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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Why a cure for ageing would benefit everyone and not solely the ultra wealthy

    If you put aside ethical and humanitarian reasons for making a cure for ageing widely available, there is still economic considerations, i.e. if you are a government you will be presented with a choice between:

    Do I pay to treat people for ageing, even though the treatment might initially be expensive, or do I let them age without intervention?

    The former option might actually be significantly cheaper because people in an advanced state of ageing cost more money. They have more diseases, since many diseases are age related such as dementia, cancer and cardiac disease, and need more healthcare and also can’t work anymore.

    If instead, the government pays for rejuvenation treatment they save on all the other healthcare costs and their people don’t have to stop being productive.

    So perhaps in the future when a cure for ageing is actually developed it will be made available for everyone rich and poor alike




  • The full journal article says “in vivo” not “in vitro”. They have already successfully regenerated mice which are organisms biologically similar to humans.


    Edit

    I was wrong about this. The journal article does only talk about results obtained “in vitro” but mentions other studies that have successfully reversed cellular ageing “in vivo”.

    The ability of the Yamanaka factors to erase cellular identity raised a key question: is it possible to reverse cellular aging in vivo without causing uncontrolled cell growth and tumorigenesis? Initially, it didn’t seem so, as mice died within two days of expressing OSKM. But work by the Belmonte lab, our lab, and others have confirmed that it is possible to safely improve the function of tissues in vivo by pulsing OSKM expression [22, 23] or by continuously expressing only OSK, leaving out the oncogene c-MYC

    So in this study the results were only in vitro but other studies have successfully reversed cellular ageing in vivo.