[alphanumeric0]

Sounds like the future is bright for the field and that it has lots of applications. I'd imagine future aging treatments would employ several of these methods together, say cell reprogramming for your organs, along with resetting some of those aging biomarkers.

It's funny that it was considered a pseudoscience for such a long time, when there's lot of clinical applications outside of trying to live longer. For me, as someone with celiac disease, I know the age of my intestines are probably older than most people, after constant damage from gluten. It'd be nice to have a cell reprogramming treatment for intestines.

[shiroiushi]

That would be nice, and for other things too, but wouldn't it theoretically be simpler to grow cloned organs and other body parts and surgically replace your old ones with those? (Obviously, there's real technological hurdles to growing cloned organs, but these seem somewhat easier than the hurdles for reprogramming your cells.)

[sharpshadow]

I was thinking about it. It looks like sperm from PSCs is a thing[1] so might be ovums. That means you can clone yourself from yourself. It’s even more intense if the statement that stem cells start to combine themselves autonomously and make embryo is true.[2]

I’ve heard that it is possible to let grow one type of animal inside another’s animal womb is that true, any sources?

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29717842/

2. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/06/1092055/scientis...

[rob74]

Might be difficult for the brain, and a very significant amount of the elderly have brain problems (Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia)...

[adrianN]

It seems difficult to replace bones, cartilage, muscles and skin.

[shiroiushi]

How so? Surgeons do it all the time. You've heard of skin grafts, right? You can remove patches of skin and replace them with other patches of skin from the same person and it'll work fine, aside from scarring at the sutures of course. A common problem is not having enough skin to work with of course (it's not like people have lots of spare skin), but if someone got severe burns for instance and we could grow cloned skin for them to implant, that's far preferable to current techniques.

Of course, replacing anything has issues with 1) the trauma of surgery itself, and 2) scarring where things are cut and spliced, but this is better than not replacing things at all and just dying or getting an amputation or whatever. Of course, if you could just get an injection that programs your body to fix these things itself, that's better, but my whole point is that it seems to me that growing cloned organs is closer to our current technological capability.

[rob74]

> It's funny that it was considered a pseudoscience for such a long time, when there's lot of clinical applications outside of trying to live longer.

That's probably the reason why it's taken more seriously now (and not just by venture capitalists hoping to live forever): by now, all Western societies have population ageing problems. Due to better medicine, people live longer, but their actual productive lives are still comparatively short because of age-related diseases like dementia, increasing physical frailty etc. Plus, not enough children are born so the working population can sustain the elderly. So, even if the goal is not (yet) "living forever", societies are now more interested in at least tackling age-related diseases. Not sure if that will significantly increase life span, but it might still be an improvement.