The extension of human life

Until now, human life was extended by improving hygiene, food, sanitary conditions, etc … and that has meant that life expectancy has increased in the developed world, but only a few years have been increased.

If life could be extended for many years, 20, 30 or more, that would be a great deal that everyone with money would buy. Without exceptions.

And since it is a possible big business and there are many rich people who are growing old and beginning to see their end near, new companies are being created to fight against aging and investing large sums of money in them.

The last one I have heard from is called Altos Labs and it is in the USA. There are big millionaires who have invested in it and try to develop biological reprogramming technologies to rejuvenate cells.

And since these types of companies have money, they manage to hire the best specialists in the field, paying them millionaire salaries and much higher than those they receive in other research centers.

In 2012, Shinya Yamanaka was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of reprogramming cells to return them to a primitive state. And since then an intense race has been organized to see who will achieve positive practical results first.

There is a big difference between rejuvenating cells in a laboratory and doing it with a whole organism. In experiments in mice, many tumors have been generated, but some animals have also been partially rejuvenated. They still have a lot of work to do, but every day there is more interest in the subject.

As I have read, a problem with reprogramming is that in addition to making cells younger, their identity also changes, and a skin cell can become another from a different organ, causing great confusion in the body.

In any case, there are several start-ups working on the technology of reprogramming cells and doing tests with partial rejuvenations of some parts of the body, such as the skin, some muscles, etc …

At the laboratory level, it has been achieved that a cell of 80 years has become 40. But that has only been with one cell in vitro, as soon as there are more cells together, things get very complicated

I have no doubt that progress will be made over time, and also as always, the poor will be the last to benefit.

Who was the naive one who said that social classes were going to disappear?