Item — HN Reader

Hmmm.

From an engineering perspective what are the MTBFs for the various human components; are a dearth of White blood cells a prime reason for aging and death?

Great progress has been made in genetics surely one could read the DNA of a few thousand cells and have an extremely strong confidence of what the unmutated DNA for a person once was.

And from this you could make new white blood cells et voila.

This all seems rather Blade Runnery. Mind you there would be societal problems with people who can live much older: slowing of cultural evolution, career blocking, and monopolising property; we've got that now but it would get worse.

I'm worried about the Brexiters kicking out the metric system;that and fascist tyranny.

1 comments

From an engineering point of view, there has been some work on the application of reliability theory to aging, though not to the point where your question can be answered using this approach:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_an...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20469937

Immune system aging is an important component of age-related frailty, and probably also accounts for the rising number of senescent cells and higher cancer risk. It isn't as simple as a dearth of cells, however. It is more of a complex configuration/whole-system failure in which rate of cell replacement is just one variable contributing to the bad state endpoint. See for example:

https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/12/when-and-how-doe...

https://longevityandhealthspan.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...

From an engineering point of view, this article is an oversimplification. Check out http://www.sens.org for a more comprehensive and sophisticated approach.

Fascinating.

So there are a finite number of T cells, and nearly all of them are used up fighting Cytomegalovirus?