All news
Path to Immortality: The 'Third State' Has Scientists Talking About a Revolution in Medicine
World medicine recognizes two types of death. Clinically, this is when the heart has stopped but can try to resume work, and from a biological point of view, this is when the brain is dead and it is impossible to reverse it. Some neurons are damaged after 10 minutes of lack of blood circulation.
The article in the scientific publication The Conversation was immediately analyzed by the world press and gave the following remarkable quote: “Scientists have discovered a “third state” beyond life and death.” The author of the article is Alexander Pozhitkov, an American scientist of Russian origin, a professor of microbiology at the University of Alabama with a promising Nobel surname and a graduate of the Chemistry Department of Moscow State University.
Alexander Pozhitkov, technical director of the bioinformatics department at the City of Hope School of Biological Sciences, said: "The first state is when the organism is alive. The second is when the cells are already dead. They have either been mummified or simply decomposed. And the third state is something in between these two extremes."
Scientists have long known that when a person dies, their cells do not die immediately, which is why transplants exist. But Alex Pozhitkov and Peter Nobel were the first to think of studying what happens to the DNA of still-living cells of a dead organism, and they themselves were shocked by the discovery.
Alexander Pozhitkov: "We then discovered that many genes, about 500, reached their maximum in the cells of fish and mice. "You could say that the cells of a dying organism return to their original state."
Peter Nobel, professor of microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said: "When we published our results, the scientific community laughed at us. However, it was soon shown that this is indeed true in humans. This was done at the Genome Regulation Centre in Barcelona. RNA is produced even two days after the death of the organism."
Thus was born the revolutionary idea of cellular autonomy of the human organism. Each of them acts independently according to the program embedded in its DNA. And they represent a collective mind, which together makes up one organism.
Alexander Pozhitkov: "Every cell and every tissue in general has a certain capacity for autonomy. We see this in the case of cancer cells as well. "These are already autonomous living cells, acting according to their own principles, ignoring signals and behaving almost like bacteria."
This idea was put into practice by scientists from the American Tufts University. They took cells from different types of frogs and asked a supercomputer to create biorobots based on them. In a week, the machine went through millions of options and simulated billions of years of evolution. The most viable form turned out to be Pac-Man. The living robots not only moved along given trajectories, but also, surprisingly, began to work together, without any commands, creating other robots from individual cells discovered by their creators. It was thanks to biorobots that frogs learned to regrow lost limbs.
Scientists have gone further and created human robots from human cells. Anthropobots can revolutionize medicine. They clean blood vessels from blood clots and plaques, localize tumors, and treat congenital defects.
Peter Nobel: "If you collect human cells, create a human bot based on them and put a drug in it, you can deliver it directly to the target in the body. "There will be no immune rejection."
The third state of existence is a biorobot created from your cells, with your DNA, but another multicellular organism, not yours. According to scientists, this is what can significantly increase life expectancy, even if people do not achieve immortality.