Yesterday in a talk with Kevin, I came to a question, which I think may be interesting to wiserU minds. So I'll post it here, in the hope of sparkling discussions. I'm nearly ignorant of biology and pls take tolerance.
The question emerges this way. In January this year, I attended a speech on langevity presented by Francois. From it I learned that, there is a great univerality existing among various speacies, covering bacteria and humans. What appears remarkable to me is that, despite their apparent differences in life forms, the mortality rates of a variety of organisms plotted against ages follow essentially the same trend, very high at infancy, declining all the way as it grows till its adolescence, then increasing without return throughout the rest of its life. I got stuck to this similarity, because this is something in sharp contrast with what might be conceived based on naive reasoning. Think about this: a bacteria has only one cell but a human has billions of cells, and it is natural to think that, aging process for a human involves inter-cell communications while for a bacteria no such communications are possible, and therefore, one naively expects their mortality curves should differ distinctly. This is the argument I held when I talked with Kevin. But Kevin told me that, a bacteria can interact with another bacteria. Aha, a good fact ! Perhaps it is just these interactions that are playing the same role as inter-cell communations for many-cell individuals. Then I asked, what would happen to a single isolated bacteria ? Does aging process essentially reflect the way cells interact ?
I feel that, the universality is perhaps deeply connected to the interactions between cells. Otherwise, it would be hard to understand such universality. Another implication is that, all cells may take similar mechanisms in contacting one another.
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