>>11439164> Investigating animals with anti-aging features or drugs?Many, many different ways people are researching this. A typical lifespan study involves usually mice, flies, or C. elegans. Researcher will either feed it a drug, maybe upregulate a gene, or downregulate a gene, for example, and see if that makes the cohort live longer than the control cohort on average. Finding genes with known functions that increase lifespan, or drugs, can give insights into aging mechanisms. There are a million different known factors that affect aging but it's still a very active area of research and as gene-editing and screening technologies improve, as well as sequencing predictive algorithms, etc. a more clear and more clear picture will be painted in the coming years that could lead to some significant therapies using techniques that are already being used for things like cancer and some niche genetic diseases. I'm just a senior undergrad though so I have a little bit of time before I'lll actually be making any meaningful contributions myself.
>reproductive cloningJust a fancy word for cloning, i.e. making a genetically identical organism from another organism, as opposed to therapeutic cloning which is just expansion of cells of an organism in vitro for therapy. Very many practical applications to the concept if it could be done effectively in farm animals, for example, and I believe there'd be a market for it in humans. I'd certainly like to clone myself someday. The technology is technically there and it is theoretically possible to do it in humans, just impossibly difficult and new techniques would be required to do it in humans. It's been done in many mammals though, like goats and mice, and some more.
