Immortality secret hides in water. Researchers discovered creature that rejuvenates
Turritopsis dohrnii is a jellyfish whose life development cycle is totally abnormal compared to that known to us, humans. When suffering environmental stress or any other physical assault, the jellyfish begins to rejuvenate and get back to the early stage of polyp, where a normal cycle starts again. Basically, this jellyfish never dies.
Turritopsis Dohrnii or the Benjamin Button immortal jellyfish, can reverse life cycle and transform back into polyp. Photo:Takashi Murai/New York Times
More than 4,000 years after sailor Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret of immortality is in a plant located on the seabed (according to ancient Mesopotamian texts), modern man seems to be convinced that, indeed, immortality lies in the deep, on the ocean floor.
The discovery belongs to a German marine biologist, Christian Sommer, who spent some time on the Italian Riviera, in Rapallo, the place where more than a century ago Friedrich Nietzsche conceived “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, a book in which the hero is just sick of the “eternal return”, the idea that identical comes back and everything returns to the same point.
Every morning, Sommer was snorkeling off Portofino Bay in search of hydras. Among the hundreds of hydra and jellyfish caught, the researcher discovered a species of jellyfish, named Turritopsis Dohrnii, which today is best known as the immortal jellyfish of the Benjamin Button jellyfish.
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All these happened in 1988 when Sommer was indeed amazed by his discovery, but at that moment he did not understand the significance. Thus, it took almost a decade until he dared to use the term “immortal” jellyfish for that. Fascinated by Sommer’s findings, several biologists from Genoa published in 1996 a paper entitled “Reversing the life cycle”, which describes how the species, at any stage of its development, could evolve back to the polyp stage -early evolution stage-, and so be immortal.
One of the authors, Ferdinando Boero, compares Turritopsis with a butterfly which instead of dying, becomes caterpillar, or a hen that turns back into egg, then once again becoming young. According to the New York Times, Sommer’s discovery as well as the study of the Italian biologists remained strictly in academia. Although scientists would have expected the humans to devote enormous resources for extensive research once they learn of the existence of “immortality”, this fact didn’t happen. Neither pharmaceutical companies nor governments were interested in immortality and rejuvenation process.
Nowadays, it is known more about the rejuvenation of Turritopsis dohrnii, so that the process is caused by environmental stress or a physical aggression on her. During the transformation, the body cells change their function, such as a nerve cell can turn into a skin cell (the phenomenon also occurs in humans, stem cells case).
Meanwhile this type of “immortal” jellyfish have greatly expanded the living range and can be found in the Mediterranean as well as the coasts of Panama, Spain, Florida or Japan.