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The "master copy" would be at conception. Even after a few divisions it is unlikely any of the cells carry the exact same DNA. And just because you made it fro
by nonbel 7y ago
The "master copy" would be at conception. Even after a few divisions it is unlikely any of the cells carry the exact same DNA.
And just because you made it from zygote to birth does not mean your master copy was "pristine".
But yeah, if you could somehow replace your tissue stem cells in situ with ones that are closer to the original state it would generally allow your body to continue functioning for much longer. I mean some of those mutations could be beneficial to your particular environment too, but in general... Yeah.
- neetdeth 7y agoYou don’t have any single non-degraded copy but you do have billions of degraded copies. Assuming errors are non-correlated, one ought to be able to reconstruct the original sequence given enough of them. The idea would be to use some far-future technology to enable a kind of DNA repair that cells themselves can’t do, using non-local information from other cells in the organism.
- nonbel 7y agoMost mutations are probably large scale chromosomal missegregation, etc where huge chunks get moved around or duplicated/deleted rather than just replacing/removing/adding a single nucleotide. From what I have read something like that happens about once every 10 divisions per cell line. So I think that could be more difficult than you expect.
- bohm 7y agoIt's worth pointing out that YC startup foreverlabs.com does freeze your stem cells for precisely that reason.
- eloff 7y agoInteresting! Not a bad idea given there will likely be more stem cell based treatments available in the future. The cost benefit analysis seems to make sense to me.