With this technology, don’t we have access to cures for at least some types of cancer?

Most people in “western” societies die from eating too much.

Most people in “poor” societies die from infections, or from not eating enough.

Why would you think that it is “immortality” just because somebody can do things about some of our many causes of death?

Does CRISPR enable you to build the tower of Babel? And what if you finally arrive at the top of that tower and then finally find out that you still aren’t God?

DNA is also damaged sometimes just by chance. Even in perfect conditions, with no UV, reactive molecules, etc., there will be errors and this is sometimes how cancer happens, just by chance (it’s also how evolution happens, so).

Editing DNA in-vivo (in a living organism) would be tricky, because one: we don’t actually know what all that DNA does. Some of it seems to have multiple functions. and some of it is just… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I mean, we’ve only just recently (2025 i thk) created a map of the entire human genome and, again, we don’t know what most of it does. IIRC there’s an entire group of DNA that was, until recently, known as ‘trash’ DNA because everyone thought it didn’t do anything, but it turns out it has important regulatory functions. So using CRISPR in such a way across an entire living organism might kill the organism. There’s also the issue of how to use CRISPR in such a widespread way, as most gene editing is done in really small test tubes with micrograms of the enzyme. Some people have proposed using a modified virus, as that’s pretty much what viruses do, and of course that has it’s own issues because ‘new’ viral particles that were created by the infected cell have different DNA to hide from he host immune system. So administering a treatment like that might accidentally create a new strain of infectious virus, even if the researchers are really, really careful (Life, uh, finds a way).

Also, I seem to recall that there are some issues with CRISPR only being able to edit strands of DNA that are x long, and doing anything longer would require another enzyme that doesn’t exist or hasn’t been found. I forget most of that part of my micro lecture tho.

DNA research is really slow, mostly because culturing cells is really tricky. Sure you can get them to stay alive, but to see them actually in action is difficult as you would have to supply the right concentration of certain molecules over a specific time and make sure those don’t react with other molecules that will produce toxic molecules that kill the cell. Also some of these molecules are light reactive so experiments have to be done in the dark and preferably at 37°C. In short, it’s really difficult to study DNA because the necessary conditions to make it do it’s thing are extremely difficult to replicate in the lab.

I’m just a student though, so if there is, by chance, a researcher in this forum that would like to correct me please do so.

*ALSO, if you really want to increase the life span of humanity, everyone should start having babies as late as humanly possible. There will be genetic issues with the offspring, but those will eventually be ironed out as more reproduction happens at a later stage in life.

Creating and replicating genes is a very cool technology. But it is a far cry from going into every cell and replacing the DNA without causing any damage.

we age due to our telemere buffer shortening

Telomere shortening is a marker and there is a correlation, but aging is a process that happens on multiple levels and many of those aren’t fixable by DNA restoration.

We experience wear and tear, we accumulate damage, we accumulate waste, we lose body parts, we constantly fuse our bones together, we have body parts that grow surrounded by tissues capable of maintaining them but then operate outside of them, the list goes on.

But most importantly, death is such a beneficial feature, that it outcompeted everything else. Producing new generation of individuals regularly is a simple and terrifyingly effective solution to a vast array of problems. Many aspects of aging can be seen as adaptations to inevitability of procreation and death.

That aside, I like pointing people at professor Michael Levin’s work. Be very skeptical, as it’s a small field in a world that goes through reproducibility crisis, but it does fill me with a cautious hope.

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!

You might want to edit that post title, lest you attract “yes”-replies from people who don’t bother reading the post body.

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