• CarbonIceDragon
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    11 months ago

    How so? Cancer is something that one would be statistically likely to get eventually if you didn’t first die of anything else I suppose, so it’d certainly be useful in extending effective lifespan if you already had a youth serum, but how would a treatment for cancer do anything for other age related disease?

    • Kalothar@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      You get cancer all the time your body has natural mechanisms of finding and breaking down the cancerous cells. As we age some of these mechanisms start to falter, cells divide, but small errors over time accumulate.

      A youth serum is really not the goal, the goal is fixing errors in these systems, maintaining current functions and creating a new mechanism.

      This would work like a booster for this mechanisms and effectively make it possible to maintain and improve these systems. The side effect being an increase lifespan to some degree.

      I suppose this I just the cancer component, but several other things are still needed on the field of longevity research for a “youth serum” to be viable.