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Comment by drchiu | Hacker News Reader

I suppose what I didn’t reveal is that I spent a lot of time before medicine trying to coax cells whether in a culture or some other medium to grow in the way I wanted it to grow. And it was hard. It’s been a while, but if I could recall correctly, cells tended to have a finiteness in their very nature. I think at some subconscious level, I interpreted this as nature’s way of expressing that is how things are designed to be.

I don’t do life science anymore, but deal with computers now. And it’s a whole lot more predictable and malleable. (Heck, it’s easy if I were to compare it to running gels or prepping cell lines.)

But I would be ecstatic if I could witness some science fiction level advancement in this field in my lifetime. I doubt it, but I would be amazed should it happen.

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> It’s been a while, but if I could recall correctly, cells tended to have a finiteness in their very nature.

This is known: https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hayflick_limit

Yeah that. There’s something even more subtle. Experiments run with certain older lines just… failed more. It’s weird. The supervisor would say, “Yeah go to X’s lab and grab theirs.”

Like the reproducibility is contingent on so many factors. Very depressing and tedious.

There’s definitely a lot we don’t know and the knowledge gap is huge. And even if it can be done in the lab, translating some finding to a workable therapeutic is another story.

Yes, but:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

On the other hand, there are 150-year-old tortoises and 200-year-old whales out there. So it's not like there is some finite impossibility to living a long time, other animals have figured it out.

Even better, human species live indefinitely through human cells making new human fetal cells. At it's essence, it's still a chemical transformation process. Some compounds are being converted, old human to new human, which keeps life going indefinitely.

And possibly 500 year old sharks. (Not yet confirmed)

If you look about it a certain way. At the species level, we've already reached biological immortality.

The trick is to have some cells starting the process over. Sexual reproduction always started from pre-existing cells, rebuilding a full individual.

Using this process to repair all the living cells does not seem impossible.

Our understanding of DNA programming is far from sufficient to enable this kind of project, but I don't see why it could not be possible at some point.

The DNA in the nucleus of a human cell has telomeres, which effectively function as a countdown timer for reproduction. Every cell division drops the timer by one, and when the timer hits zero, the cell enters senescence and stops working so hard. Killing off senescent cells improves quality of life in several aspects.

Then there are transposons, elements of ancient retroviruses embedded in our DNA, that can awaken and spray themselves thousands of times over the cell's genome. Usually, these new inserts don't hit anything important. Usually. Germline cells have mechanisms to suppress this, but most cells undergo this once a month.

You are talking about a lot of damage to repair in an older cell.

No, fuck the older cell, replace everything with new, but slow enough.

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