Curated from MIT Technology Review — Here’s what matters right now:
This week I’m writing from Manchester, where I’ve been attending a conference on aging . Wednesday was full of talks and presentations by scientists who are trying to understand the nitty-gritty of aging—all the way down to the molecular level. Once we can understand the complex biology of aging, we should be able to slow or prevent the onset of age-related diseases, they hope. Then my editor forwarded me a video of the leaders of Russia and China talking about immortality. “These days at 70 years old you are still a child,” China’s Xi Jinping, 72, was translated as saying, according to footage livestreamed by CCTV to multiple media outlets. “With the developments of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality,” Russia’s Vladimir Putin, also 72, is reported to have replied. SERGEI BOBYLEV, SPUTNIK, KREMLIN POOL PHOTO VIA AP There’s a striking contrast between that radical vision and the incremental longevity science presented at the meeting. Repeated rounds of organ transplantation surgery aren’t likely to help anyone radically extend their lifespan anytime soon. First, back to Putin’s proposal: the idea of continually replacing aged organs to stay young. It’s a simplistic way to think about aging. After all, aging is so complicated that researchers can’t agree on what causes it, why it occurs, or even how to define it, let alone “treat” it. Having said that, there may be some merit to the idea of repairing worn-out body parts with biological or synthetic replacements. Replacement therapies—including bioengineered organs—are being developed by multiple research teams. Some have already been tested in people. This week, let’s take a look at the idea of replacement therapies. No one fully understands why our organs start to fail with age. On the face of it, replacing them seems like a good idea. After all, we already know how to do organ transplants. They’ve been a part of medicine since the 1950s and have been used to save hundreds of thousands of lives in the US alone. And replacing old organs with young ones might have more broadly beneficial effects. When a young mouse is stitched to an old one, the older mouse benefits from the arrangement , and its health seems to improve. The problem is that we don’t really know why. We don’t know what it is about young body tissues that makes them health-promoting. We don’t know how long these effects might last in a person. We don’t know how different organ transplants will compare, either. Might a young heart be more beneficial than a young liver? No one knows. And that’s before you consider the practicalities of organ transplantation. There is already a shortage of donor organs—thousands of people die on waiting lists. Transplantation requires major surgery and, typically, a lifetime of prescription drugs that damp down the immune system, leaving a person more susceptible to certain infe
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Original reporting: MIT Technology Review