Part I: Musings About the Drayan Life-Cycle
Part II: Is Aging an Inevitable Biological Fact?
Part III: Can an Organism 'Grow' Smaller and Younger?
Part IV: The Drayan Civilization
Regarding this first point, let me begin with the assertion that what we know as the aging process is not the fundamental truth we presume it to be.
I recently came across an intriguing short story called "Invariant" by John Pierce about a scientist who learns how to stop biological aging. As the story explains: "The regeneration of limbs in salamanders led to the idea of perfect regeneration of human parts. How, say, a cut heals, leavng not a scar, but a perfect replica of the damaged tissue. How in normal metabolism tissue can be replaced not imperfectly, as in an aging organism, but perfectly, indfinitely." (The story deals with some unexpected results of his research - you may want to find a copy of this story to see how it ends.)
The idea of "perfect regeneration" proposed in this short story back in 1944 is not as far-fetched as it might sound. Consider some recent comments from some leading minds in the field of human aging:
“We tend to think of ourselves and other animals in the same way we think of machines: wearing out is simply inevitable . . . . Biological organisms are fundamentally different from machines. The most fundamental defining characteristic of living organisms, in fact, may be their ability to repair themselves . . . .They are self-repairing: wounds heal, bones mend, illness passes . . . . Why, then, should [biological organisms] be subject to the same sorts of wear and tear as machines?”——Steven Austad, Harvard University biologistFar from being a well understood biological necessity, the mechanisms that cause aging are a poorly understood biological puzzle. The mystery of aging is touched on in the DS9 episode "In the Cards." Dr. Giger suggests that the only reason we dies is because of cellular boredom - our cells simply become bored of doing the same thing over and over and over again. So he devises a cellular regeneration and entertainment chamber to counteract the problem. While the presentation is tongue-in-cheek, the issue is genuine: Why should a self-repairing, self-replicating system die in the absence of disease or trauma?
“At the molecular level our protein molecules are subject to continuous turnover at a rate characteristic of each particular protein; we thereby avoid the accumulation of damaged molecules. Hence if you compare your beloved’s appearance today with that of a month ago, he or she may look the same, but many of the individual molecules forming that beloved body are different. While all the king’s horses and men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again, nature is taking us apart and putting us back together every day.”——Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist
"If you understand the mechanisms of keeping things repaired, you could keep things going indefinitely."——Cynthia Kenyon, professor and director of the Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
Aging only seems an intuitive concept becuase inanimate things deteriorate over time and because life as we know it does the same. But the above quotations demonstrate that aging is actually counter-intuitive when we realize that—in terms of the molecules and cells inside us—we have perpetually young bodies. In theory, we should be, or at least could be, perpetually young organisms.
This brings us to a startling realization: Aging may not inevitable—it may in fact be a quirk of how life on earth behaves.
That is probably a difficult concept to accept. But science fiction can and should challenge our assumtions and expand our minds to explore possibilites outside of our ordinary experience. Moreover, there are organisms on earth that do not age in the traditional sense of the word. What is more, even present human biology demonstrates a capacity to be ageless.
The classic example of an eathly organism that is for all intents and purposes immortal is the amoeba. Amoeba's do not grow old and die—they just keep dividing . . . indefinitely. Think about it. An idividual amoeba might be killed by something in its environment, but otherwise it will divide in two, and in two, and in two . . . without ever "wearing out."
If these single celled organisms can divide indefinitely (in fact, they must be able to do so for the species to survive), theoretically couldn't the individual cells within a larger organism do the same thing?
Actually they can—the cells in the human body already do this, in a manner of speaking.
A child's body is made up of cells that ultimately originate with its parents. Because the child has its own life—because we view it as a discreet organism in and of itself—it is easy to overlook the fact that our offspring are actually an extension of our own bodies. In a sense they are us. An aging human body can create, from its own cells, a perfectly vibrant, healthy, functional, youthful body.
We wouldn't even exist if the human body couldn't generate youthful cells. That would make us incapable of reproducing. These new and youthful cells make up every coneivable tissue and system of the human body. Couldn't those same mechanisms be used internally to replace older cells in our own bodies? If you can make youthful skin, or a heart, or a brain for your offspring, why can't you make them for yourself? The "stuff" we're made of keeps living indefinitely outside of us in our offspring and their offspring. Surely that "stuff" can live indefintely inside of us as well.
Being multi-cellular obscures it, but in the end we're really not that different from the amoebas. Our ability to reproduce proves we have the capacity to be ageless. And if the possibility of ageless life exists in our real universe, there certainly must be room for the possibility of a species like the Drayan in a fictional universe extrapolated from our own.
Beyond the issue of aging, we also need to address the process of growth that goes along with it. This will be discussed in my next post.
100 Years Young:
Part I: Musings About the Drayan Life-Cycle
Part II: Is Aging an Inevitable Biological Fact?
Part III: Can an Organism 'Grow' Smaller and Younger?
Part IV: The Drayan Civilization
