replace them.
Akbar, we wish you a great luck and success at
your experiments and career in future.
We hope
that you will keep on making Uzbekistan popular in
science world.
REVIEW 4
You will hear a scientific lecture regard to an
important discovery, immortality.
You must have heard that bacteria is immortal.
That it can just divide into two daughter cells and
never die. But that is a single celled organism. But
what if a multi-cellular big organism found a way to
achieve immortality? How did this organism find a
way to cheat death? Can we do the same? Is this where
the answer to immortality lie?
The immortal Jellyfish’s, scientifically known as
Turritopsis dohrnii, peculiar habit o f refusing to die was
discovered by Christian Sommer, a German marine-
biology student who was then in his early 20s. He
was conducting research on hydrozoans and collected
hundred o f organisms by scanning the ocean floor. He
kept his hydrozoans in petri dishes and observed their
reproduction habits. Sommer noticed that Turritopsis
dohrnii was displaying a very odd behaviour. That is,
instead o f dying like other hydrozoans did,
it started
to age in reverse growing younger and younger until
it reached its earliest stage of development, at which
point it began its life cycle anew.
In plain terms, it means that instead of dying as it
got old, it started growing younger till it reached its
youngest stage... and then started growing old again.
And on and on this cycle goes, making the jellyfish
for the lack of any other term, immortal. While other
jellyfishes die after propagating, it reverts to its young
form.
Seems like something out o f science fiction! It
sort o f reminds you of that
movie The Curious Case
of Benjamin Button. Actually, Turritopsis dohrnii is
often referred to as the Benjamin Button jellyfish.
While humans have been looking for the elixir
o f immortality, Jellyfishes have developed their own
way to beat death. Friedrich Nietzsche a century ago
conceived in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Everything
goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel
of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again.
Death is very important. Because if nobody died
and more and more young ones kept coming into the
world, the population will
rise steadily and before
you know it, it’ll overwhelm the other species on the
planet. That is what is happening in this case. The
population number o f the immortal jellyfish is rising
at an alarming rate. As if the ocean wasn’t scary
enough already!
Dr Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical
Marine Institute said: “We are looking at a worldwide
silent invasion.” The immortal jellyfish was originally
from the Caribbean but have spread all over the world
into every ocean. It “hitch-hikes” on cargo ships that
use seawater for ballast. This jellyfish is found not
only in the Mediterranean but also off the coasts of
Panama, Spain, Florida and Japan.
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