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 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...
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.
Also, the cornea does heal from some damage, so clearly it's not just passive tissue.
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.
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.
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.
Similarly, you can reverse other negative effects with other drugs. One thing at a time.
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
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.