George Church

Escape velocity is sometimes what it's called for aging.

Different people have estimates, and all those estimates, including mine, are going to be taken with a big grain of salt.

I think that mainly looking at the exponentials in biotechnology and the progress that's been made in understanding, not just understanding causes of aging, but seeing real examples where you can reverse

subsets of the aging phenotype you know so you're getting close to all of aging um in other words you're seeing instead of just saying oh i'm going to fix the damage in this collagen in this tendon in this limb you're saying oh i'm going to change a lot of things that that are they're common to aged related diseases and i'm going to get more than one at a time

I think looking at those two phenomena, the exponentials in biotechnologies and the breakthrough in general aging, not just analysis, but synthesis and therapies, and a lot of these therapies now making in the clinical trials, I wouldn't be surprised if 2050 would be a point.

If we can make it to that point, 25 years, most people listening to this have a good chance of making it 25 years.

And the thing is, it's not going to be some sudden point where you're going to be, you know, so sick 25 years from now that it's like hit or miss.

It's more likely that you're going to be healthier 25 years from now than you thought you were going to be.

There may be some, probably not some law of physics, but some

economic or complexity issue that we don't know about that becomes a brick wall.

I doubt it seriously, but we'll have to see.

Bowhead whales, yeah.

200 years, yeah.

is there any hope for doing that from somatic gene therapy alone or would that have to be germline gene therapy probably there's a lot of forces pushing it towards somatic um for one there's eight billion right people that have missed the the germline opportunity yeah as to say doesn't apply to us uh the two of us and everybody listening to this and you know

You have to be very cautious when you say something's impossible.

It's safe to say it's impossible to do it this second, but you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow and the next decade or something.

So I think there's a lot that could be done.

In particular, since aging is a fairly cellular phenomenon with

Proteins going through the blood and other factors going through the blood that signaling and so forth.

You could imagine if you replaced, let's say, every cell in the body, every nucleus in the body, you know, it would suddenly be young again, right?