Can Jellyfish Unlock the Secret to Immortality
The "immortal jellyfish" can transform itself back into a polyp and begin life anew.
By NATHANIEL RICHPublished: November 28, 2012
After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzsche conceived “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . .”
Sommer was conducting research on hydrozoans, small invertebrates that, depending on their stage in the life cycle, resemble either a jellyfish or a soft coral. Every morning, Sommer went snorkeling in the turquoise water off the cliffs of Portofino. He scanned the ocean floor for hydrozoans, gathering them with plankton nets. Among the hundreds of organisms he collected was a tiny, relatively obscure species known to biologists as Turritopsis dohrnii. Today it is more commonly known as the immortal jellyfish.
Sommer kept his hydrozoans in petri dishes and observed their reproduction habits. After several days he noticed that his Turritopsis dohrnii was behaving in a very peculiar manner, for which he could hypothesize no earthly explanation. Plainly speaking, it refused to die. It appeared 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.
Sommer was baffled by this development but didn’t immediately grasp its significance. (It was nearly a decade before the word “immortal” was first used to describe the species.) But several biologists in Genoa, fascinated by Sommer’s finding, continued to study the species, and in 1996 they published a paper called “Reversing the Life Cycle.” The scientists described how the species — at any stage of its development — could transform itself back to a polyp, the organism’s earliest stage of life, “thus escaping death and achieving potential immortality.” This finding appeared to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die.
One of the paper’s authors, Ferdinando Boero, likened the Turritopsis to a butterfly that, instead of dying, turns back into a caterpillar. Another metaphor is a chicken that transforms into an egg, which gives birth to another chicken. The anthropomorphic analogy is that of an old man who grows younger and younger until he is again a fetus. For this reason Turritopsis dohrnii is often referred to as the Benjamin Button jellyfish.
Yet the publication of “Reversing the Life Cycle” barely registered outside the academic world. You might expect that, having learned of the existence of immortal life, man would dedicate colossal resources to learning how the immortal jellyfish performs its trick. You might expect that biotech multinationals would vie to copyright its genome; that a vast coalition of research scientists would seek to determine the mechanisms by which its cells aged in reverse; that pharmaceutical firms would try to appropriate its lessons for the purposes of human medicine; that governments would broker international accords to govern the future use of rejuvenating technology. But none of this happened.
Some progress has been made, however, in the quarter-century since Christian Sommer’s discovery. We now know, for instance, that the rejuvenation of Turritopsis dohrnii and some other members of the genus is caused by environmental stress or physical assault. We know that, during rejuvenation, it undergoes cellular transdifferentiation, an unusual process by which one type of cell is converted into another — a skin cell into a nerve cell, for instance. (The same process occurs in humanstem cells.) We also know that, in recent decades, the immortal jellyfish has rapidly spread throughout the world’s oceans in what Maria Pia Miglietta, a biology professor at Notre Dame, calls “a silent invasion.” The jellyfish has been “hitchhiking” on cargo ships that use seawater for ballast. Turritopsis has now been observed not only in the Mediterranean but also off the coasts of Panama, Spain, Florida and Japan. The jellyfish seems able to survive, and proliferate, in every ocean in the world. It is possible to imagine a distant future in which most other species of life are extinct but the ocean will consist overwhelmingly of immortal jellyfish, a great gelatin consciousness everlasting.
Nathaniel Rich is an author whose second novel, ‘‘Odds Against Tomorrow,’’ will be published in April.
Editor: Jon Kelly
New York Time News
By NATHANIEL RICHPublished: November 28, 2012
After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzsche conceived “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . .”
Sommer was conducting research on hydrozoans, small invertebrates that, depending on their stage in the life cycle, resemble either a jellyfish or a soft coral. Every morning, Sommer went snorkeling in the turquoise water off the cliffs of Portofino. He scanned the ocean floor for hydrozoans, gathering them with plankton nets. Among the hundreds of organisms he collected was a tiny, relatively obscure species known to biologists as Turritopsis dohrnii. Today it is more commonly known as the immortal jellyfish.
Sommer kept his hydrozoans in petri dishes and observed their reproduction habits. After several days he noticed that his Turritopsis dohrnii was behaving in a very peculiar manner, for which he could hypothesize no earthly explanation. Plainly speaking, it refused to die. It appeared 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.
Sommer was baffled by this development but didn’t immediately grasp its significance. (It was nearly a decade before the word “immortal” was first used to describe the species.) But several biologists in Genoa, fascinated by Sommer’s finding, continued to study the species, and in 1996 they published a paper called “Reversing the Life Cycle.” The scientists described how the species — at any stage of its development — could transform itself back to a polyp, the organism’s earliest stage of life, “thus escaping death and achieving potential immortality.” This finding appeared to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die.
