How will life extension therapies affect diseases like cancer?
Cancer is very much a part of aging. Anyone who tells you cancer is a disease and it's not part of aging, they don't know what they're talking about. Some cancers, of course, are not part of aging. Some cancers are early onset childhood diseases, for example. But most cancers are age related. They're age related because they are the late stage consequences of various aspects of the ongoing accumulation of damage, especially the ongoing accumulation of damage to our chromosomes. But mutations, and another type of damage called ethamutations, which is, essentially, not changes to the DNA sequence, but changes to the way that sequence is translated into protein. And, we definitely need to fix that. If we only fix all the other aspects of aging, and we didn't do much about cancer, then our lifespans would only be increased by maybe fifteen, twenty years on average. And we'd all die horribly instead of only twenty percent of us or whatever dying of cancer. So, one of the strands of the Sands program is specifically targeted at cancer, and it's extremely complex and elaborate, but I think necessarily ambitious approach to really defeating cancer. They really take cancer as seriously as it needs to be taken. Because in a way, cancer is the most difficult aspect of aging to fix. Because cancer is a disease of mutation, it has natural selection at its disposal. There are a trillion cells in a big cancer, and they're all dividing away, trying figure out new ways to divide even more effectively and evade our therapy.
