User:BumblingBuffoon

Greytide.

Life goals? I promised myself that I would at some point get out of my trash heap and go through college and university, looking into biology disciplines (probably genetics, and cellular biology) to find a way to prolong my life. As it turns out a lot of very rich people also don't like the idea of dying, who could know why? And have been dumping money into life-extension research for a long time now 1.

Most people have to specialize in their life and pick something that defines them, I am an artist, they'll say, an engineer, a doctor, and they have to spend every increasing amounts of time to become those things. Time is everything, if we had more time, we could do everything. So it just seemed to me to be the biggest priority. The reality of the situation is that I will soon be thirty, and that's making me anxious, procrastination is terrible. Nothing fills me with more anxiety than running out of time, how about you?

Some bullshit about that
Telomeres are the holy grail right? Except when they haven't actually worked. If you have ever been interested in life extension for realzies, telomeres is one of the first things you'll see. The idea is that the hayflick limit (the amount of divisions a cell can undergo) is determined by how much telomeres that your cell's DNA has. Every division shortens the caps on the end of DNA, just a lil bit, and when they run out, the DNA becomes unstable leading to death or other painful mutations (and then death). What if we could hypothetically extend the telomere caps then? Well, as it turns out that isn't a new theory for the natural world, in fact, cancer does this quite swimmingly. There is telomerase, this enzyme essentially maintains telomere length, alright let's experiment on some rats (as we do) it can delay ageing, but it only delays ageing. I have never seen a report in nematode worms, fruit fly or mice that telomere extension by itself has ever been enough to indefinitely prolong life. The indefinite part is important, as it means something else must contribute to eventual senescence (death), thus no model that hopes to explain senescence solely using telomeres can hope to be correct.

Supplements
There was once a Chinese emperor who hoped to obtain immortality, and he was eventually sold mercury by a quack. Today's quacks like nutritional supplements, because they're cheap and easy to produce and thus easy to turn a profit on reselling. They do nothing.

Blood replacement
Young blood is the best according to these vampires, bonus points if they're a capitalist corporate CEO exploiting the blood of a proletariat underclass. More on parabiosis here.

Epigenetics
As a Christmas present I decided to include news about epigenetic research to show that the quest for the Holy Grail is still very much alive. It is a newer model to determine biological age versus chronological age, based on DNA methylation, and some trials are proposed to reverse some of this ageing in future trials. It's good to see that the world is still interested in living forever.