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Do you think it's possible?
If so, how is it possible, like biologically?
Do you think it's caused by a spell?
Is it a bad or evil spell, if they're was such a spell?

Aging is a progressive process of entropy. I'd be very cautious in suggesting that it can move in reverse.

As we've covered before, to age in reverse (or just halt the aging process,) we'd have to activate the enzyme telomerase to increase or sustain the length of the telomeres on our genes (they're the enzyme caps that prevent our DNA from fusing and being corrupted), halt the intake of oxidants (or neutralize them), and prevent glycation (where glucose we metabolize adheres to our DNA, proteins, and lipids. We've only succeeded in sustaining tissue samples in the lab by activating telomerase, and the only way it is activated naturally (after a certain age, when it stops being produced naturally) is when cells become cancerous. As far as I know, there is no know way to prevent glycation. All three of these aging processes (and perhaps more, depending on whether there are indeed more factors) need to be halted or reversed (somehow) in order for aging backward to even be considered a possibility.

You're also talking about bones growing smaller and losing mass, skull bones losing density and unfusing, reopening of the epiphyses on the carpal and tarsal bones, among other developmental processes that would have to unnaturally reverse.

All in all, I'd say reverse aging is an impossibility outside of a lab setting which would require more advanced medical technology than we currently have.

For more information on aging and what we can do about it, read Are Telomeres the Key to Aging and Cancer?

For info on epipyhses, check out Bone Age.

What about the effects of a spell on someone?

La6Muerte66


Great information, yet it would to say prolonging the life of the person when this is altered, yet not to have aging go in reverse. much like he movie or the old mork and mindy sitcom. start as an adult and age back to an infant.

okay i am not always right with these things but i have 2 examples one it is said that merlyn/merlin ugh spelling ok he lived backward so he knew the future.

then there is the legend of the painting that aged instead of the person and he could never gaze upon the picture for he would age forward from then on.

it would be nice and i don't think of it as a curse but a blessing that one could learn more, see more and be a great teacher to all

maybe going backwards would be a good thing yet do not think so and as for a spell I would think it could have flaws in it as to accuracy on how the outcome would be. I mean would you still die going backwards or will you begin all over again ... it would depend on a lot of stuff as to how the Spell was cast.

You mean like in the movie with Brad Pitt? No I dont think it is possable

not at this point in time would it be plasable, yet slow aging process are still being tested. yet where would we be if no one dies.

in theory, it could be reversed. the theory that aging is caused by degradation in the cell copying process (like a photocopy of a photocopy) has never been proven, and is beginning to fall our of favour. but supposing that theory is actually true? different cells duplicate and die at different rates, and some cells last a lot longer than others. basically, the template of who we are is encoded into our DNA, and that is just information or data. so let's suppose it were possible to keep a master copy somewhere which never degrades. if the information within that master copy could be used to generate fresh copies, and these were to be accepted by the body as the new template, we would grow younger.

look at how our DNA is passed on. if a 50 year old man fathers a child, that child is not born any older than the child of a 19 year old father. the DNA is still pretty much intact. we each hold templates for younger versions of who we are. it's simply a matter of tapping into that data and forcing new cells to take on the true template.

Scientists are still not entirely sure why we age, and halting or reversing the aging process is something that a lot of people are working very hard to achieve. i don't think its simply wishful thinking - i think it is something that is potentially possible.

In stem cell research scientists have several ways to return a mature cell to its embryonic state. Two applications come to mind --- one is cloning so that you might get a cellular equivalent of yourself. Hazards and all the nurture vs nature stuff comes into play.

The other would be to stall the aging process in a person, slow it down. Say you could devise a way to keep collagen from breaking down so the skin remained taut and supple; reinvigorate the sinovial (sp?) fluid in joints --- ahh, lovely. This is all good stuff and could slow the clock fosho.

From a biological point of view - what would be the disadvantages - apart from the obvious fact that if we all stayed eternally young the world would become hoplessly overpopulated?

if we think of it as a circle of life living backwards till your a child into infentcy to the womb and rebirth go forward then back again and loop i cant draw on this but imagin if you would a straight time line lets say from 1800 to 3000 ok so you live back ward get born in 1818 lets say you die 1876 your reborn and live forward till 1920 then go back ward going back and forth living backward and forward with each incarnation you pop up in a differant area of the time line

i think you are probably right. maybe it will be possible one day, but if it were possible through natural or mystical means, the biological advantages of such an ability would ensure the success in the gene pool - thus making it the norm rather than a myth.

