what's really cool is this plus telomerase will give us a youth serum
Here's the thing: we're not getting many people to the natural limits of the human body's age much less working out ways to go past that.
Jeanne Louise Calment was 122 when she died. There's a hypothesis that she switched identities with her mother at some point, but most scientists who study aging don't consider it credible. Many other supercentenarian claims don't hold up; they often come from places that had bad record keeping a century ago, and they just forget how many birthdays they've had. 115 seems the typical limit for most people, but even that might have very few legit claims.
There are so few people who make it that far that they're basically rounding error even when including incorrect claims. Monaco has the highest average life expectancy at 87. We should be able to add almost 30 more years to that before we even talk about extraordinary youth serums.
Better cancer treatments will be part of getting us there, but far from the only factor.
telomeres are cells' biological clock... they get shorter with each division, and is the general cause of your body breaking down, round the 80's.
telomerase and other chemicals can reset those telomeres, but also cause the body's existing precancerous cells to go malignant. (telomeres also limit cancer cell growth, and creating telomerase is one of the mutations required for full on cancer)
so, if we can regrow cells telomeres without causing cancer... we have a youth serum.
but there's already other telomerase gene therapy in development anyways...
and is the general cause of your body breaking down
This is the step where a heavy [citation needed] comes along. There are a lot of complex processes involved in aging, we have no idea if simply "make the telomeres longer!" is going to solve all of that. Frankly it seems unlikely that that's all there is to it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an optimist when it comes to longevity research. I think aging is a problem that will eventually be solved. But there's not going to be just one "cure for aging", there's a lot of things that go wrong over time and we're probably going to have to find ways to fix each of them as they come along.
How so? Cancer is something that one would be statistically likely to get eventually if you didn't first die of anything else I suppose, so it'd certainly be useful in extending effective lifespan if you already had a youth serum, but how would a treatment for cancer do anything for other age related disease?
You get cancer all the time your body has natural mechanisms of finding and breaking down the cancerous cells. As we age some of these mechanisms start to falter, cells divide, but small errors over time accumulate.
A youth serum is really not the goal, the goal is fixing errors in these systems, maintaining current functions and creating a new mechanism.
This would work like a booster for this mechanisms and effectively make it possible to maintain and improve these systems. The side effect being an increase lifespan to some degree.
I suppose this I just the cancer component, but several other things are still needed on the field of longevity research for a “youth serum” to be viable.
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