Written by BPNews Team | 04 April 2011

Who wants to live forever? A simple question with a simple answer. But when you come to think about it, there's so much to consider before anyone can answer the question. It's not as simple as Edward loving Bella, or Mateo loving Lia. If you think of all the complications of living forever, it gets a lot more, well... complicated.

At my age, I could be considered a grandfather by my own kids, still a nephew by my uncles and aunts, and still a grandson by many grandparents. I am now at a stage wherein I sometimes forget my own age hence get confused with other people's, whose age I remember in relation to my own. I get surprised that the kids I know are now in their 30s and raising their own families. Until I realize that I am now almost 50, then everything falls neatly back into place.

All people age whether they like it or not, with the latter exerting more effort than the former. No matter what rejuvenation Belo, Mendez and their kind claim to be capable of doing, at the cellular level the truth cannot be denied.

We begin our journey as one sperm and one egg that join to form a zygote, a morula, a blastula and finally, a fetus. The one–celled zygote divides to form 2cells, which divide to form 4 cells, 8 cells, 16 cells, 32, 64, 128, and so on. It's not too hard to imagine that gazillions of cells make up our body. But they differentiate to form bone, muscle,

skin, etc. So it is understandable why we "grow" until we become adults at which point our rate of anabolism (construction) roughly equals our rate of catabolism (demolition).

And then we start to grow old. It is obvious why we call the 20s the "prime of our life" because it is the apex of our lifespan. Then it's all downhill from there. It may be hard to believe but by the time we are past 20, the timer called senescence has already started ticking. And there is nothing that Vicky Belo or Hayden Kho can do to stop it.

So why do we grow old? Why do we die? Why can't we just be like Edward so we could love Bella forever? The secret is in the cells of our body. There are different theories as to why cells age and eventually die. One is that cells have a preprogrammed number of times they can undergo cell division (mitosis). But this merely raises more questions like, "Where is this programming stored."?

Another theory blames the accumulation of toxins inside the cells that gradually weaken the cell division mechanism. Still another theory has pointed to the successive shortening of the "spindle fibers" that serve to break apart the cells during division. But these theories have remained just that. Theories. And as long as this secret remains a secret, the Edward wannabes will have to make do with imagining themselves as immortals inside the theatre and get back to reality once they get out into the bright sunlight without crumbling into ashes.

This craze about wanting to live forever started in the 16th century with the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon in his search for the "fountain of youth". He wanted to drink from and bathe in the fountain so that he could live forever. (Gross!) And then there was the movie "Lost Horizon" which portrayed "Shangrila" as a paradise hidden in the mountains of the Himalayas where people didn't grow old. The scene wherein Olivia Hussey (didn't get to see the 1937 version) turns into an old wrinkled woman when she got out made a lasting impression on my 10 yr old mind. Maybe if I didn't get to continue my education at that point, I would still have believed that movie up to now.

Today we don't have to read books or watch movies to see people telling us, that young is good and old is bad. If you drive along EDSA you'll see it if you look up at the billboards. You'll see it on TV beauty product ads. You might even see it on the jeepney when senior citizens take too long to get off while the driver loses his patience. Or in the drugstores that tenaciously refuse to give 20% discount. We seem to forget that we are all on our way there. Sabi nga sa Bikol, "Magurang ka man."

But what do you think would happen if we indeed were able to unlock that mystery of cell aging and cell death? During the past centuries, human beings usually lived up to 40 to 50 yrs old. Today, with the advent of medical discoveries (not my column), the average is 60 to 70. But with this "improvement" in medicine is the emergence of previously unheard of illnesses such as Alzheimer's Dse, Atherosclerotic Heart Dse, and other diseases related to "oldness". This emergence of age-related disease is our body crying out that it's way past its warranty period. So we bring it into the service center more frequently than before to relubricate, tune up, or in the worst case scenario, replace worn out parts.

All we did was extend our lifespan and we're already having too many problems. What more if we lived forever? Live cells that were artificially made immortal in the lab, meaning able to divide indefinitely, accumulated too many toxins that led to too many abnormalities, that led to malignancies. So while we still haven't unlocked the mystery of cell aging , we better not tinker with trying to make cells, or human beings for that matter, immortal.

There is another movie about immortality that I saw back in college entitled "Highlander" starring Christopher Lambert. He was hundreds of years old and everytime he fell in love with a woman, he had to bear the pain of watching her grow old and die while he remained alive on this earth uncertain of where he would go next. I wouldn't want that happening to me. Would you?