Defeating aging with regenerative medicine

90% of Westerners die of aging. Is a ‘cure’ just around the corner? Aubrey de Grey claims regenerative medicine for aging is coming, and it promises to bring aging under the same degree of medical control that we have today for most infectious diseases. Within just a few decades we may be able to prevent all those deaths - and the ill-health and suffering that precedes them.

Aging has long been viewed by most people as somehow different from diseases - somehow inaccessible, even in principle, to medical intervention. We are now approaching the point where we can finally show that this is a misconception. Aging is merely a set of precursors of the diseases and disabilities of old age: a set of side- effects of normal metabolism that accumulate throughout life and eventually impair and overwhelm our biology. Regenerative medicine is the medicine of the 21st century: with stem cells, gene therapy and other techniques, including ones that are much less well known, we will be able to repair diseased and disabled bodies with increasing effectiveness.

In this talk, Dr Aubrey de Grey explains that aging is no exception: regenerative medicine for aging is coming, and it promises to bring aging under the same degree of medical control that we have today for most infectious diseases. 90% of Westerners die of aging, but within just a few decades we may be able to prevent all those deaths - and the ill-health and suffering that precedes them.

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