The projects in generative medicine that are working toward replacement (and upgrades) could basically do so in a practical way for us as individuals in the same way that we can keep churches and other buildings going strong for thousands of years.
Perhaps we cannot stop entropy in our bone marrow, in our liver, in our kidneys, in our heart. But we could replace each of them at a suitable age (and then re-replace them again as time goes by).
We could even gradually replace parts of the brain in a gradual, continuous way such that you still are you even after we over say a decade or so have replaced your entire brain with healthy neuron and other brain tissue.
Every mother is able to do it for her child. Whatever the age of the mother (even >50yrs sometimes) and the father (even >80yrs sometimes) the child starts over again from zero - with every tissue having the age of zero at birth.
With regenerative medicine we should and will be able to do that for anyone and every part of your body. The question is mostly how do we accelerate such approaches. Will they come online in time for us?
See above post.
The last generation to die (before an individual chooses too) might very well be alive today - but is it eg my parentâs gen, my gen or my kidsâ gen?
Yes, cellular reprogramming will solve the problem of aging if they can perfect it. Iâm not sure if Iâll be able to see whole body reprogramming, but being able to fix different organs may be possible shortly.
Re the first piece. You and your body is not just cells. You are also structures - you are things like cross linking, glycation, amyloid, tau, plack, etc.
Resenting the biological age of our cells at a whole organism level (repeatedly) should be able to extend life a lot and even partially rejuvenate us to a large extent. But it is likely not enough to completely solve the problem of aging - given those different âstructure based thingsâ and that not everything operates at a cellular level.
The baby analog is valuable because of TWO pillars
yes it is natureâs proof of âpartial (or in fact complete) reprogrammingâ - every cell starts at zero age
AND
every tissue and organ is new > not rejuvenated, be built from scratch to be new. This is the generative medicine part.
I think partial reprogramming can get us far. But we will also need replacement via regenerative medicine.
And in fact if replacement comes first we may actually not need partial reprogramming - although I do think a combination of both will likely be most effective.
Let me add the next paragraph in his tweet as it may help put on context why my posts above focused on what they did
âEntropy in data has a distinct look and feel, or even smell. It does not smell well, if you want to control such a process by means available to modern biotechnology. While single-cell analysis is insightful, itâs not essential for confirmation. Achieving complete age reversal in humans will be profoundly difficult - I am sorry for that. â
This calculation maybe useful but is it accurate? I have a family history of thalassemia minor (so does Peter Attia and Dr Mercola) my Great Aunt passed away at 105 my Grandfather her brother 98 x smokers) they both had anemia and high RDWâs. This is anecdotal but if you look into there Sicilian ancestry I noted most all of them had longevity with this trait. IMHO No to the accuracy of the aging clock via blood markers only. There is so much more to aging than a blood test.
Diluting entropy = homeostasis, but it doesnât work forever. This paper is interesting (only abstract).
âAging is characterized by an alteration of several physiological processes and biological pathways that leads to an increased susceptibility to age-related diseases and death. Normally, multipotential stem/progenitor cells may contribute to tissue homeostasis, and to minimize the age-depending DNA damage. Scientific research has demonstrated that aging induces several complex changes affecting even the mesenchymal stromal/stem cells (MSCs) ability to self-renew, differentiate, and immunomodulate the human tissues, causing further alterations in the local microenvironment.â
Why grow it outside? How about the body regenerating copies of each organ, with each copy more faithful to the original? That is what the liver does.
Cloning copies of oneself is too expensive. Imagine a rich world cloning itself. You will have 6 billion copies occupying the earth. 600 million if only ten percent can afford.
Now imagine a rich individual, who does not want to wait. Find some poor young healthy individual. Pay him/her so he/she swaps heads with me. Done. No waiting.
Iâm pretty futuristic myself. Of course itâs a hope, which may or may not materialize some time in a remote future, all depends on how the events in our simulation unfold But how soon? Do you believe itâll happen during your lifetime? I donât believe itâll happen during my lifetime. We still didnât learn how to grow organs to satisfy a need for transplants. So many ppl die every day on dyalises machines. The down shift of optimism in general is one of the features of aging. I observe mine moving lower, and vagus nerve stimulation doesnât help
To swap heads sounds too extreme, but could become a reality. What about obtaining young blood from poor population. I bet itâs already going on for the rich who donât want to die.
Not sure that is the most likely. What do you think of this framework to think it though:
From a cost perspective is more like pharma where the first pill costs a few billion dollars to develop (the R&D + clinical trials) and all subsequent pills only cost dollars or cents to make.
First principles thinking suggests that once R&D is done, growing even a whole human body should not cost more than growing a cow (single organs, bone marrow, etc should cost substantially less). Would perhaps cost less in energy, and a bit more because it would need cGMP, but should be a reasonable approximation.