One of the paper’s authors, Ferdinando Boero, likened the Turritopsis to a butterfly that, instead of dying, turns back into a caterpillar. Another metaphor is a chicken that transforms into an egg, which gives birth to another chicken. The anthropomorphic analogy is that of an old man who grows younger and younger until he is again a fetus. For this reason Turritopsis dohrnii is often referred to as the Benjamin Button jellyfish.
Yet the publication of “Reversing the Life Cycle” barely registered outside the academic world. You might expect that, having learned of the existence of immortal life, man would dedicate colossal resources to learning how the immortal jellyfish performs its trick. You might expect that biotech multinationals would vie to copyright its genome; that a vast coalition of research scientists would seek to determine the mechanisms by which its cells aged in reverse; that pharmaceutical firms would try to appropriate its lessons for the purposes of human medicine; that governments would broker international accords to govern the future use of rejuvenating technology. But none of this happened.
Some progress has been made, however, in the quarter-century since Christian Sommer’s discovery. We now know, for instance, that the rejuvenation of Turritopsis dohrnii and some other members of the genus is caused by environmental stress or physical assault. We know that, during rejuvenation, it undergoes cellular transdifferentiation, an unusual process by which one type of cell is converted into another — a skin cell into a nerve cell, for instance. (The same process occurs in humanstem cells.) We also know that, in recent decades, the immortal jellyfish has rapidly spread throughout the world’s oceans in what Maria Pia Miglietta, a biology professor at Notre Dame, calls “a silent invasion.” The jellyfish has been “hitchhiking” on cargo ships that use seawater for ballast. Turritopsis has now been observed not only in the Mediterranean but also off the coasts of Panama, Spain, Florida and Japan. The jellyfish seems able to survive, and proliferate, in every ocean in the world. It is possible to imagine a distant future in which most other species of life are extinct but the ocean will consist overwhelmingly of immortal jellyfish, a great gelatin consciousness everlasting.
Nathaniel Rich is an author whose second novel, ‘‘Odds Against Tomorrow,’’ will be published in April.
Editor: Jon Kelly
New York Time News
Gigantic jellyfish invade the Sea of Japan
Gigantic jellyfish invade the Sea of Japan
07/28/2009
Outbreaks of Nomura's jellyfish off the coast of Japan have caused
trouble for local fishermen/
Copyright (c) 2003 Y. Taniguchi, Niu Fisheries
Cooperative
First it’s the swarm of jumbo flying squid off San Diego, then there’s a giant black fibrous, hairy blob of Alaska, and which turned out to be an unknown algae, which even the native Inupiat Eskimo elders had never seen in their lifetimes. Now I hear of a population explosion of gigantic Nomura’s jellyfish off Japan. What is going on with our world’s oceans? Some changes are afoot!
After reading my blog post, an environmental journalist colleague said he thought squid were gross. “Gross? No way!” I replied, “I got squirted in the face by their squid ink, and I still think they're not gross.” He then asked if I’d heard of the giant jellyfish invading Japan, “Now, they really are gross, no?” I replied, “They are spectacularly cool. I am an animal lover! I love all kinds of creepy, slimy, poopy
things.” What can I say?
But I digress. Back to the facts about the Nomura or Nomura's jellyfish (Nemopilema nomurai), also known as the Echizen jellyfish. For the sixth year since 2002, these huge creatures that grow to six feet in diameter and can weigh 450 pounds have shown up by the hundreds of thousands in the Sea of Japan, brought in by oceanic currents from the Yellow Sea. They’re more than just a scientific anomaly; they’re causing serious problems for rural Japanese fishermen because they get entangled in their giant nets, destroying the nets and their catch.
Since the first jellyfish invasion in 2002, Japan instituted a warning system so that fishermen now know the jellyfish are in the waters and can save their expensive nets, but they still lose money they’d get from fishing. The invasion has impacted whole coastal communities. "In the high season of Nomura's Jellyfish, more than 1000-5000 big jellyfish are unwantedly caught in the set-net, more than 100 tons for one day," explains Kiminori Ushida, a scientist with Riken Advanced Science Institute who studies the jellyfish. "Fishermen want to just remove [the jellyfish] from the inside of set-net but they cannot take out them from water because the bulk is too heavy."
