Body’s Secret Plan for Death

A fitness-conscious colleague of mine ordered a cup of tea. I nearly dropped my pen. “Tea?” I said. He replied, “I’m growing old.” We both chuckled, but as his words lingered in the air longer than the aroma of Darjeeling, It became intriguing topic to understand the most ancient of contemplations why do we age, and more curiously, why do we die?

From an evolutionary perspective, “fitness” isn’t about biceps or abs it’s about the ability to pass on genes effectively. In that sense, ageing is simply the slow decay of that fitness, the gradual fraying of a once-pristine biological fabric, until one day, the loom stops altogether. Since I am not a biologist, I started exploring for this enquiry and stumbled upon a riveting lecture by Nobel Laureate Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan. The coincidence that we both share the same university (and possibly the same cafeteria food) made me feel oddly connected to him. What followed was an exploration about unsettling, humbling, and occasionally absurd truths about death truths that biology textbooks in India avoided.

Let me begin with a paradox: we are dying constantly in order to stay alive. As I write this, millions of my cells are bowing out dying purposefully, quietly, and efficiently to make way for new ones. This programmed cell death, or apoptosis, is not a tragic failure; it is a design feature. Without it, we would be an accumulation of unedited errors. So the death, at the cellular level, is not an end but a maintenance ritual. Yet, when we think of death at the human scale, we treat it as an absolute. Dr. Ramakrishnan reminds us that even at the precise moment a person is declared dead, most of their cells remain very much alive. The heart may stop, the brain may fall silent, but the liver, kidneys, and countless other cells continue their diligent work for hours. The boundaries between life and death, are smudged more a matter of definition than a clear line.

That blurry threshold grows even stranger when we ask: when does the process truly begin? Many of us associate ageing with creaky knees or the first grey hair that has the audacity to appear in our late thirties. The truth, though, is brutally earlier. Actually ageing begins before birth. From the moment we are conceived, our molecular machinery begins accumulating tiny imperfections. DNA mutations creep in, and subtle epigenetic modifications adjust how our genes express themselves. In other words, even as we are being formed, we are already biologically speaking growing old. Life and decay, it turns out, have been dancing partners since conception.

But why would evolution allow such imperfection? The answer, as always with evolution, is unsentimental. Nature does not care how long we live; it only cares that we live long enough to reproduce. From an evolutionary lens, we exist to deliver our genetic parcels safely to the next generation. Longevity is merely a bonus feature, not a design goal. This brutal calculus explains much about how different species approach life. Mice, facing daily predation, have no incentive to invest in long-term maintenance; they grow fast and breed faster. Whales, relatively predator-free, take their time and live for centuries. The bat, intriguingly, achieves the best of both worlds: it is mouse-sized but lives twenty times longer, thanks to its ability to fly out of trouble. The lesson is sobering evolution rewards efficiency, not fairness. Once you’ve done your reproductive duty, nature’s interest in you rapidly wanes.

And then there are the freeloaders within us the “zombie cells.” These are the ones that have stopped dividing but refuse to die. When young, they perform a useful function: signalling the immune system to repair damage. But as we age, they accumulate like grumpy tenants who won’t vacate the building. Their constant inflammatory chatter becomes toxic, contributing to the slow, system-wide deterioration we call ageing. It’s the biological equivalent of never-ending background noise subtle, pervasive, and ultimately exhausting. In severe illnesses like COVID-19, the body’s overreaction to such signals can even trigger the infamous cytokine storm, where our own immune system becomes the arsonist in its attempt to douse the fire.

Yet humanity, ever rebellious, refuses to accept its expiry date. For the first time, we’re not just dreaming of immortality we’re experimenting with it. Scientists are using Yamanaka factors to coax aged cells into behaving like youthful ones, testing drugs like rapamycin to mimic the effects of caloric restriction, and even exploring whether transfusions of “young blood” can rejuvenate older bodies. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s happening now, in sterile labs filled with very serious people who might, quite literally, be cheating death.

But Dr. Ramakrishnan raises an uncomfortable question, should we? Suppose a pill could extend your healthy years by a decade. You would almost certainly take it, and so would everyone else. What then? A society where people stop ageing might also stop evolving. Power and privilege would calcify; the young, starved of opportunity, might live in perpetual shadow. Progress thrives on generational renewal, on the friction between youth and experience. Without death, would life itself lose momentum? Even Dr. Ramakrishnan, aware of this paradox, decided to close his own celebrated lab to make space for younger scientists.

And that brings me to the thought that lingers after the science has quieted down. Perhaps it is precisely because we die that our lives hold meaning. The finite nature of existence gives urgency to our days and sharpness to our choices. If immortality were possible, we might postpone everything worth doing, because there would always be time later. The ticking clock, irritating though it may be, is what makes the music of life worth listening to.

So yes, perhaps we are growing old. But maybe growing old is not a failure to stay young it’s the privilege of having lived at all. And if the tea helps, even my fitness conscious colleague deserves his cup.