Harvard Prof. Says Cure For Aging Could Emerge Within 5 Years (washingtonpost.com)

trbdavies writes: Reporting from the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene-editing summit in D.C., the Washington Post quotes Harvard genetics professor George Church as expressing "confidence that in just five or six years he will be able to reverse the aging process in human beings." He says: "A scenario is, everyone takes gene therapy — not just curing rare diseases like cystic fibrosis, but diseases that everyone has, like aging," CRISPR is a powerful technology, but many at the summit have expressed caution about both the ethics and the feasibility of using it to cure disease. The story quotes Klaus Rajewsky, of the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine saying "We have become masters in the art of manipulating genes, but our understanding of their function and interaction is far more limited."

Comments

Bullshit

[Wootery]

Conveniently in time to enable the professor to live forever, right?

Bullshit. There's even a name for this idiocy: the Maes–Garreau law.

So far, medical science has done essentially nothing whatsoever to stop ageing from killing us. Instead, current medicine stops us dying prematurely of other causes. I see no reason at all to think we're just going 'solve' ageing overnight, as the professor seems to think.

The entire argument seems to be something something gene editing. Not good enough.

These things tend to improve incrementally, and if we're lucky, medical science may soon take the first step in combating ageing.