[yholio]

Is it really plausible to think that stopping cell and tissue degeneration is synonymous with curing ageing and transforming the human body into a perpetual self-repairing machine?

We have evolved to acomodate these senescence mechanisms in various way, so shouldn't we expect that halting them should have unforeseeable consequences that evolution couldn't have prepared against? Shouldn't we expect the genome itself to have embedded within it some notion of the organism's age ? (as opposed to a limited development to a mature, final state that could go on forever in the absence of celular ageing)

I'm thinking, for example, at the limited number of female gametes available at the start of life. There was never a need to evolve regenerating gametes so the reproductive lifetime of an immortal woman is still limited. How many such innate limitations could there be in a genome after a billion years of evolution from mortal organisms?

[tormeh]

No, but is that so important? If we can fix cell and tissue degeneration we're likely to prolong life span and improve quality of life dramatically. We can do the rest when we get there.

[yholio]

It's certainly a necessary condition to prolong life but I would hold the "dramatic" epithet until we get there.

Once down the rabbit hole, we might well encounter an endless barrage of other genomic self destruct clocks.