I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying the causes and processes of illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
eh no…..i wouldn’t want to live forever! I think it’s more important that they help us get old but healthy, in stead of living forever. They already know some tricks in how to make people live longer, but not forever. For example, if you eat less than average, you seem to be able to live longer.
When your body takes up the energy from the food you eat, in every cell in your body that energy is being converted into energy the cell can use. But…..this process of making cell energy out of food also causes free radicals to form. Free radicals are small particles that can damage your DNA, your proteins and your fats. That’s how we age, eventually damage builds up and our body gives up. So by slowing down the energy making processes inside the cells, you will get less free radical production, less damage and your cells will be healthier for longer.
Other people just seem to be lucky with good genes that help them live longer than average.
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Dear Jockett; ‘Forever’ means very very long time! I hope scientists should work hard to live our expected life span only, healthy in body and mind, equally well.
By the way, 120 years are the expected life-span for human. Usually 6 times of the years to reach adulthood is the expected life-span and 20 years for human to be adult.
The impacts of living forever;- imagine the bad characters of the history to live forever and keep doing bad. Of course there have been good characters and we wish them to be lived forever and keep doing good. The harm can be done by the bad guys to the world for eternity? Oh, absolutely NO!
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I don’t realy know if we should be working on such an invention (though my initial reaction is that I don’t have a problem with it). But I can speculate a little on what would happen to humanity if we did come up with such an invention. An important finding over the past century is that as people’s standard of living increases (as countries become wealthier and healthier), people tend to have less children. How many of your classmates have more than 1 or 2 siblings? Fifty years ago, that number would have been a lot higher. If we reached the point of immortality, my feeling is that birth rates would drop even further, possibly close to zero. Since immortal wouldn’t necessarily mean indestructible, that might even mean that we’d solve our population problem; people would keep dying, though at a low rate, from accidents and disease, but they’d otherwise live very long lives. And if births stopped or slowed down to a crawl, then we could probably halt or reverse our population growth.
If those two things happened, births dropping to near zero and deaths doing the same, then as an evolutionary biologist, I can tell you that our evolution as a species would effectively come to a halt as well. Evolution, the change in populations over time, can’t occur if the population stops changing! There would be a lot of changes in society to go with that, of course. If we lived forever, health care would probably become a lot more important (as people would want to live healthy lives). We’d have to revisit our feelings on difficult moral issues like suicide / euthanasia – if we could only die by choosing to die, then we’d have to talk about whether that was acceptable now.
There would be thousands of effects on society, most of which are difficult or impossible to predict. It’s fun to try, though; can you think of any others?
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