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Update:
In what I guess is a classic case of ‘Things that didn’t age well’, I wrote this post the very day the story of the lost Titanic submarine began to grip the world. Fortunately, as the following story shows, not all undersea adventures end in tragedy.
In Disney’s 1989 animated classic, The Little Mermaid, Sebastian the lobster sings of the benefits of life “Under the Sea”. He might have been onto something. A recent scientific experiment seems to confirm that Darling, it’s better down where it’s wetter.
A man of science locked himself in a 592 square-foot underwater research station for 100 days to document the effects of pressurization on the human body.
As Isaac Asimov once said, the most exciting sentence in science is not Eureka!, but, that’s funny… It’s the unexpected result that so often advances science in new and startling ways. Michelson and Morley set out to prove the existence of the luminiferous aether, and failed – but their failure led directly to the discovery of Relativity.
When Joe Dituri went into his underwater experiment, he was expecting to focus on the negative effects of being cut off from natural light and air. What he found, though, was an unexpected boost.
Now, having emerged from his submerged experiment, scientists studying those effects have discovered a shocking change in the man’s body – he’s 10 years younger.
This is stretching it a little, of course. The 55-year-old Dituri isn’t literally suddenly 45. What has happened though is that a key marker of ageing in the body has remarkably reversed.
The man, Joe Dituri, a former US navy diver and expert in biomedical engineering, had experienced a 20 per cent growth in the lengths of his telomeres.
Without explaining the complex biology of the aging process, one of its hallmarks is the shortening of telomeres, which are found on the ends of strands of DNA and act a little like the fused plastic ring around the end of a shoelace – it keeps the fabric from splitting apart.
Telomeres shorten as we age, exposing the DNA to damage, and many longevity programs today focus on halting that loss.
That wasn’t the only astonishing biological alteration, though.
Another major factor was likely his body’s natural stem cell count – which grew 1,000 per cent higher from before he went under. He experienced a 60 per cent increase in the duration of deep sleep, the truly restorative state of sleep we all need to maintain our health that typically makes up around 90 minutes of our sleep cycle.
Altogther it served to reduce his biological age clock by about 10 years.
But not all the seaweed is greener in someone else’s lake. Dituri necessarily focused on known negatives, first.
As Science Alert reported, before going under Dituri was focused more on what negative effects would befall him under the sea, such as a reduced exposure to vitamin D, losses of bone and muscle mass and a [reemergence] of already-beaten viruses due to a weakened immune system.
And it turns out that Michael Jackson really might have been onto something.
However, pressure, such as is found within a therapeutic hyperbaric oxygen chamber, has been shown to have several benefits, which living under the pressure of the waves seems to have replicated.
If only Wacko Jacko had laid off the prescription drugs.
Another benefit of the experiment hearkens back to that ’80s corporate culture fad, the isolation tank.
“You need one of these places that is cut off from outside activity,” Dituri told British media about his experience. “Send people down here for a two-week vacation, where they get their feet scrubbed, relax and can experience the benefit of hyperbaric medicine.”
In the pod, he used exercise bands to complete around an hour of fitness-work five days a week. This was probably substituted or supplemented by swimming, as he could go for a dive whenever he felt like it.
Good News Network
Well, maybe taking a few months off to chill out like Captain Nemo won’t be a way to become younger, but, as you watch the colourful fish swim past your window and contemplate going for a lazy dive, I rather suspect that you wouldn’t care, anyway.
