I...would like to see citations on that... Rust dissolves in certain liquids, and the same oxidation state, Fe3+, is released during heme degradation, which happens frequently enough to turn poop brown. Now I'm by no means an expert on inorganic chemistry in the human body, but this is definitely a claim that I have never heard before. Usually it's cancer or organ failure that kills everyone if they last long enough. Everything in us with a genome has telomerase, but the problem is that keeping it off is a nice safe-guard against tumors.There are real drawbacks to living in an oxidizing atmosphere. You rust. That's aging in a nutshell - the stuff that makes you work bleaches in the sun. As soon as we committed to hemoglobin we committed to an expiration date and I'm unaware of any critter that's gotten around that.
The former is uncontrolled cell division, most frequently due to genome mutations. The latter is a vague term that can be anything from cancer to gradual tissue necrosis / failure to replace the cells that regularly die. Cell failure generally results after loss of the nutrients / oxygen required to maintain protein levels and clear out cell poop. You also have cell suicide when it senses things are not as they should be and straight up bursting when too much liquid enters the cell. The list goes on and on, but I'm not sure what point you want me to get at / how it's related to iron oxidation...
I didn't much like biology. However, my father got his undergrad in it and my mother taught microbiology at the college level for 20 years. Both of them emphasized that most of the breakdown processes associated with replication and division were driven by oxidation. I'm asking, not telling.
Ah! I misinterpreted your original comment! Things definitely oxidize, it's just the carbon chains, not the iron atoms, that play the biggest role in maintaining the energy stores / structural integrity of cells. At their peak energy, they are stored in long -CH2- chains -- at rock bottom, CO2. The same goes for all the lipids, proteins, and sugars that hold a cell together, just at different degrees above rock bottom and with nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, and other trace elements mixed in. Now, cells are perfectly capable of reduction, too, when fed. It's not to say that an end to aging isn't possible, but really, human bodies were never designed to live past a hundred years. They accumulate problems that tortoise and elf genetics already figured out how to deal with.I didn't much like biology. However, my father got his undergrad in it and my mother taught microbiology at the college level for 20 years. Both of them emphasized that most of the breakdown processes associated with replication and division were driven by oxidation. I'm asking, not telling.