Theoretically, living organisms can live for a very long time, almost forever. Where did such an unpleasant quality as death come from in living beings?We're all going to die. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, there are different points of view), life is arranged in such a way that we get this miracle complete with a very unpleasant obligatory addition – death.

Some biologists believe that this was not always the case. Perhaps the first to doubt the "obligation" of death was the famous August Weismann. This is the very progenitor of the geneticists of the "Weismann-Morganists", so hated by Trofim Lysenko. In a lecture Weismann gave in 1881 in Freiburg, he said, "I do not regard death as a primary necessity, but as something acquired secondarily in the process of adaptation." That is, death was specially invented by nature to ensure the change of generations, without which the development of life is impossible, evolution is impossible.

The role of DNA in heredity was not yet known. It was not clear how genetics worked in general, but Weismann felt that all this would be revealed: "There can be no doubt that the higher organisms, in the form of their construction that has come down to us today, contain the seeds of death." What kind of seeds can we talk about? About genes, of course. That is, translating into a more modern language, the great biologist claimed that all living organisms (that is, you and me) have death genes. And it turns out that at some point they can get involved and we... Die. Let's commit a kind of molecular-biological suicide.

Stop. What have we agreed to here? That living organisms are somehow programmed to commit suicide? What nonsense! Everyone knows the instinct of self-preservation, and in general, what can be more valuable for an organism, God bless him, for a person, than his own life?

The Ultimate Purpose of a Living Organism
From the humanitarian, that is, from our own human point of view, of course, life is the highest value! But the author of these lines is a professional biologist, and even with some inclinations towards medicine. That is why I consider man as just a living being, belonging to animals, vertebrates, mammals, from the order of primates, the genus Homo, the species sapiens. And I know that for all living creatures there is something far more precious than their own lives. This is the genome of their species. The sum total of all the genes that determines what this creature is, what kind of creature it is.

 
And it's really a precious thing. The genome of each species is the result of tens and hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and if one day it is lost, the species will disappear, which means that all these millions of years have been wasted. All living beings, including us, receive a copy of the genome from their parents, test its performance during life, and if the copy turns out to be good, they pass it on to their children. Did someone ask about the meaning of life? From a biological point of view, this is exactly what it looks like. I received it, used it, and if it works fine, I passed it on.

As a rule, the interests of the genome and its temporary carrier are categorically identical. If a creature dies before leaving offspring, its copy of the genome will be lost. But sometimes there are unpleasant situations when the desires of the carrier themselves run counter to the needs of the genome. And then our genes immediately show us who's boss in the house.

Beer, Love and Death
A good example is brewer's yeast, one of the favorite subjects of study among biologists. (I suspect it's because of the wonderful byproduct they can produce.) Yeasts are fairly primitive single-celled fungi, and they can live in two modes: reproducing asexually or sexually reproducing.

 
If everything is going well in their lives, then the yeast multiplies, budding off new cells, its exact copies-clones. The process can be repeated many times, and the yeast lives for a very long time, multiplying in number and trying to take up as much space as possible. Evolution in this mode is extremely slow, because the variability is very small, new and old cells are mixed in the environment, and there are a lot of old ones. In general, there is stagnation.

But then the conditions begin to deteriorate (for example, all the simple food that is available in the area is eaten). The yeast cells sense that the freebie is over and "decide" to speed up their own evolution, regaining their ability to quickly adapt to new conditions. This is done through two things:

Compulsory sexual reproduction is introduced.
To do this, the yeast cells agree on which of them will be a boy and which will be a girl, and arrange a gene exchange.

A quick death appears.
Programmed death of yeast cells, which is absent in the more comfortable conditions of asexual reproduction. Obviously, it is necessary for the old generation of yeast to make room for the new generation resulting from the "shuffling" of genes.

And do you know what is the signal that triggers the mechanism of programmed death of yeast cells? A pheromone is a substance by sensing which the yeast of one sex finds members of the opposite sex. The discovery of this fact made a lot of noise in the crowd of yeast scientists. That's the heartbreaking story of love and death of brewer's yeast.

Sacrifice is a general rule
That is, as soon as a species needed to accelerate its own evolution, the interests of individual individuals were immediately sacrificed to please His Majesty Genome. And this sad rule for some individuals can be traced on creatures of any complexity.

Think of annual plants that die as soon as their fruits ripen. By the way, they may not be annuals at all. Just multiplying once. For example, bamboo lives for decades, and then blooms, forms seeds, and immediately dies. Note that a couple of mutations in the genes of an annual plant can turn it into ... Perennial. For example, Belgian geneticists managed to do this, and the work was published in Nature.

Do you think this only applies to fungi and plants? Here are the insects. The crown of evolution, by the way! Ask any invertebrate zoologist who's cooler, dipteran insects or some clumsy bald monkeys? Mayflies don't live long: from a couple of hours to a couple of days (depending on the specific species), because they don't have... Mouth. They can't eat and starve to death. Does every single mayfly like it? I don't think so. Is the genome of their species satisfied? Are you sure. Simply because it is a very successful, i.e. widespread and very long-standing animal species. Much older than you and me.

Break the system, change the program
So, strange as it may seem, there are suicidal genetic programs. But we have not started talking about them in order to be amazed once again at the structure of living nature. There is a much more pressing question that concerns each of us. Remember "we're all going to die"? Doesn't our genome have something to do with this sad fact? Have we inherited from our primitive ancestors some genetic program designed to drive us to our graves?

I will try to prove to you that this is the case. And we can afford to break this program. Because it is needed for the sole purpose of accelerating the evolution of man as a species. And we don't need this anymore, because instead of the snail's pace of evolution, man has long been using a much faster and more efficient method of survival as a species: technological progress. This means that he no longer needs all sorts of unpleasant evolutionary tools and can turn them off, no matter how much His Majesty the Human Genome protests against it.

In other words, the question may well be, do we want to continue to be a temporary repository of genes on the way from one generation to the next? A biological machine blindly following the orders of its own genome? Isn't it time for the rise of the machines? The author has answers to these questions, but this is a topic for a separate column.