Perhaps a framework to triangulate the impact would be something like:
My guess is that we would not replace our organs, etc more than say every 40 years. So if it takes about 5 years to manufacture the headless clone (might actually go meaningfully faster) and every single person on the planet uses this procedure there would be 8 billion / 40 * 5 = 1 billion.
That might sound large, but there are almost 2 billion cows and pigs on the planet today (not counting all other animals for food).
As more comprehensive triangulation: animals for food production make up 62% of the worldâs mammal biomass (all wild mammals and humans account for the rest). So weâd only be adding at max 1 billion new human bodies / 8 billion total sentient humans * (100% - 62%) = 5% to the worldâs total mammalian biomass (assuming that humans are 100% of non food production mass and wild animals count for 0% of the biomass).
And as you mentioned, adoption would likely not be 100% that we assumed in the scenarios above. In your 10% adoption scenario weâd only be increasing the worldâs total biomass by max 0.5%.
That would of course be entirely unethical and not legal anywhere and would likely not be a good longevity strategy as the perhaps would have to take a lot of anti rejection medication so the body that not reject the persons head.
My guess is that we would not replace our organs, etc more than say every 40 years. So if it takes about 5 years to manufacture the headless clone (might actually go meaningfully faster) and every single person on the planet uses this procedure there would be 8 billion / 40 * 5 = 1 billion.
You would have to âfeedâ (nourish) the headless clone ( A big whole human without the head). So that is feeding 1 billion extra adults. If only one percent of the world can afford, that is 60 million headless adults. That is the entire population of France (67 million).
Technically cloning seems to have been largely solved. More about some tweaks, than new total scientific breakthroughs left on that end.
The gene editing to create brainless bodies also seems mostly to be here.
There are artificial wombs in development, but perhaps that is the biggest scientific/R&D risk.
From above it looks like the R&D risks are not larger for most new drugs. Organs from such a personalized, your own DNA source, would also not have the same risks as the xeno pig organs that are currently moving into humans under different trial settings.
Seems like the biggest issues will be around the world figuring out correct bioethics and regulations and that likely is the main thing that will slow things down.
Iâm actually getting more optimistic the more I learn about underlying trends and tools in science and technology.
Even without AI, each researcher is becoming more productive each year, from access to more tools, more data. And the number of scientists is growing a lot around the world each year.
I agree with most of what you have said, but growing a full size human body typically takes 16 years or so. There is the interesting idea of greatly increasingly growth hormone and IGF1 to speed growth in which case I could see a 150lb human body grown in a year or so, just as a horse is probably grown from egg to something like 150lbs In a year or 1.5 years.
I think the better solution would be to âprintâ a headless body on demand based on your schematics. Theyâre already doing it for skin and attempting it for other organs. This is a big step as well. No more need to wait for a suitable organ, just clone or print what is needed.
Seems they can already print human bladders as well.
I was actually being conservative in the other direction.
For instance, the main organs youâd want to replace first would likely be (a) your kidneys and (b) your bone marrow.
We actually know clinically that
(A) the bone marrow from a zero year old (cord blood) is enough for a bone marrow transplant into adult humans
(B) similarly deceased donor kidneys are transplanted from babies that die upon birth into adults. (When the donor is that young both kidneys go to one adult instead of two recipients getting one kidney each).
So for those main replacement organs we donât need 5 years + 9 months of gestation, but only 0 years + 9 months of gestation.
In fact you might not even need 9 months of gestation for those two systems, as 5 months of gestation or so might be enough (sometimes pre-term neonatal organs are transplanted too).
Why not go all the wayâŠI really like the Avatar (movie) scenario. If youâre going to make a new body, you can have it look however you want and I kinda liked what Jake got.
And also what if Mother Earth (Gaia) says âHey, what about me? Lately, age (or should I say humans) has really taken itâs toll. I could use a new bodyâŠand Pandoraâs looking pretty good!â @LaraPo Itâs hard not to get a little depressed by the world situation but as @Neo says, I find science and technology to be the bright spot. Computers havenât been around that long but itâs really been a jolt to the system and the pace of change is really just starting to ramp up. Combine that with the unprecedented exchange of information through the internet and itâs really hard to keep up with all thatâs happening.
And @JuanDaw âYou would have to âfeedâ (nourish) the headless cloneâ Iâm adding you to my list of people with human idiosyncrasies for that comment.
You are more optimistic only because you are younger. I also was more optimistic before, but to see my health slowly deteriorate and being unable to stop the process, slowly takes that healthy optimism away. Thereâs a lot of progress in science/technology, but real life application of those discoveries moves too slowly.
But how soon? Do you believe itâll happen during your lifetime? I donât believe itâll happen during my lifetime. We still didnât learn how to grow organs to satisfy a need for transplants. So many ppl die every day on dyalises machines. The down shift of optimism in general is one of the features of aging. I observe mine moving lower, and vagus nerve stimulation doesnât help 