A lot of biotech firms are looking into stem cell therapies because stem cells are the closest humans will ever get to being immortal. And interestingly enough, we already see immortal organisms that exist: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120227152612.htm
Planarian worms can literally regenerate itself despite being cut into a 1/279 piece of itself. Imagine this sort of stem cell technology being applied to humans who might be able to regenerate limbs or dead neural cells? This sort of tech isn't just limited to billionaires. Humans have the opportunity to transcend nature.
Planarian worms can literally regenerate itself despite being cut into a 1/279 piece of itself. Imagine this sort of stem cell technology being applied to humans who might be able to regenerate limbs or dead neural cells? This sort of tech isn't just limited to billionaires. Humans have the opportunity to transcend nature.
Right now, one of the biggest studies for extending life, is to lengthen telomeres system-wide. If this could be done in a person's whole body at the same time, life could be extended indefinitely. Later on, new findings could be applied to make things work even better.
Telomere. A chromosome is essentially a long, long piece of DNA that has really wrapped up and compacted on itself until it looks like the structure you probably picture when I say chromosome. The problem is that the long piece of DNA has two ends, and they're just hanging out there loose. A lot of things could go wrong if those ends aren't protected. They could get cut off, or they could join onto other loose DNA ends, which would be a problem for the cell. Telomeres are how cells protect chromosome ends. The telomere itself is a long stretch of a specific short DNA sequence repeated over and over hundreds of times. At the very end of the telomere is a sort of knot not called the "T-loop," which keeps the chromosome ends from all sticking together. Every time a cell divides, some of those telomere repeats get cut off. So in certain cell types that divide a lot, an enzyme called "telomerase" adds those repeats back so the telomere doesn't get too short.
