Damien Broderick wrote:
>BTW, my forthcoming book THE LAST MORTAL GENERATION (Sydney: New
>Holland)
>will go to printers in Australia next week, due out in February. Good
>timing
>from Geron and Shay & Wright... :)
To two optimists:
1. Damien Broderick:
Regarding your optimistic book title 'last mortal generation', I would
be curious to know how you enforce perfect repair system control on all
levels (transcriptional, translational, intracellular and inter-cellular
molecular repair etc).
As I pointed out at this newsgroup a year or so ago (and I think I
received some sort of affirmative reply from M.West of Geron), Mike
Fossel had one big shortcoming in his book 'Reversing Human Aging'.
Namely, maintaining telomere length would allow adjacent cells to divide
and by division replace the deficient apoptopic cells, but he did not
realize (as far as I can remember) that it would be not easy to maintain
those adjacent cells intact; they are constantly incurring damage which
is repaired only partially at all levels (too allow for mutations,
variation, and hence evolution). So even if we can regulate telomerate
in vivo, cellular aging would still occur, though hopefully at a lower
rate. But your book title implies something else...
So how do you enhance repair systems to have 0 error rate?
2. Aubrey de Grey
In one of your recent postings, you assess that 'given the current rate
of scientific discovery, I feel confident that lifespan would be
prolonged in next 50 years' (excuse me if I strongly misquote anything;
I was hoping to paraphrase to the best of my memory). I'm not going to
ask how you estimated that (it's clearly a highly qualitative
statement), but I would like to know what do you see as 2-3 most
prominent challanges on the way there. Clearly, the problem definition
will change along the way, but what do you think are the next 2-3
problems which need to be solved?
All in good spirits of exchanging knowledge, Jurgen Kaljuvee
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