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Last weeks article was 130. Clearly take this all with a grain of salt, and realize that bioengineering is having an explosion that will redefine everything we
by nscalf 5y ago
Last weeks article was 130. Clearly take this all with a grain of salt, and realize that bioengineering is having an explosion that will redefine everything we think about medicine and the human body.
- marcodiego 5y agoI think the biggest step will come once we start transplanting organs from clones of ourselves. Apart from traumatic or infectious diseases, being able to replace most vital organs would extend our lives to the last remaining non-transplant-able organ.
- meh99 5y agoTransplant medicine is going to seem like archaic nonsense in the future. We’ll just consume the chemical cocktails that normalize us: https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg
- sdenton4 5y agoJust get a nice brain transplant every eighty years or so and you, too, can live forever...
- nscalf 5y agoBack in 2020, a Japanese team did the worlds first transplant of lab grown heart cells into a patient. There is definitely progress being made on this.
- elcritch 5y agoEven more fun is 3D printing the desired structure and scaffolding of the target tissue or organ.
- kyriakos 5y agoOr transplant brain to clone body. As long as brain survives longer than the body
- TaupeRanger 5y agoIs having? Where? I see nothing that leads to me believe the evidence-free hype around longevity. I think it's early to say it's happening now. Eventually? Sure...maybe.
- chpatrick 5y agoBeing able to produce any protein in the body with mRNA seems like a pretty big leap.
- hulitu 5y agoBio(n)tech is Godzilla.
- inglor_cz 5y agoOh, a Sepultura fan. They were big in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s. A Brazilian band, but resonated with Central European metalheads a lot.
- Someone 5y agoSo do understanding the role of DNA and understanding it’s chemistry: necessary, but not sufficient. I think mRNA production will help in quite a few rare genetic diseases, but also that we’re far away from being able to safely make the myriads of subtle changes needed to make otherwise healthy people live longer. I compare it to heart surgery. It is quite a miracle that we can do it, but the risks are so high that we only do it when people’s hearts have lost significant portion of their pumping capacity. You don’t see cross-country skiers who are just not good enough get heart surgery to make it to the olympics, for example.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nscalf 5y agoWe can now make the safest, most effective vaccines ever in 2 days. We're making huge advancements with mRNA. CRSPR is still a new technology that is being rapidly improved. Last years big biotech story was that we have more or less solved the protein folding problem, which effectively gives us strong predictive power. So yes, it's happening now. We're still in the early stages of it, but it is without a doubt happening. Edit: adding from a comment below, there are real world instances of lab grown tissues being transplanted into patients. That is also in the early stages, but has evidence of real world progress.
- melling 5y agoSure, it’s just a number. The point is that if we made the effort, there’s likely easy things we can do to extend life beyond 100. Studying Blue Zones, for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone We really haven’t made an effort to study aging. Why do some people live well into their 90’s and appear to be in good health? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Van_Dyke https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Van_Dyke
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoOne thing to be careful with “Blue Zones” is that a lot of blue zones didn’t have that great record keeping, especially 50-100 years ago. Unlike modern developed countries where we have pretty good records of the exact moment of birth for people, in a lot of areas in the past, there could be a lot of guesstimating about the actual age of someone.
- throwawaygh 5y agoYeah, places without great record keeping when people were born, but with fantastic age-contingent state pensions today. What actually unifies the blue zones is the ability and incentive to fudge numbers.
- Someone 5y agohttps://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1: “Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans” To me, that looks pretty damning to the theory that blue zones somehow are good for longevity.
- WJW 5y ago> We really haven’t made an effort to study aging. We haven't? Just 2 seconds of googling "study aging" brings up results from places like Harvard, the NIH, RAND and hundreds of other universities where people study aging all day everyday.
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- TechBro8615 5y agoUnfortunately most of us were probably born a generation too early to benefit from the advancements forthcoming this century. Better make do with what we have! Life is short, even if you make it to 130. Take advantage of it before you’re dead.
- enchiridion 5y agoWhat's the quote? Something like "the trick isn't to live forever, it's to live long enough to live forever"