Not always but damage itself can be very complex. It has many sources, is multivariate and can iteratively lead to more damage. The immune system is an example.
And yet, today, we can replace essentially a person’s entire immune system with a bone marrow transplant.
If the damage is from sudden events such as stroke, heart failure, non-aging disease, an aggressive environmental injury from toxin, virus or bacteria the damage can be even more troublesome.
Organ transplant, stem cell therapy. Aging damage is far more troublesome as it is far less specific than the examples you give.
Systems biology will deliver predictive tools and knowledge for both preventing and fixing these as well as the slower accumulating aging damage.
Whereas the systems approach delivers the ability to predict or detect the changes very early and engineer personalized solutions at any stage of the process, particularly where it is most economically suitable and perhaps even feasible. #2 "fixing it" becomes a more likely event when numerous possible solutions with various cost/benefits are available to us.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not dismissing the value of systems biology. Far from it. I think it is very valuable. I just happen to think there are other things that are presently more valuable. In the future that will change. And if you think it is your strongest suit, then by all means pursue it. There are certainly engineering problems that we don’t remotely have clear cut solutions for. By all means please find these solutions for us =)
Also, what if the damage is continuous where it returns immediately after you mop it up, for example, an errant process or pathway that has gone haywire? If this is the case then you need to understand how it is occurring and your engineering effort has to target the very metabolic reactions you'd like to remain ignorant about
Please give an example of this that would not be fixed by repairing damage in general. If the damaged pathways is within a certain percentage of a population of cells, those cells should be destroyed, and replaced. Fixing all these cells individually strikes me as harder. If you can prove me wrong, you’d make me a happy man. If you’re speaking about the endocrine system I’m of the opinion that if you can repair the damage in it’s constituent parts it would probably work out.
But if that same bridge had built-in mechanisms for repairing and replacing its own faulty components (designed by some ancient race of Atlantians), time permitting, a good engineer would study these mechanisms, reverse engineer them and then make repairs to these rather than simply trying to patch up the bridge with his own creative fixes to the structure itself. Surely you could argue that through serendipity he might hold the bridge up a bit longer but if the goal is to never let the bridge fall, levering the existing designs will likely trump the simplistic hack attempts.
To live as long as it does the body has numerous mechanisms for preventing and mopping up damage.
You’re right. The body does indeed have mechanisms for dealing with certain types of mostly quickly accumulating damage (not so much the intrinsically slowly accumulating damage as there has never been much selective pressure to deal with that), and these systems fail just as the systems they are designed to repair fail. And replacing/repairing these systems certainly would be a good thing. And this absolutely falls under the category of “repairing the damage”. However, I think you’re looking too deeply into where to make the repairs. As I said, if the immune system goes completely out of wack, it can be replaced (there is certainly the problem of graft vs host disease, but with engineered stem cells made from our own cells this shouldn’t be a problem). Currently the biggest difficulty is safely killing off malfunctioning immune system that is already there. Full body irradiation does the trick, but vastly increases other risks.
There is nothing intrinsically irreplaceable involved in many other regulating mechanisms in the body. Kidney’s, and liver should be obvious (and if you’ve ever taken biochemistry you are well aware that most of it takes place in the liver
)). Other organ systems that rely more heavily on innervation to function have been troublesome in the past, but mainstream medicine has made a lot of headway with re attaching peripheral nerves.
If you’re talking about intracellular repair mechanisms failing, that’s true. But that’s taken care of by replacing the cells or entire organs.
But if that same bridge had built-in mechanisms for repairing and replacing its own faulty components (designed by some ancient race of Atlantians), time permitting, a good engineer would study these mechanisms, reverse engineer them and then make repairs to these rather than simply trying to patch up the bridge with his own creative fixes to the structure itself. Surely you could argue that through serendipity he might hold the bridge up a bit longer but if the goal is to never let the bridge fall, levering the existing designs will likely trump the simplistic hack attempts.
Time is not permitting. However, our simplistic hack attempts might just buy us the time we need. The march of science will churn out the more complicated solutions in time, but not less than any of us have.
To live as long as it does the body has numerous mechanisms for preventing and mopping up damage. I think it would be prudent to see if we can find and shore those up if we can rather than only going after every damaged endpoint and attempt to engineer a fix for each. Their are just too many things that can be damaged.
Every damaged endpoint? The great news is that there are remarkably few fundamental types of damage. Whatever tissue they occur in there is a great homogeneity. There are countless routes to that damage.
IMO it's the tortoise and the hare. Systems biology is the tortoise but will be what delivers sustainable longevity in the end. The good news is that it doesn't have to be either or as progress is either niche adds value to the other.
I can’t disagree at all with what you are saying in this last paragraph. However, for any of us here, now, the hare is our only chance (aside from cryonics I suppose
)). Also as you say, either niche does indeed add value to the other. And we hares will be more than happy to make the hand off to the tortoise as it goes on endlessly lumbering past us. However the real point is there is about a million tortoises to every hare. And we desperately need more hares to get us through to the next phase.