Is the scientific claim that jellyfish are immortal true?

From: Purushottam Kumar

Scientists claim that Jellyfish never dies. They are immortal. Please refer the article published in The New York Times, “Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?” Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/can-a-jellyfish-unlock-the-secret-of-immortality.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

Is the scientific claim true? Request you to please provide Vedic perspective on this.

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Purushottam Kumar Prabhu scientists claim that jellyfish never dies they are immortal and a reference to article from the New York Times is given can a jellyfish unlock the secret of immortality is the scientific claim true request you to please provide Vedic perspective on this answer the jellyfish as is being introduced and observed by scientists till now has the capacity for rejuvenating itself so basically in the life of the jellyfish there are two stages Medusa and Polyp and normally speaking the jellyfish goes from the first stage to the second and then the jellyfish it grows old and dies but in this particular case of this particular jellyfish it basically seems to reverse its cycle so the capacity for rejuvenation of the body is not equivalent to immortality and even scientists have acknowledged that this jellyfish may die either because of predators eating it or because of some disease infecting it or whatever and in fact the as is mentioned in this very article itself the Japanese scientist who is observing these observing these jellyfish in the laboratory has to spend every day several hours just to care for and feed the jellyfish so that means that they are so vulnerable that they can starve to death if it doesn’t take all the meticulous care and feed them properly so because of diseases because of predators and because of starvation they can die so in that sense they are definitely not immortal so now in the specific ability which they have to regenerate or rejuvenate that means from an older stage to a return to a younger stage this ability is certainly extraordinary in terms of it not being present in most other species in life but actually there are many extraordinary things in creation and for example even the there are certain mystic powers by which people can become younger there is a describing of how he was looking very aged and wrinkled and when he wanted to get married with that form nobody was ready to marry him but then he changed his form and made himself young and was not just a cosmetic surgery done to make himself look young actually there was a biological transformation in his body by which he didn’t just look young but he became younger similarly so there is this example of one person by the mystic powers changing one’s form from old to young similarly in the same ninth canto there is example of how now when he seemed to become old when he became old at that time he exchanged his old age with the youth of one of his sons so that means there is another way normal process is that from youth one grows to old age but by some mystic powers it may be possible to become young again but just the ability to become young is not to be equated with immortality because the scriptures don’t classify as eternal beings even the demigods as long as they live they are always young so in general demigods don’t suffer the process of aging the way we do human beings do so but still just because so now how that happens their body is certainly subtler than ours and the mechanisms by which they function may be different but still the principle remains that they are also always young so there must be there may be some kind of rejuvenation that is happening over there also by which they remain young despite the passage of time but even with that happening that doesn’t mean that they are eternal all that it means is that they have the capacity to stay youthful so within nature itself there are different living beings which have different capacities so for example we don’t have the capacity to see in the dark but in ours have that capacity and many things that appear extraordinary or even impossible for us human beings are possible for certain other species so by that same token this particular feat is something which is given by God to through the medium of nature to the jellyfish species just like a tortoise has a hard shell which is nearly impenetrable now it is not that the tortoise is so intelligent the tortoise is just has been by the arrangement of God given that particular kind of body with the specific endowment of extraordinarily hard shell similarly the jellyfish has been given this particular endowment by God through the arrangement of the so this was just indication or example of how extraordinary fascinating God’s creation is and certainly the ability for rejuvenation extraordinary as it is can be used to appreciate the glory of God as it manifested in creation that would be one level of Vedic perspective now what scientists are hoping for or are trying for in the future is to check whether this capacity of biological rejuvenation is replicable in the human body so normally speaking most scientists today are reductionists reductionists means that they try to reduce everything related with the human body and everything related with life itself in human life as well as life in general to the physics and chemistry of the body ultimately so there are many respected thinkers even in the modern times who critique this reductionist approach just that it is that the parts when they come together they give a whole or is there something in the whole that is more than some total of the parts the reductionistic idea is that just when the parts come together there is a whole that results as far as certain material attributes is concerned that is true for example I add sugar then in a particular food item that sugar brings sweetness I add another I add spice that brings some spicy taste so we could say that the particular food item is a combination of all its all the various tastes and the element and the ingredients that produce those tastes but now if I look at sugar itself and I break it down down down ultimately it goes down to atoms then we have electron neutron