Towards the one step replacement of damaged DNA & promise of living forever
We’ve been getting far more effective at understanding the way our brains work especially as they relate to the idea of ‘mind’. Simply, the idea that we make decisions based on our conscious understanding, appears limited at best and highly flawed at worst. And now, the step towards longevity, perhaps even the fountain of youth, is being unpacked. Just recently a medical research team announced that they had successfully rewired a living organ (a thymus), such that an aged one began operating as new. The next piece of this puzzle is a one step fix of faulty DNA
Using a gene-editing technique, researchers at MIT have successfully removed a defective gene and replaced the DNA strand with a fully functioning one. The implications of this technique are profound – humans with defective genes could, in time, have their defective gene replaced with a fully functional ‘correct’ one. The promise in this technique is that people impacted by gene related disease, may avoid or recover from those impacts. Here’s an article on KurzweilAI about the process and the article on the reinvigorated thymus is here
And if, as some researchers believe, that ageing is caused by a defective gene response, perhaps the door to living forever, is being opened
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