Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-25618639-20150723053637/@comment-6078851-20150729152918

your right, i hadn't heard of senescence, but i've had a read and that's very interesting.

however, any organisms that have been found (or theorised, of which the article had a lot of) to be biologically immortal are very primitive organisms, and the more complex an organism becomes the less biologically-immortal the organism becomes.

i conceed the point about ageing though: it seems that very primitive organisms can be immune to deterioration by ageing. but senescent cells seems to be overwhelmed as an organism becomes more complex, and as a result more complex organisms suffer from "a progressive deterioration of physiological function, an intrinsic age-related process of loss of viability and increase in vulnerability," - in other words death from old age.

i have to admit though that it's a definite possibility within 40k that gene-science had reached a level (or had reached by 30k) to impart senescence into astartes, but almost all astartes show signs of ageing so the majority of them are not immortal, effectively or biologically.

as for dante (i don't know too much about him but i'll read up on him), maybe he's just ageing very gracefully :)  is it just him that doesn't seem to age or the blood angels as a whole? if it's just him then he probably is just ageing very well, but if it's the whole chapter then it could be that emps succeeded in imparting senescence to astartes. that would be  a bit of a downer though - the only chapter that he managed to make immortal is the one that's collectively going insane :P