>>12102827In my opinion, we have the possibility of achieving this in 20-30 years, I'll elaborate below.
My undergrad and grad degrees are in medical research topics.
From what I've read of de greys work, and the talks I've seen on youtube, he makes a relatively good case by identifying seven age-related disease processes that cover every age-related disease (that I'm aware of at least)
The idea is that if we can prevent the accumulation of damage before it is too far gone, then we can remove the damage, and repair the body. This seems reasonable in the disease I am most interested in; alzheimers.
Alzheimers genetics indicates the build up of particular proteins intracellularly and extracellularly, and that these proteins are toxic to particular brain cells. There seems to also be two mechanisms by which these proteins aggregate, with the second one being concentration dependent (secondary nucleation) and the main driver of amyloid related alzheimer pathogenesis. IF we could prevent amyloid reaching this concentration, perhaps we could stave off alzheimers indefinitely.
The obvious problems to this are the financial cost to the consumer or tax payer. With alzheimers there is the concern about specificity of treatment, effectiveness, safety, delivery mechanism, and so on.
The barrier to "cures" for aging appear to be purely technical, rather than theoretical.
This is largely why my intended PhD is around the topic of computational biology.
If we can cut the cost of research, and increase the effectiveness using in silico "experiments" then there is a higher chance of success. This can be achieved through improvements in protein folding simulation, and molecular dynamics simulations.
That's why I personally put that it would be possible to cure aging within 20-50 years, if the funding is there, and if there aren't any extreme unexpected hurdles.
That said, there are apparently some surprising (unpublished) advances due to senolytics in mice.
