I think I solved immortality and we currently have all of the technology and I need people who know what they’re talking about to tell me I’m wrong and why.
Alright, so here’s what I’m thinking. Mainly two points: aging and cancer. As I understand it, we age due to our telemere buffer shortening. Which, as I understand it, is like a safety buffer to the DNA that is the real meat and potatoes of who we are. And cancer, as I understand it, is when a cell whose dna that has been damaged undergoes mitosis and the replicated dna either is out of the telemere buffer and we are now losing parts that make the human body function. Or the dna being replicated was damaged by UV light or other means and no longer expresses necessary genes for proteins, structure, or whatever.
So that’s what I understand aging and cancer to be at a biological level. Now, we’ve been using CRISPER for years, which as I understand it, finds specified sequences of DNA and replaces them with a specified sequence. As I read earlier this year that the company Colossus made advancements where we can edit multiple genes at once.
My question is: With this technology, don’t we have access to cures for at least some types of cancer? And at least some causes of aging? I feel like it is “relatively” easy with technologies we already use with a high degree of accuracy. Why can’t we, say, create a virus carrier to match our DNA against itself and add telemere’s to the ends of our DNA strands to combat aging and decay?
If I’m clearly not understanding a key concept in biology, please enlighten me. If the technology is way too immature, what parts are we missing. I’m so curious, because as I understand it, we have all the pieces and I can’t understand why we’re not using them other than nefarious reasons like Big Pharma or other trust issues
Thank you in advance for kind responses 🫶🏼
DNA is also damaged sometimes just by chance. Even in perfect conditions, with no UV, reactive molecules, etc., there will be errors and this is sometimes how cancer happens, just by chance (it’s also how evolution happens, so).
Editing DNA in-vivo (in a living organism) would be tricky, because one: we don’t actually know what all that DNA does. Some of it seems to have multiple functions. and some of it is just… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I mean, we’ve only just recently (2025 i thk) created a map of the entire human genome and, again, we don’t know what most of it does. IIRC there’s an entire group of DNA that was, until recently, known as ‘trash’ DNA because everyone thought it didn’t do anything, but it turns out it has important regulatory functions. So using CRISPR in such a way across an entire living organism might kill the organism. There’s also the issue of how to use CRISPR in such a widespread way, as most gene editing is done in really small test tubes with micrograms of the enzyme. Some people have proposed using a modified virus, as that’s pretty much what viruses do, and of course that has it’s own issues because ‘new’ viral particles that were created by the infected cell have different DNA to hide from he host immune system. So administering a treatment like that might accidentally create a new strain of infectious virus, even if the researchers are really, really careful (Life, uh, finds a way).
Also, I seem to recall that there are some issues with CRISPR only being able to edit strands of DNA that are x long, and doing anything longer would require another enzyme that doesn’t exist or hasn’t been found. I forget most of that part of my micro lecture tho.
DNA research is really slow, mostly because culturing cells is really tricky. Sure you can get them to stay alive, but to see them actually in action is difficult as you would have to supply the right concentration of certain molecules over a specific time and make sure those don’t react with other molecules that will produce toxic molecules that kill the cell. Also some of these molecules are light reactive so experiments have to be done in the dark and preferably at 37°C. In short, it’s really difficult to study DNA because the necessary conditions to make it do it’s thing are extremely difficult to replicate in the lab.
I’m just a student though, so if there is, by chance, a researcher in this forum that would like to correct me please do so.
*ALSO, if you really want to increase the life span of humanity, everyone should start having babies as late as humanly possible. There will be genetic issues with the offspring, but those will eventually be ironed out as more reproduction happens at a later stage in life thus, naturally increasing the human lifespan viva la evolution.