I think I solved immortality and we currently have all of the technology and I need people who know what they’re talking about to tell me I’m wrong and why.
Alright, so here’s what I’m thinking. Mainly two points: aging and cancer. As I understand it, we age due to our telemere buffer shortening. Which, as I understand it, is like a safety buffer to the DNA that is the real meat and potatoes of who we are. And cancer, as I understand it, is when a cell whose dna that has been damaged undergoes mitosis and the replicated dna either is out of the telemere buffer and we are now losing parts that make the human body function. Or the dna being replicated was damaged by UV light or other means and no longer expresses necessary genes for proteins, structure, or whatever.
So that’s what I understand aging and cancer to be at a biological level. Now, we’ve been using CRISPER for years, which as I understand it, finds specified sequences of DNA and replaces them with a specified sequence. As I read earlier this year that the company Colossus made advancements where we can edit multiple genes at once.
My question is: With this technology, don’t we have access to cures for at least some types of cancer? And at least some causes of aging? I feel like it is “relatively” easy with technologies we already use with a high degree of accuracy. Why can’t we, say, create a virus carrier to match our DNA against itself and add telemere’s to the ends of our DNA strands to combat aging and decay?
If I’m clearly not understanding a key concept in biology, please enlighten me. If the technology is way too immature, what parts are we missing. I’m so curious, because as I understand it, we have all the pieces and I can’t understand why we’re not using them other than nefarious reasons like Big Pharma or other trust issues
Thank you in advance for kind responses 🫶🏼
That’s not quite what cancer is.
Cancer is when a cell’s DNA is damaged and it starts behaving badly. Monstrously huge generalization, but that part is right. But the key is that the damaged DNA results in uncontrolled cell division (mitosis)! That’s what causes cancerous tumors. It’s not really that the cells stop doing their job, though they do stop doing their job, but it’s mostly that they grow uncontrollably and destroy the surrounding tissue.
That being said, yes, we could fix some genes. However, cancer is hugely complex. It’s not really one thing, even; It’s just what we call the outcome of a very unfortunate sequence of DNA damage. Some specific kinds of cancer, maybe, could be helped with this.
Maybe we can help prevent cancer by changing some genes, in particular cases, even. But curing cancer, at least thru CRISPR gene editing, doesn’t seem, to me, to be viable.
Oh, and about the telomeres! That’s not all that aging is, for one, and the way it works isn’t even totally clear. It’s just not that simple!