Scientists don’t really know what has caused the change since 2002, but several possibilities exist. CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship and University of Queensland scientist Dr. Anthony Richardson and colleagues recently published research in Trends in Ecology and Evolution discussing reasons for the general increases in certain jellyfish worldwide. Overfishing could have depleted the fish that prey on the tiny jellyfish released from their polyp stage, leading to a population boom of the adults. Or, warming ocean temperatures, pollution, or an increase in artificial reefs along the coastline could be to blame. More research is needed to find out.
Since the first invasion of the giant jellyfish, some Japanese scientists have also studied what could be done with them. Ushida and colleagues isolated a mcin like glycoprotein from the jellyfish they named qnumucin or Q-mucin. "I took this mascot name from Japanese word Kuni-Umu, meaning rebirth of the community or country," says Ushida. Mucins lubricate body surfaces and have antibacterial properties, and the jellyfish mucins are similar in chemical composition to human mucins. In contrast to mucins from pigs and cows, currently used, "jellyfish mucin is very simple, well-defined and easy to be purified, having an advantage of suitability to material science and engineering," says Ushida.
One company, Tango Jersey Dairy, has decided to take advantage of the mass jellyfish invasion to make something edible – jellyfish ice cream. I’d be willing to try it… though it sounds gross. Would you eat jellyfish ice cream? And when it comes to jumbo squid, or giant jellyfish, what’s your verdict
– cool or gross?
07/28/2009
Outbreaks of Nomura's jellyfish off the coast of Japan have caused
trouble for local fishermen/
Copyright (c) 2003 Y. Taniguchi, Niu Fisheries
Cooperative
First it’s the swarm of jumbo flying squid off San Diego, then there’s a giant black fibrous, hairy blob of Alaska, and which turned out to be an unknown algae, which even the native Inupiat Eskimo elders had never seen in their lifetimes. Now I hear of a population explosion of gigantic Nomura’s jellyfish off Japan. What is going on with our world’s oceans? Some changes are afoot!
After reading my blog post, an environmental journalist colleague said he thought squid were gross. “Gross? No way!” I replied, “I got squirted in the face by their squid ink, and I still think they're not gross.” He then asked if I’d heard of the giant jellyfish invading Japan, “Now, they really are gross, no?” I replied, “They are spectacularly cool. I am an animal lover! I love all kinds of creepy, slimy, poopy
things.” What can I say?
But I digress. Back to the facts about the Nomura or Nomura's jellyfish (Nemopilema nomurai), also known as the Echizen jellyfish. For the sixth year since 2002, these huge creatures that grow to six feet in diameter and can weigh 450 pounds have shown up by the hundreds of thousands in the Sea of Japan, brought in by oceanic currents from the Yellow Sea. They’re more than just a scientific anomaly; they’re causing serious problems for rural Japanese fishermen because they get entangled in their giant nets, destroying the nets and their catch.
Since the first jellyfish invasion in 2002, Japan instituted a warning system so that fishermen now know the jellyfish are in the waters and can save their expensive nets, but they still lose money they’d get from fishing. The invasion has impacted whole coastal communities. "In the high season of Nomura's Jellyfish, more than 1000-5000 big jellyfish are unwantedly caught in the set-net, more than 100 tons for one day," explains Kiminori Ushida, a scientist with Riken Advanced Science Institute who studies the jellyfish. "Fishermen want to just remove [the jellyfish] from the inside of set-net but they cannot take out them from water because the bulk is too heavy."
Scientists don’t really know what has caused the change since 2002, but several possibilities exist. CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship and University of Queensland scientist Dr. Anthony Richardson and colleagues recently published research in Trends in Ecology and Evolution discussing reasons for the general increases in certain jellyfish worldwide. Overfishing could have depleted the fish that prey on the tiny jellyfish released from their polyp stage, leading to a population boom of the adults. Or, warming ocean temperatures, pollution, or an increase in artificial reefs along the coastline could be to blame. More research is needed to find out.
Since the first invasion of the giant jellyfish, some Japanese scientists have also studied what could be done with them. Ushida and colleagues isolated a mcin like glycoprotein from the jellyfish they named qnumucin or Q-mucin. "I took this mascot name from Japanese word Kuni-Umu, meaning rebirth of the community or country," says Ushida. Mucins lubricate body surfaces and have antibacterial properties, and the jellyfish mucins are similar in chemical composition to human mucins. In contrast to mucins from pigs and cows, currently used, "jellyfish mucin is very simple, well-defined and easy to be purified, having an advantage of suitability to material science and engineering," says Ushida.
One company, Tango Jersey Dairy, has decided to take advantage of the mass jellyfish invasion to make something edible – jellyfish ice cream. I’d be willing to try it… though it sounds gross. Would you eat jellyfish ice cream? And when it comes to jumbo squid, or giant jellyfish, what’s your verdict
– cool or gross?