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Rejuvenation biotechnology: postponing ill-health via comprehensive damage repair

Published on September 28, 2017   50 min

A selection of talks on Cell Biology

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0:00
In this concluding lecture of the series, I shall try to draw us together many of the strands of research and thinking that have been discussed by my colleagues in previous lectures. And I shall try to give you my own impression of what this means for the prospects for intervention in human aging in the foreseeable future and postponement of the ill health, that of course is currently associated with old age.
0:34
I'm going to start right at the top. I'm going to ask the question which not enough people in society really ask, and at least not with the determination to come up with an answer that's useful. The question is simply, why have we been so much less successful in developing medicines to alleviate and address the ill health of old age than we have with respect to the diseases that used to be so prevalent early in life, in particular most infectious diseases? Of course, we know that a couple of hundred years ago, at least one third of babies would die before the age of one, and of course there was huge amount of mortality in childbirth and throughout early life. This has been virtually eliminated in the industrialized world, and it is becoming rapidly rarer even in the developing world as a result of really pretty elementary medical interventions as compared to the kinds that are being developed these days. And yet, even the kinds of medical interventions that are being developed these days are only having very limited success against the ill health of old age. We really must ask ourselves seriously why that is. And I believe that that is the starting point for any discussion of how this might be better.
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Rejuvenation biotechnology: postponing ill-health via comprehensive damage repair

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