I believe in this day and age that anything can be possible.

How interesting it would be to start out old and die as a baby though.

well i was thinking along the lines of quantum leap technology - something way beyond what is possible now. artificial cell reproduction for instance. maybe nanites. or possibly something even further beyond, such as teleportation. that is a technical dream that may well be possible one day - but a teleporter would have to be able to analyse every molecule of a human body, memorise it, disceminate it, then rebuild it somewhere else. if such a machine could do that, then such a machine would also be capeable of modifying the cells to more closely aproximate the original structure, and thus rgenerate the body.

nobody has a clue as to how that could possibly done, it's just surmised that one day it might be possible. i know it's wild speculation, but twenty years ago, so was dolly the sheep, and 200 years ago scientists believed that to travel faster than 80 miles an hour would kill a man. who then would have believed we could fly at twice the speed of sound? who would have believed 60 years ago that children would go to school with telephones the size of a matchbox that could take instant high resolution colour photographs ? or that we would have colour televisions you could wear on your wrist (apart from gerry anderson that is)

Einstein once said that any scientist who says something is impossible will invariably be wrong.

nothing is truly impossible - only highly improbable.

There are things that Medicine Shows would do to make people believe an Elixer could Slow, or reverse aging. But the feeling soon faded as the symptoms pushed through the "feel good" mix. Like people that pay thousands of Dollars to have water from a Nantucket Well so they can " reclaim their youth, though it has been shown that the first people to endorse the water had been on the island for some time, a very clear air, healthy lifestyle island.

Let's keep on topic please, instead of going off on tangents about halting the aging process.
Let's say in theory someone was born at age 76, and started off aging backwards, how would that work?
Would his cells reverse the process as well?

La6Muerte66 i think you made some very valid points i remember hearing about the t structures getting shorter with each copy ....
i like my theary on agen backwards to baby hood then being born and growing old and then reverse agen again and may be just may be that is what happen when our elderly die they our reborn after they live backwards from that old age in a differant dimention.

Rosho, you continue to miss the point. You CANNOT age in reverse without reversing the aging process. end of story. Simply hypothesizing what would happen when aging backwards without first understanding HOW one would age backwards is pointless and stupid.

How would the cells run in reverse? The metabolic processes would run in reverse, cells would cease to regenerate, they wouldn't make energy for themselves, they would DIE, and rather quickly, so would you. Simply reversing everything is impossible.

Now, back to the current conversation:

"...but a teleporter would have to be able to analyse every molecule of a human body, memorise it, disceminate it, then rebuild it somewhere else..." "...nobody has a clue as to how that could possibly done, it's just surmised that one day it might be possible."

Actually, Michio Kaku wrote in his book "The Physics of the Impossible" how this may be achieved some day. Using the properties of Quantum Entanglement, we are able to teleport (essentially) entire molecules by "scanning" them and using QE to make a perfect copy elsewhere. This has been done with multiple atoms at the same time, and it may one day be possible to do it with an organism with trillions of atoms. The only problem is one of ethics: because the process is more like a photocopier than a teleporter, you would be making a perfect copy every time, and they original you would die every time you did it.

Nah, if I think over this topic, this will bring wrinkles to my eyes... females are master of aging by 1 +/- to 50 +/-

this simple thing you could not come to answer... aunt please see this uncle he gives me tough quiz.

aging is due to tthe tolerance of gravity by our cells and their growth.... you can not operate self to reduce them. okay if such tech comes, how can stop the age of cells. if you are able to do this... how can you squeeze your brain and skull to kids size...

I think this quest is nice in 2060 but how can we tell about it before even we are not much moved ahead in quantum science...

Well this post is becoming more exciting every look i take.

Teleporters are myth our therios of inplasible ideas of star trek or the fly. understanding the molecules, scrambling them and putting them back, would not hamper the structure of the cells and contamination would be prevelant.(no screens or filters would keep it out. but like the idea.

Aging backward is a myth like many things, they would have to find or support a theory of restructuring the cells to form new ones at a fast rate to stop aging or show aging younger. A myth like the teleporter theory.

