“we’re already using gene therapy in humans,” he told the outlet. “it’s in its infancy, but it’s existing technology. it feels like decades, rather than centuries, before we’re really good at it.”
jürg bähler, a geneticist at
university college london, agrees. “there’s been a huge increase in lifespan in the last 200 years, from 30 or 40 years to something like 80 now,” he said.
but he doesn’t think it makes sense for people to age beyond 150. “some people, including myself, would say there’s a natural ceiling for human life, about 150, and you can’t go beyond that,” he said.
steele has long believed that aging is the world’s most significant source of suffering — and that it’s preventable.
“ageing is this inevitable, creeping thing that happens. we’re all quite blind to its magnitude,”
he told the guardian in 2021. “but what do people die of? cancer. heart disease. stroke. these things all [primarily] occur in old people, and they primarily occur
because of the aging process.”
illnesses don’t occur because of aging itself, he adds, but because of the negative effects of aging.
steele believes that living to an older age, but with better heath, is a possibility.
“the dream of anti-aging medicine,” steele said, “is treatments that would identify the root causes of dysfunction as we get older, then slow their progression or reverse them entirely.” the idea is that scientists will be able to “come up with treatments that slow down the whole aging process, deferring diseases into the future.”
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