How might organ transplants extend my life?

How might organ transplants extend my life?

Aubrey de Grey (Chairman, Methuselah Foundation) gives expert video advice on: What are 'life extension therapies'?; When did life extension studies first begin?; What is 'rejuvenation therapy'? and more...

It may turn out that some tissues can be most effectively rejuvenated by whole cell replacement. For example the heart undergoes a number of different changes in aging. Things like; loss of cells that are compensated inadequately by normal processes, by for example the growth of the remaining cells, not divisional, but just getting larger, or the introduction of fiber use material. Also, the accumulation of mutations happens in the heart and that may make it weaker, thing like this. And we, of course, have for some decades been doing heart transplants, putting someone else's heart into the body of someone who has a diseased heart, and we're now fairly good at that. But, the problems is that we can only get the new heart to put in from somebody who's been unlucky and been killed in a car crash, or something like that. It would be much better if we had a much better supply of hearts, and the only way to do that is to be able to make them without using humans. We're getting better at this, but it's still a very long way to go before we can actually engineer a heart. A human heart in the laboratory to put into the body. But we will get there and when we do that may be a much more effective, and thorough comprehensive way to rejuvenate the heart than simply tying to replace the individual cells that were missing or trying to obviate the mutations.