Alot of people are looking for these theories for if this would take place alot of diseases like cancer and such would be non existant.

did i just read someone post that a person can be born as a 76 year old? my uterus hurts just at the mention of that. is he born with grey hair? or born as an actual five foot tall elderly person? lets pretend both aren't impossible for a moment. how does this child grow up and suddenly his cells start to slowly un-die? (cuz thats why people die of old age. cell death.) his hair folacles un-die and starts producing melatonin suddenly and turning his hair from grey to black one at a time.

in conclusion it occurs to me that the aging process is the way it is because once a cell loses function it cannot get the function back. this means if an organism is born with disabled cells that the cells wont gain function under ordinary circumstances.

i recall seeing a documentary back in the eighties where the countries top geneteic engineer scoffed at the concept of cloning, saying that though it is possible to make a clone of a frog, mammals are a different matter, and it will never be possible to clone a mammal. Dolly the sheep was a mammal. a lot can change in 20 years.

of course, back then scientists only thought they knew everything, whereas now they realise how little they really knew, because now they really do know everything.

i remember a graduate in compuetr engineering telling me that we had gone just about as far as we could possibly go with microprocessors, and supposition that one day we could have computers that had RAM that could be measured in megabytes and processor speeds in excess of a thousand kilobytes were just laughable.

the purpose of such speculation - and indeed the vital function that myhology and science fiction play in society, is to pre-empt the question that scientists never ask. they frequently ask "can we do this?" and "How can we do this?", but they never ask "Should we do this?"

you pointed out yourself the ethical considerations of a teleport device which destroys a person at one end, and recreates them at the other. i too had pondered this. what of the soul (if such a thing exists). what if something were to go wrong, and the duplicate created, but the original was not destroyed?

as i pointed out, though the cells themselves deteriorate the DNA template remains intact. if you were to create a clone of a 96 year old man, the clone would not be old and wrinkled, but a new embryo. it should be posssible to extrapolate a non aged cell from an aged cell and therefore rebuild the younger structure.

we dont have the technology to do that now, but it would be hubris indeed to claim that it will never be possible on the grounds that because i cant do something, nobody else ever will.

but the big question we should all be asking is should we? what could be the ramifications of suvh a thing? maybe the real reason that we age and die is because we are supposed to, and it is better that we do.

Halting the aging process is on topic, can you reverse a car whilst flying down the freeway at 100 miles an hour?

Certain processes in the human body effect how we age, moderating those processes, and the glands that carry out the function is bioengenirings approach. Are you familiar with the Diosorder that makes children look like elderly people? I had grey hair at age 15. does that mean I am Aging backward? I could imagine a case. Sci-fi and Science fiction the difference is what is published in Science review journals, and what is published in paperback.

Well, they would eventually die (like in Benjamin Button) I guess.
Thank you for apologizing La6Muerte66.
Yes, you can stop a car going a 100mph, put a 5 ton steel wall in front of it, sure the car will be totaled, and people inside dead, but it still be stopped.

Another reason we should first seek to understand how someone could age in reverse before speculating what would happen as a result is because by understanding the cause, we then have the knowledge to easily determine the result. Rather than taking stabs at the dark, we would be able to use our knowledge of the cause to figure out all of the results.

La6Muerte66, well said

yet we must also know this is a fictional story of person, and it does create thoughts of what if. much like the fountain of youth, a tale that waters will rejuvenate the body to grow younger and keep the wisdom of age.

Fables , not science, and knowing the make up of the body and cells we know this could not happen, yet we could slow them down.

true scientific inquiry is open minded. a good scientist will not say "it doesn't seem possible so let's just dismiss it". a good scientist will say "supposing that is possible - how could it be possible?" and then hypothesise various possible explanatations. they may not be correct, but it is positive speculation rather than negative ignorence. i do not use that phrase judgementally, but simply stating the obvious that to ignore something is ignorence by definition.

the old imovable object versus the irresistable force condrum eh? laws of inertia say the car will try to continue in the same direction, but through the truck (and vice versa). certainly much of the pieces will do so. the truck being heavier, then at least some parets of the car will reverse direction. i get what you are saying - the allegory seemed apropriate based on the assumption that there is nothing coming that is greater. it may have been a bad alegory - or maybe not. I dont think you ever suggested that some people might have a natural ability to reverse aging - you just asked is it possible, and how could it be possible, and what might be the consequencies. you suggested a spell as a possibility. we have debated whether it might be possible some day using science, but i believe A C Clarke once said that any sufficienly advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. to reject a spell as a possible means because of a disbelief in such things is totally a subjective point of veiw, and therefore an unscientific one.

