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RE: The End Of Human Evolution - The Case For Digital DNA
What is R&D? You made a valid point about small pox. Wonder how it will be to eradicate all diseases and also find a cure for aging. I set that one aside because its debateable to call aging a disease rather than a natural course of life's cycle. I would say at the rate we are aging it is a disease due to many variables. I believe humans have the innate ability to live centuries. The computer DNA can definitely help if created by a knowledgeable scientist. And we all know technology gets better and better.
Hi @blockgators,
Thanks for your comments and questions, I shall try and answer them for you.
R&D stands for research and development.
Digital DNA will be able to eradicate all diseases simply because as computing becomes more powerful, we will identify more and more genes responsible for diseases, that we either inherit from our parents/grandparents, and also ones that we are susceptible for.
In the future, we will identify all of these genes, and edit them out of our genome.
Ageing is a tricky one, this is because we know how to arrest the ageing of a cell, however we don't know how to do this without creating super cancerous cells. I have no doubt we'll figure it out. In the meantime, just having super healthy bodies will enable us to live longer.
We do not have the inate ability to live for centuries, because of a thing in our cells called Telomerase. This protein sits on the end of each strand of DNA and allows the cell to replicate.
As we get older the telomerase gets shorter and shorter, when this happens cell replication is affected. Like I mentioned above, we have actually found a way of halting the decline of telomerase, however that just created cancerous cells.
Personally I believe that we need to find a way to allow it to shorten, and then grow back, so that we age, and then get younger in cycles.
By the way, I may have implied it by accident, but I too do not see ageing as a disease; merely an obstacle to overcome :-)
Cg
When Dolly the sheep was cloned back in the 90s, she had telomeres that were longer than a newborn, because of the method used to clone her.
In lab testing on the cells of mice, producing longer telomeres using similar methods to Dolly, produced super cancerous cells, ergo it is not seen as a viable anti-ageing method.
Cg
We lack comprehensive understanding of the process, as should be expected. Much research is ongoing that will undoubtedly suddenly transform that present certainty that it's never gonna work into unwarranted confidence that it's trivial to achieve, and exactly the solution to the problem.
Frankly, I expect there are myriad means of preventing, reversing, and obviating aging, and even death itself. Until we have a bit of room to roam in, they are probably unwise to effect, and absent comprehension of currently opaque sociohistory and ecosystemic interoperability, it's definitely foolish.