I have a pet theory that… I don’t see a way to implement *in vivo*, but I’d like to float in case it has any value.
The gist is the notion of self-copying genes that progressively pollute each cell lineage’s genome over decades. (And the explanation for why this doesn’t just accumulate across generations and end the species would be some combination of polluted sperm failing to outcompete surrounding healthier sperm on average, and polluted embryos being sufficiently more likely to miscarry.)
And the related solution (and experiment) would be editing gametes or zygotes to lack all copies of the self-copying gene, so that there’d be none of them to initiate the process of runaway self-copying gene accumulation. In the worlds where this idea leads to longevity escape velocity, it’d need to be upstream of the other pieces of aging, which… I’m guessing not all of them, but maybe enough? It’s based on the “retrotransposons” idea, from the literature.
I… have neither the knowledge nor the resources to go looking myself, yet, but it felt worth pointing out that hypothetically there might be avenues left to explore, if cellular reprogramming isn’t enough.
I have a pet theory that… I don’t see a way to implement *in vivo*, but I’d like to float in case it has any value.
The gist is the notion of self-copying genes that progressively pollute each cell lineage’s genome over decades. (And the explanation for why this doesn’t just accumulate across generations and end the species would be some combination of polluted sperm failing to outcompete surrounding healthier sperm on average, and polluted embryos being sufficiently more likely to miscarry.)
And the related solution (and experiment) would be editing gametes or zygotes to lack all copies of the self-copying gene, so that there’d be none of them to initiate the process of runaway self-copying gene accumulation. In the worlds where this idea leads to longevity escape velocity, it’d need to be upstream of the other pieces of aging, which… I’m guessing not all of them, but maybe enough? It’s based on the “retrotransposons” idea, from the literature.
I… have neither the knowledge nor the resources to go looking myself, yet, but it felt worth pointing out that hypothetically there might be avenues left to explore, if cellular reprogramming isn’t enough.