(For a human that would equate to having babies at 300 years old.) Joe, as it happens, is a rare breeding male. She mates with up to three males and remains fertile even 30 years after puberty. That means that one queen rules over the entire colony. For one thing, they’re eusocial, a rarity among mammals. Mole rats like Joe certainly exhibit weird behaviors that are (presumably) unrelated to aging. “They don't know how they’re meant to behave.” “They haven't read the textbooks,” Buffenstein says. Naked mole rats still die, of course, but the risk stays nearly flat.
Even at 35, Joe hadn’t statistically doubled his risk of dying compared to when he was 2. In 2018, Buffenstein and her colleagues at Calico published a paper showing that naked mole rats defy the Gompertz mortality law. Naked mole rats don’t play by these rules. Once a human turns 25, their risk of dying doubles every eight years. A lab mouse’s risk of dying doubles every three months or so. Although life spans vary for different species, the shape of the Gompertz curve is canon. Your body observes something called the Gompertz mortality law, a mathematical model that quantifies how the intrinsic risk of death increases exponentially as an animal gets older. What begins life as a balanced merry-go-round of mistakes and repairs, devolves into a creaky wooden roller coaster-thrown off keel by rusted machinery and lackluster repair jobs more susceptible to gusts of wind, and a brutal hell on your spine.Īs the damage from aging accumulates, it also accelerates. Photograph: Ben Passarelli/Calico Life Sciences, LLC He took a Lufthansa flight from South Africa to the US decades ago, spending a few years in the Cincinnati Zoo before being reunited with an old human friend, Rochelle Buffenstein. When aging sets in, though, “now damage outpaces repair.” Gene-reading enzymes falter, misfolded proteins gum up the brain, sputtering mitochondria weaken muscles, and cancers bloom. “While we are young, that repair actually works almost flawlessly,” says Vera Gorbunova, a biogerontologist who studies mole rats at the University of Rochester. Your body is programmed to tolerate these bumps and bruises. Enzymes read genes like a grocery list of different proteins to prepare, and those proteins might protect that enzyme, or that gene, or some body-wide process. There’s no single force that drives cellular aging it’s a network of feedback loops. Communication between cells breaks down, and inflammation cranks up. Reserves of rejuvenating stem cells dry up. Your DNA accrues damage from oxidizing molecules, which also attack proteins and fats, tearing you apart microscopically from the inside. As you get older, your cell function deteriorates, making your body more susceptible to disease and-eventually-death. Maybe their unique anti-aging tricks are destined to extend human life-or maybe they’re just an inevitable dead end. (Perhaps even too radically different.) Mole rat researchers haven’t yet managed to harness these shrively fountains of youth. But what is that blueprint? It could be that their cells are teeming with protective molecules that a large set of genes are unexpectedly switched on or off or that the very makeup of their immune system, organs, or cell membranes are radically different.
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