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.