Can modern biology and medicine make us immortal?
Life is already immortal. (Or effectively so.) It began at some unknown point more than 3 1/2 billion years ago and is still going strong today.
What
isn't immortal is
us. Our human bodies, our identities. So why do seemingly immortal cell-lines periodically produce these huge multicellular
organisms, billions of cells strong, seemingly as the cell lines'
fruiting bodies? Nobody really knows. Again, it's part of the mystery surrounding the initial appearance of multicellular organisms back in the Ediacaran (or whenever it was).
Maybe what we think of as ourselves, as
us, are to the immortal cell line that might really comprise mammals what toad-stools are to fungi...
(Bacteria have been around since the beginning too, and they don't do it. Only some of the eukaryotes.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_cell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporocarp_(fungi)
There are obviously questions in the philosophy of biology regarding how we define biological individuals and what biological individuals even
are, that arise here. And that in turn has implications for questions of personal identity. What
are we, really?
Any anti-aging drugs possible?
I'm inclined to agree with James, except that I'd change his 'yes' to a very tentative 'perhaps'. Some time in the distant future, perhaps.
I think that a lot more needs to be known about this stuff, as well as the unanticipated side-effects of changing any of it, before anti-aging treatments that effectively turn all of our body cells and their chain of descendants into immortal cell lines can be attempted.
I can imagine that the results of some of the early experiments in creating an immortality serum might be pretty horrible, science fiction movie stuff.
In a way it already happens. All of the cells in our bodies, apart from the sperm and eggs we produce, are ultimately headed towards death. They aren't endlessly reproducing cell-lines. They have a built in clock, so to speak.
But cancer cells appear to be immortal and just reproduce over and over without becoming senescent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
So one way to render us immortal might be to turn all of our cells into cancer cells. Obvious downside to that...
If our serum resets all our cells by inducing them into being pluripotent stem cells, like we see at the very beginnings of fetal development, then each cell in our body might grow into cyst-like tumors everywhere in a test-subject's body containing skin, hair, bone, teeth and even eyes. Experimental subjects would die horribly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teratoma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermoid_cyst
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetus_in_fetu