[t_serpico]

Sure, nothing fundamentally prevents us from repairing it from a physical standpoint. The practicality of it is the key question. While the machine analogy is partially useful, genes/proteins/cells are dynamic, adaptive, and can exhibit stochastic traits. This fundamentally contrasts them from traditional machines, and is the reason (imo) we suck at making effective therapies to even treat diseases where we think we know what is going on.

[dsign]

But practicality is just a technological problem. And not to make a fine point of it, the chips of the machine where you are writing or reading this receive far more “technological attention” than any human being. That fact in itself is not a technological problem, but a social one. In my opinion, at our point of technological development, aging is about 80% a technological problem and 20% a social problem. The speed of research and development in technologies to combat aging, i.e., the derivatives of the numbers above, are probably in an opposite proportion: 95% of the slowness in research can be attributed to social problems, 5% to technological.