This part caught my interest:
"Holstege says the results raise the possibility of rejuvenating ageing bodies with re-injections of stem cells saved from birth or early life. These stem cells would be substantially free of mutations and have full-length telomeres."
Makes me wonder if I should take a blood sample now (age 26) and have it frozen on the off chance that it would be of use later in life. Basically a hedge against, 50 years from now, "well we have the amazing rejuvenation technology that can replenish the fresh blood cells, but only if we have a sample of 'young' blood. Sorry everyone aged 60+."
My thinking on this is that by the time your banked cells might in theory be useful, the research community will have figured out how to make any old cell do everything that they want it to.
You might look at progress in induced pluripotency and very small embryonic like stem cells to see how rapidly things are moving there for the creation of useful cells.
Also worth noting: the preliminary signs are so far weighing on the side of concluding that cells from old people are not significantly less useful than cells from a young person for the purposes of therapy. The bigger differences are inside the body, in the cellular environment.
And again, all the incentives in the very well funded stem cell research community lie in the direction of fixing or working around everything that will prevent them from applying treatments to old people. The overwhelming majority of people (i.e. potential customers) with conditions that would benefit from stem cell treatments are old people, and thus large sections of the research community are working on understanding and manipulating the activities of stem cells in old tissues to try to (a) figure out exactly why they are not working as well as they used to, and (b) restore them to action.
There are some interesting experiments in heterochronic parabiosis that are worth looking into, but also many other lines of work in which researchers are identifying specific signal proteins that direct stem cells into ever greater quiescence. This is most likely an evolved program to lower the risk of death by cancer, reacting to rising levels of cellular damage, at the cost of greater dysfunction and eventual death by tissue failure.
Yep. I jumped to the exact same conclusion. I did a quick search to see what was out there and I came across this article from 2008 talking about a few such companies and how it was being discounted by many scientists as not likely to be useful:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/health/29stem.html?pagewan...
At least a couple of the companies mentioned in that article appear to be out of business. The prices quoted back then are non-trivial for middle class Americans.
It still seems like the sort of thing that might be worth the expense. If they come up with the solution when I'm 80, but I don't have any source of young stem cells to rely on...
This really isn't worth worrying about. I know it seems like a Pascal's wager scenario but "youth of stem cells" isn't a problem. We know how to lengthen telomeres (hTERT) and generating human iPSCs is a routine procedure.
I think that would be wise. We don't know what kind of technology we'll have in 50 years. On the other hand, perhaps it will be so advanced that you won't even need your own stem cells to get rejuvenated. Would that be possible?
I'd like to pull out some stem cells and make a slight alteration to my phi-GULO pseudogene, and inject the altered cells into my liver. That seems relatively simple and within the reach of current technology.
Within 40 years, I can envision sequencing multiple instances of my nuclear DNA, detecting and correcting the transcription error noise, and resequencing what is likely my "original" DNA sequence as the basis for a reconstructed stem cell.
That cell would be multiplied, and the resulting rejuva-goo injected into several points on my body under general anaesthesia.
But that process would still be 10 to 100 times more expensive than one used by people who had access to preserved cells from their younger self. The upside is that this process could also screen for and correct known genetically-linked diseases, or species-wide flaws such as the aforementioned phi-GULO at a marginal additional cost.
What would prevent someone from simply getting a blood transfusion from someone younger?
In that same line of thinking, if I'm donating blood or giving blood samples regularly, does that increase the chance that I will die at a younger age?
Makes me wonder if I should take a blood sample now (age 26) and have it frozen on the off chance that it would be of use later in life. Basically a hedge against, 50 years from now, "well we have the amazing rejuvenation technology that can replenish the fresh blood cells, but only if we have a sample of 'young' blood. Sorry everyone aged 60+."