Ageing is so many different things, and cells being able to self-renew is part of the picture but not all of it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it.
Aging is not currently regarded as a disease, but researchers tend increasingly to view it as the common origin of conditions like insulin resistance or cardiovascular disease, whose incidence rises with age. In treating cell aging, we could prevent these diseases.
Basically, the body does have a vast amount of inbuilt anti-ageing machinery; it's just not 100% comprehensive, so it allows a small number of different types of molecular and cellular damage to happen and accumulate.
Ageing is very rare. We only see it in humans and laboratory animals and in zoo animals and in our pets. Basically, organisms that are protected from the external world. Once you create that protection, you live long enough to see ageing.
The way that we are going after ageing, I think, is a problem. The modern medical model is basically designed to attack one disease at a time. Independent of all other diseases and independent of the basic process of ageing itself.
There is an anti-aging possibility, but it has to come from within.
Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that's why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart.
I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.
Ageing is, simply and clearly, the accumulation of damage in the body. That's all that ageing is.
I think there are two aspects to ageing: there's the physical side and what's happening inside.