Pio
+877 others
5 years ago
What is death?
"We're 26 billion cells. Each one of those cells knows what it is and what it has to be. Aging is caused because cells lose their packaging and then eventually cells lose their identity. Disease ensues, cells check out, they become zombie-like then our organs fail and we die. But until recently, we had no idea why that was happening. So the packaging is the really important part because much like the software runs the code, the epigenome controls which genes are on and off. And if you stress the system, and by that I mean biological stress. And the biggest stress you can cause to a cell is to break its chromosome because it's gonna die. So the cell has to hunker down, stop dividing, arrest just about everything it’s doing and then try to repair the broken DNA. But in doing so, it has to do two things. First of all, it has to take proteins from somewhere else where it’s doing good job making sure the cell functioning correctly. Those proteins are used by the cell to repair the DNA that's broken. But also what's happening at the break is that that's all opening up as well, because, remember, if you break DNA and it spooled up, you can't fix it. You can't glue it back together unless you unpack it. Stick it back together and then you gotta repack it. And that process of unpacking and repacking, I believe leads to cells loosing that youthful gene expression pattern of how the genes are turned on and off." source: video 
