I'm sorry to disappoint you, drugs (defined by the simple macromolecules we know them to be today) can supplement your body in doing only what it is already capable of.

Increasing lifespan more than that requires an entirely new paradigm or class of therapeutics. Like you said, we'll need entirely new biological/genetic technology to address the system-wide mutation and degradation of the body that inevitably occurs through the progression of time. That requires going into the realm of biotech/nanotechnology/etc. which as of now, we are still very far away from being able to produce. It will require many more years of basic research in a plethora of different fields before we can even begin to think about it in fact. Your best bet if you want to make it all the way to then is to follow the steps listed above.

> drugs (defined by the simple macromolecules we know them to be today) can supplement your body in doing only what it is already capable of.

Lots of drugs do things that your body is not capable of, and many drugs augment the way your body works in a way that is not possible without an external compound.

I tend to think of aging as an overall degradation of the system. For instance, there’s loss of hair cells in the ear that reduces hearing higher frequencies. There’s clouding of the eye lens as the proteins there aggregate. Long lived cells like neurons accumulate oxidation and probably die at some slow rate.

I can’t quite see how drugs which modulate existing biochemical pathways can stop, let alone reverse the processes I’ve named.

> I can’t quite see how drugs which modulate existing biochemical pathways can stop, let alone reverse the processes I’ve named.

I'm honestly mystified why this would be a mystery. Your cells have the blueprint to grow a whole new body, but clearly many of these pathways are dormant. Is it really so far fetched that a drug could reactivate some of these pathways?

Like, why is there a loss of hair in the ear when for the first few years of life, that hair grows instead of dies? There is even evidence that age reversal can and has been done:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acel.13028

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286741...

The body forms structures over the course of development. But I don’t think it can replay those actions again. In places like the knee and eye lens, the cells that formed those structures did their job and dissolved their nuclei. I’m more familiar with the eye lens example so let’s go with that. The cells there are just bags of proteins and antioxidants. No nuclei, no mitochondria, no activity. Oxidation from the environment gradually damages those proteins and lead to cataracts. Everyone would eventually get cataracts if they could live forever.

DNA is not enough. There was coordination in time and space to construct the body during development, and the growing body has no damaged cells and structures to deal with.

Eye damage repair: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/710210v1

Also, the cornea does heal from some damage, so clearly it's not just passive tissue.

> I tend to think of aging as an overall degradation of the system

Why do you do that? Why would you think it is correct?

To my knowledge that's a wrong interpretation.

Yes there is constant continuous damage to DNA and cells etc. But the body has mechanisms to repair that damage. It is the repairment that slows down during aging, and that is programmed by genetic and biological processes, like everything else in the body. Biologically, a cell can keep reproducing over and over again, it is no problem.

Put it simply, there is reversible damage and irreversible damage. Oxidized protein aggregates that the cell can’t degrade are an example of irreversible aggregates. Amyloid protein fibrils, although no longer implicated in disease, are another example of a stable, irreversible state. The process of repair slows down not due to programming but because the cells of the body get progressively worse at identifying and repairing damage, because the very machinery that carries out these processes, proteins, get damaged.

That’s a very good summarization of the problems we face in dealing with aging. No drug can fix the damage that is caused by it. We have very early therapies that try to jumpstart or uplift existing biological machinery like the various immunotherapies currently being targeted towards cancers, but that’s still just taking advantage of what is inherent to our bodies. Over time these processes inevitably begin to fail.

You have to engineer new machinery to replace/repair the failing processes for any chance at real longevity. The kind of things that will be capable of doing something like that will be extraordinarily complex, and to compare the drugs we have available today is akin to comparing an abacus to a modern supercomputer.

> Increasing lifespan more than that requires an entirely new paradigm or class of therapeutics. Like you said, we'll need entirely new biological/genetic technology to address the system-wide mutation and degradation of the body that inevitably occurs through the progression of time.

That's exactly what the drugs being discussed in this thread purportedly do. For instance, NMN allegedly repairs epigenetic factors that repair DNA damage, but which degrade as we age.

I guess you haven't heard of steroids. Taking 10x your natural level can increase your muscle strength above physiological limits. So there, you have the ability to reverse the degradation of muscle with aging.

Similarly, you can reverse other negative effects with other drugs. One thing at a time.

> can supplement your body in doing only what it is already capable of

Oh then I guess the body is perfectly capable of having lucid trips for hours like users report from a simple little molecule such as LSD. Good to know. /s