Time: Immortality & Ageing - Michio Kaku

TIME | 2. LIFETIME Friday 20 October 2006 7pm-8pm TBC

Why is our time limited? And does it have to be? Could our age-old dream of immortality ever be possible? In episode two, Michio Kaku explores these questions and meets some of the key people involved in the cutting-edge research into ageing. He travels to the amazing Methuselah tree, which is almost 5000 years old and still producing new pine cones. He discovers that time does get faster as you get older and, under hypnosis, he goes in search of his lost time, stored as memories. But it only proves that lost time is really gone forever.

We are incredible machines for living - but if we're programmed to live, are we also programmed to die? As we grow, our cells divide into a complex colony of three trillion individual cells in our bodies. Sir Paul Nurse has spent a lifetime studying cells to search for the most basic process of life - the secret of cell division. We discover that cells seem to be potentially immortal. They continue to divide again and again perfectly. Even our own bodies are replaced through our lives - most of our cells are replaced in a roughly seven-year cycle. Yet we know that we age and that time wreaks changes on our bodies.

This episode reveals the biological changes in our cells that make our skin wrinkle and our bones become brittle. This new understanding is beginning to reveal the process of time in our bodies and, through this, scientists are now looking at ways of slowing or even stopping time. Scientists in California are studying sea urchins for clues as they not only live longer than ever thought before but they appear to show no sign of ageing. Genetic manipulation is extending the lives of mice. And a British scientist is now suggesting that the pace of advance is so fast that the first immortals are already living today; that before our children have reached the end of their natural lives, the technology to stop and even reverse ageing will exist. But what will that mean for our essential humanity?


WATCH VIDEO CLIPS
An experiment which proves time does get faster as you get older
How genetic research into ageing has produced extraordinary possibilities for extending life