It's easy for the man to talk.

He thinks ahead when most of his readers are already looking backwards.

And he writes as he thinks, namely fresh.

Twenty-five-year-old Nicklas Brendborg is a Copenhagen-based molecular biologist, postdoc and remarkably witty.

Why this very young author of all people has dealt with the topic, which seems to be made for all other, namely older generations, is resolved quite far back in his book.

This will also have to be addressed here.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Nature and Science" department.

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Much more obvious, however, and this leads to the title of the book, is probably the question for many in his target audience, with which he begins his book: Why actually do we keep aging when there are so many examples in nature that that wouldn't be necessary.

To the point of, well, let's call it immortality.

Jellyfish, for example, explains Brendborg, age backwards.

From a biological point of view, it is certainly not possible to generalize like that, not every jellyfish has the abilities of the genus Turritopsis, which manages to settle somewhere in the sea when hungry and to develop back into the polyp stage.

Grow, mature, regenerate

So rejuvenation would be the real issue, because even the most bizarre biological creation on earth can hardly offer immortality;

Any life can be annihilated by anything, be it by accident, radiation, or enemies.

Even the planarian flatworm, which can be split into two and produce two whole individuals, is threatened, as is the end of the bacteria, which can put themselves as endospores into an eternal sleep.

Turritopsis after all, this inconspicuous jellyfish the size of a fingernail has a built-in developmental program that, at least in theory, allows any jellyfish to enter an endless cycle of growing, maturing, regenerating and growing again.

The author compares this to a butterfly that can become a larva again.

This example illustrates very well what can be learned in this book about the biological aging process and its (inevitable) inevitability: that unfortunately we have only been able to get an approximate, sometimes naive picture of it - and that despite the great wealth of Ideas and research on the subject.

The author's observation, for example, that the comparison of the species confirms the intuition that larger animals live longer on average than smaller ones, but that within a related group of animals the smaller individuals have an advantage, is nice.

They usually age more slowly, and thus also get older, like the harvest mouse, for example, which can live almost twice as long as any normal house mouse under roughly the same living conditions.

Which, interestingly, seems to hold true up to the extremely advanced ages of the genus Homo.

Because not only Jeanne Calment, who died at the age of 122 as the demonstrably oldest person to date, reached a below-average height of 150 centimeters, most of the other well over centenarians were also short across cultures and continents, but without meeting the criteria of pathological short stature fulfill.