The key concept that you’re forgetting is that this is only the knowledge we have and it’s not the knowledge we don’t have. That is to say that the complexities of human physiology are so large and intertwined that we don’t know a lot about it.

Will telomere manipulation and treatment of cancer have an effect on longevity, yes.

But we are very much unable to accurately predict who gets cancer, when and where. Cancer is also a name for a massively large collection of problems in human tissues, that are all completely different in pretty much everything. There will never be A cure or THE cure for cancer because it isn’t a single thing.

And then there is the fact that most people know what aides in longevity: excersize, a mostly plant based diet, no smoking, no drinking. Thousands of studies have been done on this. People however aren’t doing it. People seem to be perfectly fine with their mortality.

What all these fuckers want is to smoke, drink, catch every disease known to mankind, eat McDonalds every hour of every day and then walk into a longevity pod that fixes all their problems without pain, without recovery, without effort and preferably within a minute or two while on their phone.

You’ve identified one potential marker in both cell death and cancer but there are hundreds, possibly thousands of mechanisms involved in both.

You’re right in that if it were that easy, we could have cured aging but it isn’t.

we age due to our telemere buffer shortening

Telomere shortening is a marker and there is a correlation, but aging is a process that happens on multiple levels and many of those aren’t fixable by DNA restoration.

We experience wear and tear, we accumulate damage, we accumulate waste, we lose body parts, we constantly fuse our bones together, we have body parts that grow surrounded by tissues capable of maintaining them but then operate outside of them, the list goes on.

But most importantly, death is such a beneficial feature, that it outcompeted everything else. Producing new generation of individuals regularly is a simple and terrifyingly effective solution to a vast array of problems. Many aspects of aging can be seen as adaptations to inevitability of procreation and death.

That aside, I like pointing people at professor Michael Levin’s work. Be very skeptical, as it’s a small field in a world that goes through reproducibility crisis, but it does fill me with a cautious hope.

That’s not quite what cancer is.

Cancer is when a cell’s DNA is damaged and it starts behaving badly. Monstrously huge generalization, but that part is right. But the key is that the damaged DNA results in uncontrolled cell division (mitosis)! That’s what causes cancerous tumors. It’s not really that the cells stop doing their job, though they do stop doing their job, but it’s mostly that they grow uncontrollably and destroy the surrounding tissue.

That being said, yes, we could fix some genes. However, cancer is hugely complex. It’s not really one thing, even; It’s just what we call the outcome of a very unfortunate sequence of DNA damage. Some specific kinds of cancer, maybe, could be helped with this.

Maybe we can help prevent cancer by changing some genes, in particular cases, even. But curing cancer, at least thru CRISPR gene editing, doesn’t seem, to me, to be viable.

Oh, and about the telomeres! That’s not all that aging is, for one, and the way it works isn’t even totally clear. It’s just not that simple!

The text is meh but the picture is beautiful.

If I’m clearly not understanding a key concept in biology

Yes, you’re misunderstanding the concept of death. Death is bad only from the individual’s point of view. It’s how life renews itself, making room for change. Nothing wrong with trying to reduce suffering, of course, but immortality clearly falls into the “nefarious reasons” category. It’s what happens when you focus too much on the individual’s perspective of life. If you want to study biology you have to consider death from a different angle.

Creating and replicating genes is a very cool technology. But it is a far cry from going into every cell and replacing the DNA without causing any damage.

DNA is also damaged sometimes just by chance. Even in perfect conditions, with no UV, reactive molecules, etc., there will be errors and this is sometimes how cancer happens, just by chance (it’s also how evolution happens, so).

Editing DNA in-vivo (in a living organism) would be tricky, because one: we don’t actually know what all that DNA does. Some of it seems to have multiple functions. and some of it is just… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I mean, we’ve only just recently (2025 i thk) created a map of the entire human genome and, again, we don’t know what most of it does. IIRC there’s an entire group of DNA that was, until recently, known as ‘trash’ DNA because everyone thought it didn’t do anything, but it turns out it has important regulatory functions. So using CRISPR in such a way across an entire living organism might kill the organism. There’s also the issue of how to use CRISPR in such a widespread way, as most gene editing is done in really small test tubes with micrograms of the enzyme. Some people have proposed using a modified virus, as that’s pretty much what viruses do, and of course that has it’s own issues because ‘new’ viral particles that were created by the infected cell have different DNA to hide from he host immune system. So administering a treatment like that might accidentally create a new strain of infectious virus, even if the researchers are really, really careful (Life, uh, finds a way).

Also, I seem to recall that there are some issues with CRISPR only being able to edit strands of DNA that are x long, and doing anything longer would require another enzyme that doesn’t exist or hasn’t been found. I forget most of that part of my micro lecture tho.

DNA research is really slow, mostly because culturing cells is really tricky. Sure you can get them to stay alive, but to see them actually in action is difficult as you would have to supply the right concentration of certain molecules over a specific time and make sure those don’t react with other molecules that will produce toxic molecules that kill the cell. Also some of these molecules are light reactive so experiments have to be done in the dark and preferably at 37°C. In short, it’s really difficult to study DNA because the necessary conditions to make it do it’s thing are extremely difficult to replicate in the lab.

I’m just a student though, so if there is, by chance, a researcher in this forum that would like to correct me please do so.

*ALSO, if you really want to increase the life span of humanity, everyone should start having babies as late as humanly possible. There will be genetic issues with the offspring, but those will eventually be ironed out as more reproduction happens at a later stage in life thus, naturally increasing the human lifespan viva la evolution.

cancer has very chaotic mechanisms to stay immortal, most of its not understood. one of the things they do is global hypermethylation and de-methylation of genes. also cancer can have sorther telomeres because they divide so often. thier chromosones are so unstable, they sometimes break, and rejoin haphazardly, sometimes forming rings in some cases. metabolic wise they do alot of unnatural things, like induce surrouding tissue to give it neutrients, or induce a hypoxic factor. they can do something like the reverse warbug effect. if you get into the niche of different type of cancers, you see they all dont behave the same way, thats why theres no treat-all medication for it(some are gene related cancer solely, and some others may not.

In scifi immortality is solved one way or another not through something supernatural or “Magitech”, perfect Cloning is one of them, immortality through advanced technology"constant healing tech".

effectly some plants are immortal because they had been cloning themselves for thousands of years either through suckering or seeds, but it does put them susceptible disease/abiotic conditions if its not stable environment. but plants advantage over animals, due to them have polyploidy, which means more than 2 copies of thier chromosones. which allows evolution of genes easily because they have so many copies.

Don’t solve immortality if you ever have the chance. Death is a vital part of the human experience. Take it away and… I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t be horrible. I could write an epic rant about how necessary death is, but I’ll spare you.

You might want to edit that post title, lest you attract “yes”-replies from people who don’t bother reading the post body.

We don’t actually know what causes cancer. We have theories and some damn good reasons for some kinds of cancer, but that’s about it.

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With this technology, don’t we have access to cures for at least some types of cancer?

Most people in “western” societies die from eating too much.

Most people in “poor” societies die from infections, or from not eating enough.

Why would you think that it is “immortality” just because somebody can do things about some of our many causes of death?

Does CRISPR enable you to build the tower of Babel? And what if you finally arrive at the top of that tower and then finally find out that you still aren’t God?