Biomedical Engineering in Medicine and Aging

Today, the effective treatment of aging can only proceed rapidly as an engineering project. The fine details of the way in which aging progresses at the level of cells and proteins are far from fully understood - but that is not a roadblock to progress. The research community knows enough of the causes of aging to repair them and observe the results. In fact the repair approach, where it has been tried, and as typified by senolytic development to clear senescent cells, is doing far more, with far less expenditure, and in far less time, than other strategies that involve mapping and adjusting the extreme complexity of cellular metabolism. A good analogy for this situation is that sizable bridges and other large structures were constructed on an empirical basis for millennia prior to a full understanding of materials science, prior to the implementation of computational modeling in architecture. In exactly the same way it is possible to make meaningful progress in the treatment of aging today, and because aging causes far more harm than any other aspect of the human condition, it is our ethical imperative to make that progress rather than waiting on greater understanding of how exactly aging and metabolism interact in detail. Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey says he believes that, thanks to imminent advances in technology, the first person to live to age 1,000 likely is alive today. De Grey became interested in studying the biological aspects of aging, he...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs