It's a hard problem and despite what snake oil salesman say we are unlikely to make real progress in the next 100 years.
PS: Drugs for example are a completely useless approach long term. (Short term gains might be possible though.) Realistically we would need to disassemble someone without killing them or do the equivelent without taking them apart which is probably harder.
Science has progressed amazingly during the past centuries. There is no reason to give up hope.
EX: Cantagious cancer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease
On the other hand we have zero effective treatments for aging.
> The problem is Aging is a single word discribing
> thousands of individual problems
> On the other hand we have zero effective treatments for
> aging.
Antibiotics have been a key vehicle for human life extension. If you think the effect of honey(not sure what hunny is) on a topical wound is anything close to what a modern antibiotic is capable of, you are not paying attention.
Sure the problems we have to solve are getting progressively harder, but we are also getting progressively better at solving them with new platform technologies like genetic manipulation and finer control of immune biotechnology. I think medicine is going to be substantially better in 50 years seeing as nearly all of the development in medicine has occurred in the last two or three hundred years at an accelerating pace with most of the development occurring in the past 100.
In response to your PS, I'd like to note that stem cell therapies are just starting to be approved. That field has an incredible amount of promise for developing replacement parts. Sometimes all it takes is an injection of the stuff prepared in the right way rather than wholesale surgical replacement.
> It's a hard problem and despite what snake oil salesman
> say we are unlikely to make real progress in the next
> 100 years.