AI-generated summary
In recent years, life expectancy has increased significantly, but attention is now focused on extending not just lifespan but the duration of healthy life—living fully with a healthy body and mind. The quest to stop or slow aging has become a major scientific goal, with advances in genetic editing offering promising avenues. One breakthrough is the CRISPR-Cas9 technology, originally discovered in microbes as a natural defense mechanism against viruses, which has been adapted into a powerful gene-editing tool. Developed through key contributions by scientists including Francis Mojica, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and Jennifer Doudna, CRISPR allows precise modification of DNA sequences, opening possibilities for treating diseases linked to aging and potentially extending healthy life.
CRISPR’s ability to edit genes has already impacted treatments for diseases like cancer, AIDS, and Alzheimer’s, raising hopes it might also address aging-related genetic factors. However, editing every relevant gene in adult human cells remains a significant challenge. While CRISPR may not halt aging entirely, it offers the potential to prevent or reduce disease burden, thereby improving quality of life during aging. Beyond aging, CRISPR revolutionizes biomedical research by enabling affordable, fast, and customizable genome editing across organisms, facilitating disease studies and agricultural improvements. Despite its transformative potential, CRISPR’s use also raises important ethical considerations as science advances toward enhancing human health and longevity.
We explain what CRISPR is and how to stop aging through this gene editing technique.
In recent decades, life expectancy has progressively lengthened. However, the expectancy of a healthy life, that is, the time we live in full possession of our faculties and with a healthy body that responds to our needs, is in the spotlight right now. How to stop aging has become much more than a concern: it is a goal. What remains to be settled is whether or not it is achievable. Science is making leaps and bounds in this area and reusing genetic techniques that have been designed in others but have a hopeful future here. The
CRISPR technology is a simple, but very powerful tool that allows genomes to be edited. With it, researchers can easily alter DNA sequences and modify the function of genes, and even figure out how to stop aging.
How does CRISPR gene editing work?
Like many other advances in science and medicine, CRISPR was inspired by how nature worked to replicate this system. In this case, the idea was borrowed from a simple defense mechanism found in some microbes, such as bacteria.
To protect against invaders such as viruses, these microbes capture fragments of the intruder’s DNA and store them as segments called CRISPR, or clustered with regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats. If the same germ tries to attack again, those DNA segments (converted into short pieces of RNA) help an enzyme called Cas9 find and cut the invader’s DNA.
Once this natural defense system of some microorganisms was discovered, scientists realized that it had the ingredients of a versatile gene-editing tool. Within a few years, several groups had successfully adapted the system to edit virtually any section of DNA (first in the cells of other microbes and then, eventually, in human cells).
How to Stop Aging with CRISPR
Gene editing is already being used to develop new treatments for many human diseases, such as cancer, AIDS or Alzheimer’s, which opens the door to whether it could also be used to reverse human aging.
A Bloomberg video suggests this possibility. Aspects such as oxidative damage (when cell membranes, proteins and nucleic acids are damaged), genetic instability and damage to the mitochondrial genome are involved in the aging process.
It is true that several genes have been found in mammals that extend lifespan. If a gene is involved, CRISPR can edit it. However, editing a single gene in each cell type of the body is difficult, if not impossible, in adults. At least for now.
What CRISPR could do is solve the problem of the appearance of diseases, which opens the door to aging without losing quality of life. But CRISPR isn’t a magic wand: it’s a genome-editing technology that gives us precision and potential like never before. This means that in the future we might edit mutations associated with disease, but we will never stop aging.
Other great advantages of CRISPR
Beyond being the key to how to stop aging, the multiple potential applications of CRISPR include correcting genetic defects, treating and preventing the spread of disease, and improving crops. It is, in fact, one of the main methods for studying the biology of cancer, moving from laboratory plates to trials in people with this type of disease. In one small study, for example, researchers tested a cancer treatment that involved immune cells that were edited in CRISPR to better hunt down and attack cancer.
CRISPR has been a game-changer in scientific research for several reasons. Firstly, because it’s easy to use, especially compared to older gene-editing tools. And this, in addition, greatly lowers the costs of scientific research.
CRISPR is also completely customizable. Any segment of DNA from any living being can be edited with this technique and, moreover, knowing that it is more accurate than other tools. This, in turn, adds cruising speed. Compared to previous methods, whose work could take months or years, now in a few months we have this genome editing with CRSPR.
In addition, CRISPR can be easily scaled up. Researchers can use hundreds of guide RNAs to manipulate and evaluate hundreds or thousands of genes at once. This practice is common in cancer studies to select genes that could be good targets for drugs.
Once again, scientists are faced with the challenge of continuing to improve our lives, but from an ethical point of view.
