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Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

IANAGB and your meta-explanation makes total sense _but_ I'm given to believe that improving human damage repair systems would require gene therapy and this is becoming an easier and easier technique over time–isn't this what powers a lot of medical breakthroughs now? Am I wrong in believing this? Are you definitively asserting that repairing damage is going to be comparatively simpler than improving damage repair systems for the foreseeable future?

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Only some of the damage repair methods require gene therapy, and in the case of allotopic expression to work around mitochondrial damage that is already demonstrated in human trials by Gensight.

You should look over the linked sub-pages here for an overview of the types of damage and approaches to repair.

http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

I'd be more concerned about stem cell replacement therapies and lipofuscin removal as categories than anything requiring gene therapy, since in both cases there are a lot of targets and a lot of work to do.

For things like senescent cells and glucosepane cross-links, small molecule therapies will work (and already exist in the former case). In fact all targeted cell killing and specific molecule breakdown needs can probably be addressed sufficiently well via pharmaceuticals for a first generation effort.

Thanks for the pointers.

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