Dammit, I'm 41. Oh well, death it is.

He actually does have a point. It's pretty difficult to actually reverse aging once it has started, as everything kind of feeds back into itself. There are a few exceptions- Alzheimer's may be reversible, but things like heart damage, immune weakness or DNA degradation may not be. The way it looks right now it may be easier to stop aging from starting than to stop the damage from occuring. Once it starts happening, even if aging stops the damage will still accrue.

From a computational POV DNA damage should be trivial to repair. You have so many redundant copies in your body. Of course building a fault-free copy, creating stemcells from that and coaxing those into fixing any defects without causing cancer is still scifi, but not the physics-violating kind.

" It's pretty difficult to actually reverse aging once it has started"

As far as I know, there are two paradigms about ageing: There is a biological clock inside us or it's only entropy acting (damage accumulation).

Both would start in the moment of conception. So, what it means "once it has started"?

> things like heart damage

Could be reversed with a heart transplant?

Today is my 40th birthday. sad face.emoji

Happy Birthday :)

I feel anyone born post 1980 has a shot at slowed-aging, maybe even reversed for post 2000's. No data, just a hunch on the pace I've seen from the biotech sector.

As someone disconnected from that industry, I don't know of the major breakthroughs since 2000. Do you have have a "biotech advancements in the last 15 year executive summary"?

Well for one thing, around 2000 we completed our first human genome sequencing effort of Craig Venter's genome at a cost of $3 billion over 10 years. Today we can sequence an entire human genome for about $1000 in a few days, and we've sequenced thousands of genomes including all kinds of cells and organisms that affect human health. We're generating craploads of very valuable data just waiting to be explored.

We can now take data from a computer and synthesise DNA for a cell from basically nothing, load that DNA into a 'blank' cell and start it up, making it grow and replicate - almost like making life!

We can use CRISPR/Cas9 to accurately cut and paste active DNA anywhere we want with high precision.

All these tools are ready, we just have to work out how to use them

Data doesn't equal breakthrough. For example : better climate models doesn't help us to fight climate change; centuries of football scores doesn't help us to win bets :-)

Really?

I meant data doesn't always equal huge breakthrough. For example, theorems, neural networks, quantum physics, etc. existed long before data were available. Data helps, supercharges them, but that doesn't count as "breakthrough" for me (so, I have a very ambitious notion of breakthrough)

If we don't learn a crap load from DNA in the next 20 years, I'll be very surprised.

DNA technology is hardly used medically, even though it is becoming cheap and relatively old.

CRISPR/Cas9 is more precise than technologies before, but still not perfect: http://www.nature.com/news/enzyme-tweak-boosts-precision-of-...

... yet ;)

These things have a way of being impossible until they are not. It used to be impossible to communicate with someone a great distance away, then we invented the telegraph. It used to be impossible to see someone at a great distance, then our seemingly-unrelated breakthroughs in network technology brought us easy consumer video chat.

Wikipedia has a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_medicine_and_medic...

> I don't think the prospect of a fair amount of additional healthy years

Based on what data ? Read newspapers back in the 80s, we were going to solve every disease by the year 2010 or so. But for the most part medicine has not evolved by huge leaps. Sure, we have made some important drug discoveries, but by far and large we are notoriously bad at predicting what we can achieve in a set span of time.