Is The Slowing of Aging Possible In The Near Future?

[Deleted]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...mortality.html

"A king has his reign and then he dies ."

[Coombs]

Extending the human life span, or any life span, requires a quite a bit more than simply extending telomeres. Incorporating telomerase requires little more than adding a site of DNA into the differentiated somatic cells with a promoter region for transcription factors that are ubiquitous throughout all cells. But that isn't really the biggest thing to deal with. It's already shown that cellular metabolism is connected strongly with aging in C. elegans and other organisms. Simply putting WT C. elegans in hypoxic conditions will increase their lifespan by 2-3 fold. They still, however, will eventually age to a point where their systems still breakdown. It's likely that a lot of signals that are present during development, and which turn off further into differntiation, lead to the eventual breakdown by their absence. With that said regeneration and stem cells already are present, but transitioning the rest of the organism into cells that are capable of endless repair is not an easy feat.