Pioneers of Immortality

These scientists made breakthroughs that could eventually overcome the three key barriers to a much longer human lifespan.

A certain indication that an important breakthrough has taken place in science is when something that was generally considered impossible by the entire scientific community suddenly proves possible. Among the many scientific discoveries of the 21st century, perhaps the closest to that description was the success that brought the Japanese Shinya Yamanaka and United Kingdom’s Sir John Gurdon the Nobel Prize in 2012. Their work has overcome an important biological limitation of living organisms, and it is difficult to even imagine all the possible implications of this progress in the future.

We know that different types of cells gradually emerge from our first cell. This happens through cell divisions and the transcription of the same genetic information. It eventually leads to the development of bone cells, heart muscle, gastric mucosa, pupils of the eye, as well as neurons in the brain. Seen under a microscope, such specialized cells no longer resemble each other, although they all arose from the same, the so-called stem cell. Obviously, stem cells have the property of “pluripotency,” so different types of cells can develop from them. Scientists have always believed that this process — which we call „cellular differentiation” — is exclusively a one-way process. It was hard to even imagine that narrowly specialized cells could ever become pluripotent again.