

Harvard University researcher Ronald A. DePinho has discovered a way to reverse age degeneration for the first time. His experiments on mice have demonstrated that you can return individuals to a younger state, with new brain growth and improved fertility.

While scientists knew about the role of telomerase—an enzyme that adds DNA sequence repeats at the end of chromosomes—in body decadence and experiments were made with extremely simple organisms, this is the first time that this breakthrough has been achieved in complex mammals. Read More:http://gizmodo.com/5701151/eternal-youth-potion-discovered

Read More:http://www.alchemylab.com/history_of_alchemy.htm

ADDENDUM:

‎”A poet once said, ‘The whole universe is in a glass of wine.’ We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be?…

…There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!”
— Richard P. Feynman

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Count Cagliostro, noble born in Palermo in 1743, was a technique “infallible” to regenerate the body and live longer. The technique attempted to replicate the process suffered by the worms that were wrapped in a cocoon of silk and were reborn as butterflies, and if they could do, we. So his method was to strip naked and lie on a bed, wrapped in a blanket to the individual and allow to stand for a month eating only chicken broth. Cagliostro claimed that after a few days the guy was losing his hair and teeth fall out until you reach a state of extreme weakness, from which a regenerative process begin to return to their teeth and hair unhappy with youth. Science confirms the first part of the experiment, the action of scurvy and the lack of intake of vitamin C that the individual would rapidly lose hair and teeth, but the remainder of the experiment would never come to fruition, and no one came to propose such an atrocity. …

…The most famous alchemist was the famous Saint Germain, who began his wanderings through this world in the eighteenth century. Voltaire wrote about him to Frederick II of Prussia was a “man who never dies and knows everything.” Their first historical appearance dates to 1743 in London, where rumors quickly spread that he was much older than it seemed. As could count hobnobbed with nobility and talked about historical facts of past centuries with so many facts and details that seemed to have been an eyewitness, said he had indeed met Julius Caesar and Pontius Pilate. Read More:http://hubpages.com/hub/-THE-QUEST-FOR-IMMORTALITY

Skiadas:Instead by analyzing the females’ mortality data from Sweden of last two centuries we observe that the longevity tangent turns clockwise quite systematically. A further parameter analysis suggests a probability of increase of the life span in the future according to some scenarios. Now it looks that with our systems of life care, the maximum death rate in the short run will face a limit close to 100 years of age. If it is so the tangent line in the longevity area will be more and more vertical during the years and the form of the first exit time density function at the maximum area more sharp following the improvement of the living standards. Instead, if our destiny is not driven by an
internal mechanism the tangent lines should move parallel to the right. It remains to the improvement of the DNA and gene science and the related scientific techniques to improve our maximum life span. Read More:http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1101/1101.1796.pdf

 

Read More:http://clarke.physics.uwo.ca/JournalClubPDF/JCArchives/telomere.pdf

Read More:http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/02/aubrey-de-grey-on-mitochondrial-rejuvenation.php