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Originally Posted by JurisDictum
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Apparently this might actually happen in my lifetime. More and more I'm hearing about drugs that target senescent cells. Destroying these "Zombie" cells prevents a lot of the harm of aging apparently.
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It totally might: Google/Alphabet made a $1.5 billion bet on "defeating death" with their Calico start-up (
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6...ife-span-trip/). Even for Google that's a lot of cash, and you don't throw that out unless you think there's a decent chance it will happen in the next 20 years.
But at the same time life-extension involves a lot more than just killing "Zombie cells". We don't even know everything about what causes aging, but one big part of it is telomers. Those are bits of "junk" DNA hanging off the end of every chromosome in every one of your cells. Every time the cell replicates it copies its chromosomes, but that process loses a bit of the telomers every time it happens, which means that over the course of your life your cells start running out of telomers. When that happens your new cells starting getting errors in their chromosomes, because without telomers part of the "real" DNA gets lost in the copying.
We have some ideas of ways to restore telomers, but they involve side effects like massive amounts of cancer. If we can figure out a non-cancer-causing way to restore them though that alone will increase lifespans significantly.