protons and then we have subatomic particles so now do these either atoms or atomic particles or further subatomic particles do any of these have a particular taste a particular color a particular fragrance no then how does the combination of these atoms produce certain things which have certain sensory attributes so that itself is a question which science finds it’s very difficult to answer and the reason for that is science is since the time of Galileo divided the study of matter into what they call as primary and secondary properties so primary properties are those which are measurable for example mass velocity electric charge these are quantifiable measurable and all the qualities that are perceivable by that are appealing to our senses for example the fragrance the taste the texture the visual appeal none of these are quantifiable so these are relegated by science to secondary properties so a scientist can tell that okay this particular rose is of this much size but then if we were to ask is this rose beautiful there is no scientific meter which can tell that it is beautiful so reductionism completely misses out on the aspect of what science rejects as secondary characteristics but even in the world it is secondary characteristics that attract we are attracted to a rose not just because it is say three it’s petals are two and a half inches or two and a half centimeters or whatever we are attracted by the by its arrangement by its color by its visual appeal basically so reductionism the point which I am making is reductionism has serious philosophical problems which can also be perceived in day-to-day life so now is it that the particular attributes of a jellyfish are just a product of its biological ingredients that is what scientists are assuming over here that there must be some cell in the body of the jellyfish and that must be capable of bring about rejuvenation and if we can put that cell in the human body then we can rejuvenate ourselves also and then you go beyond the cell it may not be a cell I am just using cell as a metaphor here to refer to some biological component it may be a gene now genes are considered to be the gods of biology today just anything that needs to be explained it is attributed to genes so in human beings also scientists try to have studied the process of aging quite a bit and they said that okay what causes aging in the body is it that the cells in the body are continuously dying and regenerating but as we grow older the number of cells that die are more than the number of cells that are created and over a period of time this leads to weakening deterioration and destruction so scientists thought that maybe there is a particular gene in the body which is the cause of this and then they did a lot of investigation and when they couldn’t find that cause then they thought particularly that okay there may be this particular gene is there and then they found they tried controlling that gene and nothing happened by that then they thought that maybe it’s not a gene there is a whole set of genes and every gene is associated with many many functions and if there is a whole the aging is the effect of multiple genes that are coming together but then we can’t switch off all those genes because if we try to switch off those genes then many other functions in the body will be affected so more or less most scientists although they sort of by a magic wand effect attribute the process of aging to genes they are not able to give any specific cause and effect and that is why the efforts to try to reduce aging have been relegated mostly to cosmetic effects not biological redirection or regeneration that’s why the idea that a jellyfish can make us immortal is having a lot of flaws first is that the jellyfish itself is not immortal it can die by various other means and just the capacity to regenerate itself does not equate with immortality and secondly that the idea that even if there is a capacity for rejuvenation that can be explained in terms of biological components of the jellyfish’s body is a reductionism which is philosophically problematic and the approach of reducing aging to the genes has despite extensive research failed within human research also what to speak of then trying to understand jellyfish and then trying to transmute it into human beings and try to see its effect so it doesn’t seem very feasible or realistic not just in terms of whether scientists can or can’t do it but whether scientists have got even a clear grasp of the basic issues involved over here so as long as scientists by scientists I don’t refer to all scientists I’m referring here to reductionistic scientists and there are many scientists who are not reductionists also so as long as science remains reductionistic till that time it will be very difficult for scientists to actually understand the totality of how material nature works because material nature has its own complexities and those complexities come not just because of the specific mechanisms that may be embedded in the material nature that cause those complexities but beyond that those mechanisms have higher cause in the will of the supreme lord and as long as that will of the supreme lord is not acknowledged just trying to explore the material mechanisms will keep us in a search which is endless and ultimately fruitless endless in the sense that there will be so many complexities that will observe in material nature itself and that fruitless because even if we find out in some way that something we can change by which we can make human beings from old into young still that doesn’t make them immortal matter by its very definition is temporary and by its very constitution by its very composition is temporary and that is something which can never be changed so those who want immortality have to strive to attain the spiritual platform and go beyond matter and that is the way to attain immortality so when we see this kind of research rather than getting disturbed we need to understand presumptions that underlie such research and look at those flawed presumptions questionable presumptions and then understand how Krishna consciousness and the philosophy that is associated with it counters those false presumptions and gives us a clear pathway to immortality thank you