Re: [DIYbio] Fwd: [tt] Geneticists Discover a Way to Extend Lifespans to 800 Years

The thing that always bothers me about these headlines is that, while
you could probably create a human being that could hypothetically live
to 800 by replacing senescent cells as they age, and forestalling cancer
while initiating radical bodily repair.. what about the neurons that
carry the person's identity? They are exceptional in that they do not
get replaced, or "turned over", to the same extent as the rest of the body.

There is probably no natural way to, ah, 'automate' the process of
reinforcing a memory against the replacement of its constituent neurons.
One could probably learn memory-redundancy techniques to reinforce the
memories that one wishes to last 800 years, but that's not really how
memory works. Over time, the associative links that make memory
remarkable would wear out as connecting neurons die, leaving isolated
memory-islands retained by practice and meditation, without any triggers
or contexts to make them relevant or even 'authentic'.

So, without exogenous technology to account for this (brain:computer
interfaces to provide a long-term memory bulwark), I'm not convinced
genetics or drugs can provide a genuine immortal, merely a regenerative
shell whose identity and sense of self resets every century or so.

On 29/01/13 16:29, Jeswin wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Michael Turner
> <michael.eugene.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've been following Valter Longo's work on fasting as a way to reduce
>>
>> There is now a way to extend the lifespan of organisms so that humans could
>> conceivably live to be 800 years old. In an amazing development, scientists
>> at the University of Southern California have announced that they've extended
>> the lifespan of yeast bacteria tenfold — and the recipe they used to do it
>> might easily translate into humans. It involves tinkering with two genes, and
>> cutting down your calorie intake. Tests have already started on people in
>> Ecuador.
>>
>
> How did they come up with the number 800? And how would you simulate
> that? A computer simulation or was it by extrapolation?
>
> How difficult is it to adapt the idea from yeast to complex mammalian
> machinery?
>
> Nothing lasts 800 years, unless its a rock or maybe a tree. Things
> wear out. But I guess this is for trillionaires.
>

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