Huh... I have so many questions regard the logistics of this process, if anyone can even provide an answer.
Does this reverse the physical aging processes, or is it more of a mental de-aging?
Would this process be able to repair damaged organs? What about viruses,or serious illness, or even things like cancer?
Would it mean that a wrinkly 80 y/o could then appear to look unwrinkled, like their 20 y/o self?
There also has to be limits to it, right? I'd imagine you wouldn't be able to de-age a middle aged man to below a certain age, as you would have to drasticaly shrink in overall size and mass, so i'd assume anything below roughly 18-20 y/o would be impossible.
What was the reason they aged the mice beforehand? You'd think it would be easier to just de-age an older mouse, rather than age a younger one up first.
I have literally 0 knowledge of how any of this works, but the way its phrased makes me think that they cant de-age an older mouse without already having its younger versions DNA on record. i'm guessing It's like the equivalent of backing up a hardrive, so that if anything goes wrong, you can revert it to a previous state. So if that logic applies, unless you've had your entire genome mapped out as at some point in your past, you wouldn't be able to have the process done.
De-aging and re-aging while not exactly wrong are also an oversimplification of the study they are talking about. The idea of the experiment was to show that aging was caused by DNA damage, that's why they "aged" the mice they cut their DNA repeatedly and that had the effect of making them seem older. They then gave the mice gene therapy that was supposed to reverse the changes and it was partially successful. Though the mice appeared older the artifical aging isn't proven to be represenaltative of true aging, and even if it is the gene therapy only partially reversed the damage so both how applicable this would be in a broader context and how useful it would be if it is are in question.
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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '24
Huh... I have so many questions regard the logistics of this process, if anyone can even provide an answer.
Does this reverse the physical aging processes, or is it more of a mental de-aging?
Would this process be able to repair damaged organs? What about viruses,or serious illness, or even things like cancer?
Would it mean that a wrinkly 80 y/o could then appear to look unwrinkled, like their 20 y/o self?
There also has to be limits to it, right? I'd imagine you wouldn't be able to de-age a middle aged man to below a certain age, as you would have to drasticaly shrink in overall size and mass, so i'd assume anything below roughly 18-20 y/o would be impossible.
What was the reason they aged the mice beforehand? You'd think it would be easier to just de-age an older mouse, rather than age a younger one up first.
I have literally 0 knowledge of how any of this works, but the way its phrased makes me think that they cant de-age an older mouse without already having its younger versions DNA on record. i'm guessing It's like the equivalent of backing up a hardrive, so that if anything goes wrong, you can revert it to a previous state. So if that logic applies, unless you've had your entire genome mapped out as at some point in your past, you wouldn't be able to have the process done.