In some ways we do age backwards,with middle age being the turn around point. If you compare an infant with an elderly person, they are very similar, right down to the pureed food and the diapers.. My only comment...shoot me!

Actually scarlett, quite profound.

The aging never stops yet the mind is susceptible to the aging progress, in ways that they eventually turn back to the youth. which we do see a lot in the elderly.

Cases of heavy drinkers are also in this category, that when they start drinking (heavy) at younger ages , the mind seems to stop developing, and some say the individual mind is still...well 18 or 21 at the time of first consumption.
Whether no knowledge is put in it or the brain suffers and only few sparks are hitting.

But you have to remember that there is a stark difference between an underdeveloped brain and a deteriorated one. A child's brain may function about as well as an elderly person's, but only the child's brain will grow and learn. The elderly brain will only get worse as time goes on.

I'm trying to think of other examples (in fiction) of where people aged backwards.
There's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Poof Point.

rosho, theres always the book backwards from the red dwarf series. not only do people age backwards they also drink and walk and do everything else backwards too.

Hm... given that the individual is usually naturally shielded to a degree, causing a "spell" to reverse aging is going to be a whopper of an accomplishment. I don't think it's possible. Requires too much energy to spin something that naturally flows in one direction into the opposite cycle.

the legend of the portrait aging is actually from a story by oscar wilde.

im curious tho...i read an article several years back about possible/probable age halting and then age reversal to the point where the subject is at full maturity (around 30ish).

based on the medical knowledge available here, is the above completely out of the realm of possibility for the foreseeable future? im very curious about this.
thanks
~Wolf~

Well I beleve just about anything is possible. Probable on the other hand... maybe. they have been comming out with wrinkle creams and stuff like that. whether or not if a spell could work I wouldn't say it can be considered evil because it has no negative effect.

I don't think so. That kind of shit is reserved for old cheesy Twilight Zone episodes. :D

Humans quest for the fountain of youth, for we all fear death coming to our door. So we hope to rejuvenate to our youth of long ago.

I only wish to stay where I am at. Being young was no easy task for me. But I sure would love that immortal bite from a vampire!

Not all fear death, and not all laugh at funerals, when then cry at a wedding.

Undying? Refetus? I think people are more confused about dying, then afraid, they want to die like everybody else.

Um.. well I guess anything is possible and maybe it is biological but then again it might not be possible. So then I think that it isn't possible but then it is possible that it has a spell that can make it happen. When I see that this happens.. Then I'll believe it.

dabbler, I have patients on their last time be scared . Scared of not knowing what lies beyond. This is true and especially dying alone. fear of death is for younger generations that do not want to pass early and expeierence life yet fear could also bee the fear fo not knowing..

In theory if a person grew to a ripe old age in one life , and then dyed , and then they were born into a new body . Would their mindset not be older when they were younger ?, and as they grew their lessons would be relearnt and reavaluated , and they would grow younger again , and then older . The cycle would repeat , sometimes carrying with it the mindset of the previous life . A different way of thinking about it ! lol Leax

La6Muerte66: I'll have to agree with you there. As a mere 20 year old, I can vividly remember the times when I was ten years old, wishing I were an adult, and thinking it would be forever before I'm finally 20. I even knew the year I would be turning such an age, and yet, even know, it's hard to grasp my mind around the concept that half of my life ago, I was hoping for boobs. *dies*

As for the aging backwards thing: I think it's an impossible concept. Who can one be born as an 80 year old and with in the span of 80 years, completely regenerate every cell in their body, then shrink to infancy? It would be great if science could find some way to reverse this process...and even greater if, at the age of 50 I could reverse it to about 18, then stop the reversal, however, I know that this is not something that will ever be done, simply because, nature did not intend for it to happen. As for spells used to reverse the aging process, I'd like to hope that there are none, as it would go against my very morals, nor do I hope one is ever created. There's an odd beauty in the aging process. Seeing an elderly woman and a young child, with the same mental capacity getting along great, understanding one another, and playing board games...it's saddening, and yet, so wonderful at the same time. To think that people embody innocence when they start out, lose such innocence, only to go full circle, and gain it yet again before they die-if they are even so fortunate to live so long-is something I love to ponder, and actually hope for.