Iggy Makarevich

Woo! This caught my eye, eh. And best of all it was a completely serendipitous result! I love that.

Scientists Caught ‘Undead’ Genes Coming Alive After Death

Thread posted on Aug, 26 2016 @ 10:33 PM by cuckooold
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Is death the end of our existence? An eternal question that perhaps that may at least be partly answered in our genes. Nothing to do with the concept of the ‘soul’, not at this point anyhow.

Very interesting article over at Vice about what happens to us after we are dead.

motherboard.vice.com…

What really happens to us after death? Once a person stops breathing, and their heart ceases to pump blood, they’re what doctors consider “clinically dead.” On a biological level, the eventual decomposition of cells, organs, and brain tissue signal its final and irreversible stages.

But what if that’s not actually the end? Two new studies claim that hundreds of genes actually kept expressing—and, in some cases, become more active—after death occurred. This came as a surprise to the researchers, because forensic pathologists have long suspected that gene activity degrades postmortem, which is why their rate of change is sometimes used to calculate time of death.

One of the most surprising findings, however, was that hundreds of genes actually fired up—boosting their activity—within the first 24 hours after the animals had died. Noble suspects that many of them might have been suppressed or shut off by a network of other genes when their host was alive, and only after death were they free to “reawaken.”

So what exactly does this mean?

These quotes stood out as interesting to me.

The team also found that many of the genes that persisted postmortem are typically active during embryonic development, which led them to theorize that, on a cellular level, newly developing lifeforms might share a lot in common with degenerating corpses.

“Since our results show that the system has not reached equilibrium yet,” one of the studies broadly speculates, “it would be interesting to address the following question: what would happen if we arrested the process of dying by providing nutrients and oxygen to tissues? It might be possible for cells to revert back to life or take some interesting path to differentiating into something new or lose differentiation altogether, such as in cancer.”

Perhaps this will eventually give us some insight into the very nature of life and death.

Is science actually approaching understanding the mechanism that enables life, free of religious and ‘woo’ interpretation?

Link to original article here.

Before you ask, microbiologist Peter Noble of the University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues were not trying to find out what allows zombies to stalk Earth and slurp the brains of the unwary. Instead, the scientists wanted to test a new method they had developed for calibrating gene activity measurements.

edit on 26-8-2016 by cuckooold because: (no reason given)

www.sciencemag.org…