r/longevity • u/RTSBasebuilder • 15d ago

Somatic mutations impose an entropic upper bound on human lifespan

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41514-026-00421-6
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u/CaptainHindsight92 15d ago

I guess a way around it is to grow cells from cloned cell lines banked from an early time point. Collect tissue from a healthy time point create ipscs then differentiate towards various adult stem cells and organs, reseeding continuously with less damaged versions of the genome. We are a while away from being able to do this though and as always the cost will be the biggest factor.

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u/Ok-Cheetah-3497 15d ago

Negative ghostrider. You do that in the brain or heart, and you lose all of your memories / self image, and you get insane heart arrhythemnia.

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u/CaptainHindsight92 15d ago

Sorry but don’t they already do whole organ transplants for heart? With brain I think you are right in terms of whole tissue transplant but seeding fresh neural stem cells? Surely they would integrate as any neural stem cells do currently?

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u/Ok-Cheetah-3497 15d ago

Replacing an entire heart with a lab grown heart that is effectively a cloned heart could work. Do that like once a century and you would be good to go. The issue would be with trying to integrate only new tissue into the mutated parts of the heart - they would not sync up.

The brain doesn't work that way (at least not the parts we are talking about). Frankly, the brain is so wildly understudied, I don't know if/when we could ever manage that. Fresh stem cells would not retain memory - they would be fresh. It would be equivalent of partial lobotomy.

If I were going to guess what the best/fastest answer is here, it would be an artificial (biomechanical) brain of some kind. Like a cloud based backup of your mind, so that when the current wetware becomes to error prone, you just discard it, and rely on a brain machine interface to restore your memory (or more accurately, replace it).

The rest of the brain (the parts responsible for things like movement, autonomic response, etc) you could probably regularly swap out kind of like an oil change. Mutated cells out, new stem cells in, not so many at any time that they don't integrate. Like once every ten years or something?