Biotech startup Rejuvenate intends to reverse the dog's biological clock. If successful, you can become the next client.
The company is run by renowned Harvard geneticist George Church, a mammoth resurrector and a pioneer of CRISPR technology and genome sequencing. The company plans to use gene-editing technologies to change the instructions that DNA tells cells, thus restoring some biological markers to a "youthful" state, and possibly completely reversing the aging process. Several of these methods have already been tested in mice and have been able to reverse degenerative changes in the heart, according to the MIT Technology Review. Research will continue in this direction, focusing on age-specific ailments such as renal and heart failure, obesity and diabetes in rodents.
According to MIT Technology Review, Rejuvenate has completed similar preliminary testing in dogs, but Rejuvenate itself has not reported results.
Since the technology is not yet ready for use in humans, it makes sense to start by rejuvenating man's best friend. And given the popularity of dog cloning among the wealthy public, it would be a smart way to raise funds for further research. (If there are those willing to pay $ 50,000- $ 100,000 to try to clone a pet, you can imagine how much they would pay to be able to own the same dog as a puppy for decades.)
But if Bobby lives longer, the same befits his master - isn't it? But when it comes to applying these results to humans, things get more complicated.
Ethics advocates in biology are already debating the ethics of a drug that would achieve actual immortality. These ethical questions are usually based on the inherent inequality of such technology (after all, it will be very expensive, which means that the rich can remain healthy forever, and the poor will continue to suffer from diseases and die young), as well as on the factor of overpopulation and uneven access to resources.
These are the questions Rejuvenate and its followers will have to face, but at the same time, many ethicists believe that it is wrong to provide technology to anyone just because it is not available to everyone (see video below with Russian captions).
But Rejuvenate also plans to reverse aging. One of the company's presentations includes an image of George Church himself (who announced his readiness to become a test subject for experiments) as he looked decades ago, marked "year 2117". Church also defined technology as incorporating 130 years of experience into a 22-year-old body.
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Such plans raise questions about our age-old obsession with youth. Sociologists trace this common cultural phenomenon to the end of World War II, after which young people, and the innocence of youth, became a rarity. 70 years later, to our time, this is reflected in the culture, where anti-aging cosmetics has become a $ 250 billion industry (for 2016), where some expose themselves to "preventive Botox" already in their third decade of life in order to contain the manifestations of the passing years.
“Young people have become role models for the older generation, not the other way around,” says Robert Harrison, professor of Italian literature at Stanford, in the foreword to his book Rejuvenation: A Cultural History of Our Time. "From a cultural point of view, whether we take the style of dress, the way of thinking, the style of life - our world is amazingly young, and in many respects, and childish."
But this is in no way an argument against the treatment of age-related diseases. Medicine to treat painful, debilitating conditions is one thing, but reversing aging is another.
Much remains to be done to ensure that our ever longer life is healthy throughout its entire length. But if we want to become a society in which people often celebrate their 120th birthday, we must strive to ensure that these years are fully lived.
Vadim Tarabarko