6 thoughts on “Defeating Aging”

  1. Using A.I. to defeat aging as a separate process in each human being can bring to bear the current work on pattern recognition that much A.I. work revolves around. As human beings, doctors, however skilled, are vulnerable to that old joke: “Humans are good at recognizing patterns, in fact, they’re so good that they can find them when they’re not even there!” A.I. can be trained to bring a fresh perspective that doesn’t stop searching with the first pattern that presents.

    Aging, affects us both in its aspects of recognized disease states and in its aspects of cellular senescence. That cellular senescence, in larger and larger percentages of our body’s cells as we grow older, seems to block the immune system from functioning as well, by the inflammatory processes that senescent cells produce. If A.I. can detect and keep track of senescent cells in each human body in a continuous monitoring process, then we may have a means to keep them from interfering with the body’s immune system by continual targeted stimulation of apoptosis (self-destruction of the cell) in *both* cancerous and in senescent cells.

    This would be a great step towards readying the body for treatment by the individual’s stem cells, cultured outside the body, and someday cleansed of accumulated genetic errors.

    1. Surety in medical science is, at best, ephemeral. However, by the evidence to date, we can say that a cell’s senescent state is caused by a *failure* of apoptosis to be generated and thus to kill a cell that would otherwise become cancerous, while still moving the cell away from a cancerous state. In that much, we can say it is not cancer, but it is not healthy, either. It is a fourth possible state of a cell:

      1.) Healthy

      2.) Cancerous

      3.) Apoptotic, and thus dying

      4.) Senescent, thus producing chemicals that provoke an inflammatory response in the body

      1. a cell’s senescent state is caused by a *failure* of apoptosis to be generated and thus to kill a cell that would otherwise become cancerous, while still moving the cell away from a cancerous state.

        I was being semi-snarky, but with your reply I have learned something. Thank you.

  2. Science will not cure aging. Add that to the list of my crackpot ideas.

    We’ve increased the average lifespan but not its actual limit no matter what we’ve learned. The reason for this was stated thousands of years ago and remains true today.

    1. This level of certainty can surely be accompanied by a pointer to the law of nature that forbids it. Or at least a sketch of what sort of law it might be, since it’s pretty clear it must be a very different type of natural law than all the others we know.

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