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Comment by swwu | Hacker News Reader

Layperson's explanation - this is a pretty important step to stopping aging in human beings. Telomerase lengthens telomeres, which are end-caps on DNA strands that are slowly whittled away as cells divide; without functioning telomerase human cells can only divide a finite amount of times before dying.

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Also, telomeres are largely an anti-cancer defence mechanism, like a surprisingly large number of other things that your cells do all day. When a person 'gets cancer', this just means that one of the many, many potential cancers they've had, slipped through all the defences and got out of hand.

At a cellular level, the opposite of ageing isn't longevity, it's cancer.

However, our ability to fight cancer is also getting better and better, and likely will not be a serious issue in the long term.

I, for one, would be happy to trade longer life for a higher risk of cancer. As a reasonably healthy person today, I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by other means.

> I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by other means.

What makes you so sure it will be 'easily treatable' by then ?

It's just kind of hard to believe that there is some kind of "magic" about cancer that will make it impervious to treatment using mid-21st century medical technology. Just in the past 5 years there have been some pretty amazing breakthroughs related to targeting cancer cells with new drug delivery mechanisms, etc. Even with 20th century tech cancer survival rates have continued to rise. See, for example, pg 29 of this report: http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2004/results_merged/sect_01_...

Am I reading you wrong in understanding that you think that cancer will not be treatable in the mid 21st century, to at least a far greater extent than it is today? That seems the much harder case to make...

Cancer is not much better treatable today than it was in the 70's of the previous century, when the 'war on cancer' was launched, it's a 5% change in the 'death' rate over 40 years.

Newsflash, we've lost that war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Cancer

We are hoping but we do not know for sure that new directions and avenues researched for treatments will give us new tools to help in finding a real cure.

But for the moment, and probably for the foreseeable future there is no indication that we will actually find this cure. At the moment - as crude as it may sound - if you could choose between being HIV positive or having a malignant tumor I'd pick HIV, we have a much better handle on arresting HIV than we have on stopping a cancer once started, other than by surgery, radiation and chemo therapy and a lot of good will.

Once a cancer has metastasized you are living on borrowed time.

Just like cancer isn't treatable by a much greater extent than it was 40 years ago I would not bet on seeing that change in the next 40 years.

That does not mean we should stop researching or that we will 'just have to live with it' but I think it is a bit early to start putting dates on when a solution will be found.

One of the bigger problems is that the differences between healthy cells and cancerous cells are minute, in some way you could say that the cancerous cells are the stronger ones. This makes going after cancer cells and not killing the cells around them (or even the whole organism) very difficult.

You've never had cancer, have you?

You've clearly never had cancer. I too considered myself a "reasonably healthy person" and was surprised to get diagnosed at 32 with stage 4 lymphoma. I've had it and done the chemo and come out the other side (for now). My cancer is one of the more treatable ones (>80% survival over 5 years), the chemo one of the lesser ones (R-CHOP). Even so it was one of the most difficult experiences in my life.

Trading a probability of longer life for a higher probability of cancer is just stupid. Most cancer treatments have the potential to (dramatically) shorten your life -- i.e. the combined probabilities probably don't work out in your favor.

Make the time you have count.

laypersons explanation: this is a commercial entity that would very much like to sell you their snake-oil to the tune of $1000 per month on a product that you'll never be able to prove is at best a placebo.

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