This is generally fairly cool. Beats the choice, as they are saying. But one decidedly uncool factor about being nearly 50 is that my “bad” LDL ldl cholesterol is simply too excessive. The apparent answer right here is to enhance my food plan and get extra train. But if that had been really easy, nobody would have excessive ldl cholesterol, proper? Another choice is perhaps to go on statins—use treatment to convey it down. Lots of individuals do that, but it surely’s a therapy, not a treatment, and the uncomfortable side effects might be intense.
Or, simply possibly, I might have my genes edited utilizing CRISPR, as a affected person in New Zealand not too long ago did, to completely scale back my LDL. Given that coronary heart illness is a number one reason for loss of life, that would meaningfully delay my life. There’s nonetheless a lot to study concerning the effectiveness of such a therapy, however the mere prospect is fairly superb.
The issues we are able to do to change our our bodies at present would have seemed like science fiction just some years in the past. Scratch that—a few of them nonetheless sound like science fiction. Aging and loss of life have lengthy been our inevitable fates, constants of life that start with start. But what if getting older isn’t inevitable? What if we might sluggish and even reverse the method? This could also be much less far-fetched than you think about.
A flotilla of billionaires and Silicon Valley elites, and even the Saudi royal household, have poured staggering quantities of cash into this query, funding startups and analysis that search to increase our time on Earth. Antonio Regalado has the story of the search for medical rejuvenation: researchers wish to reprogram our cells to make them younger once more, letting us lead longer, more healthy lives.
Or much more intriguing: What if we might cheat loss of life and dwell eternally? Because we are able to. Or no less than our digital replicas can, as Charlotte Jee discovered when she skilled an AI to create simulacra of her dad and mom. The know-how she explored is one in every of a number of meant to let the residing commune with the useless, on this case through Amazon Alexa.
But even when we are able to dwell eternally in a wise speaker, in the mean time there’s nonetheless no means round loss of life. Of course, there are lots of people engaged on that. Perhaps you would possibly wish to have your corpse preserved at −196 °C within the hopes of being introduced again to life once more sooner or later. The subject of cryonics continues to be trucking alongside, even whether it is “a hopeless aspiration that reveals an appalling ignorance of biology,” as one scientist places it.
For those that have accepted their destiny however need their loss of life to assist others dwell longer, there’s all the time the opportunity of donating one’s physique to science. While that’s one thing you might have absolutely heard of, it’s nothing like what you might have most likely imagined. Abby Ohlheiser pulls again the curtain to disclose how this intimate course of actually works.
I hope this concern serves up lots for you to consider. As all the time, I’d love to listen to your ideas. You can attain me at mat.honan@technologyreview.com.
See you on the opposite aspect,
Mat