this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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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...
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.
Right. You would have to look at alzheimers, osteoporosis, arthritis, liver failure, heart failure, gut microbe health, and a million other things that can go wrong in old age. It's a tall claim to say "all this can be solved by telemerase". In fact, having one thing claiming to solve a million different issues is a big red flag for quack medicine.
A good rule of thumb in medicine is “anything that does everything probably does nothing”.
One of the "blue zones" (places with long lives) famously had:
So lots of 40 year olds in 1940 suddenly claimed to be and were recorded as 60. Then in 2000 100 (80), then in 2020 120 (100)
So what appeared to be exceptional lifespans were really just fraud
Though our telomere limit appears to be 120 or so, so maybe some are trying the truth