Except delayed aging will increase the occurrences of cancer.
Everyone gets cancer if they live long enough.
Everyone gets cancer if they live long enough.
Since practical immortality is pretty much out of the question, for now, I'll quite happily accept deferred aging, which would seem to imply generally good health longer and later in life, followed by one or more catastrophic illnesses in the terminal phase...
...which hopefully will be brief.
As to pain, why do you think we have painkillers and euthanasia? (Well, we "don't" have the latter, in Canada, really, but we will by the time I need it.)
I would much rather live longer and be generally healthy then die horribly and suddenly that live generally healthily for a shorter time then waste away for years and years and years....
Not true. There are tons of people above 100 years old who die of causes unrelated to cancer. Obviously there are well known mechanisms that link cancer to aging but it does not mean there's a probability of 1 to get cancer as you get older.
I forgot the actual source link, but I remember seeing a publication showing how autopsies on young people who died of accidental circumstances showed tiny cancer tumors in their bodies even in their 20s-30s, and that simply these would not grow further because of the repair mechanisms being highly effective in younger organisms.
So basically you get mutations in your body the whole time. Not just when you age.
Living cells constantly attempt to repair "the inaccuracies" occurring over the course of life of a cell. Reaching a beyond repair stage leads to apoptosis, or genetically programmed cell death; in other news, the cell commits suicide.
A cell turns into a cancerous cell when some of the oncogenes (namely, p53 and, likely, p16) responsible for upregulating apoptosis become silenced, and the cell continues to live in a dysfunctional state as a cancerous cell. We do not know yet what excatly causes the gene silencing.
At any point in life, the human body contains a number of cancerous cells that it methodically gets rid of or neutralises, which is a normal process of life. Not every cancerous cell turns into a tumor and leads to cancer We do not know yet what causes it. Many people die of an old age and do not have cancer.
I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying you don't necessarily get cancer just because you get old.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130731093255.ht...