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by im3w1l 2076 days ago
Seems to be the primary reason we age is dna damage. The first order effect is cancer, and the second order effect is that the body engages various cancer prevention strategies like senescence.

There are some other ways in which we accumulate damage, such as scar tissue, and increasing amounts of embedded foreign bodies. But not nearly as important as dna damage.

For this reason, I see crispr as the only path that could lead to immortality, and frozen stem cells as the most likely way to stall until that happens.

1 comments

According to the Hallmarks of Aging paper DNA inside the nucleus is relatively stable, and the epigenetic material (i.e. DNA methylation) is a much better predictor of aging, as the proteins can't be transcribed if the DNA is methylated at those parts.

That's why is such a big thing that reversing methylation already happened in humans, as it means that the human body already knows how to regenerate itself (just like other animals), we just don't yet know how to turn on the regeneration pathways safely.

Relatively stable is not enough, as we can see from how common cancer is.