This is 1. fascinating, but 2. not entirely useful. I’m upvoting it anyway because it’s something I hadn’t heard of and may want to do if it’s as helpful and inexpensive as you suggest. To answer that, I’d need to know:
Who to go to to get cells frozen.
What the procedure entails.
How much #2 costs.
What’s required to get the cells off ice and appropriate tissues or organs grown in the event that I need them.
Probability of success for #4. (or even just: How often has this been done, and what proportion of attempts have been successful)
Cost of #4.
Common death-causes for which this entire exercise is useful.
...and probably a few other things I haven’t thought of. The post answers none of these, although I’m glad you brought it up anyway because at least now I know the possibility exists.
Also of note: it sounds like this is used for things like replacing failed organs with own-grown ones. Which, okay, that will buy you longer life, and that’s a good thing, and I’m sure organs grown from younger cells work better. But it doesn’t sound like it will buy you longer youth, which is what anti-aging is all about. I think your complaint might be misdirected. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you.
Getting it off the ice is relatively easy—we vitrify/freeze gametes and embryos and they grow into healthy people. I think the restrictions center mostly around the current limitations of adult stem cells (in place of embryonic or umbilical). You can do quite a few useful things but, risks.
I’m not certain about relative risk/benefit of doing those things with a cryo-preserved younger version of your adult stem cells as opposed to harvesting them when needed from a clinical perspective...but from a basic science perspective people have found rejuvenating effects from giving old mice transfusions of young blood, neural progenater cells, etc so it’s promising.
(Also, if anyone’s going to do this, you might be able to collect free goodness points by going on the bone marrow registry at little additional inconvenience.)
This is 1. fascinating, but 2. not entirely useful. I’m upvoting it anyway because it’s something I hadn’t heard of and may want to do if it’s as helpful and inexpensive as you suggest. To answer that, I’d need to know:
Who to go to to get cells frozen.
What the procedure entails.
How much #2 costs.
What’s required to get the cells off ice and appropriate tissues or organs grown in the event that I need them.
Probability of success for #4. (or even just: How often has this been done, and what proportion of attempts have been successful)
Cost of #4.
Common death-causes for which this entire exercise is useful.
...and probably a few other things I haven’t thought of. The post answers none of these, although I’m glad you brought it up anyway because at least now I know the possibility exists.
Also of note: it sounds like this is used for things like replacing failed organs with own-grown ones. Which, okay, that will buy you longer life, and that’s a good thing, and I’m sure organs grown from younger cells work better. But it doesn’t sound like it will buy you longer youth, which is what anti-aging is all about. I think your complaint might be misdirected. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you.
Getting it off the ice is relatively easy—we vitrify/freeze gametes and embryos and they grow into healthy people. I think the restrictions center mostly around the current limitations of adult stem cells (in place of embryonic or umbilical). You can do quite a few useful things but, risks.
I’m not certain about relative risk/benefit of doing those things with a cryo-preserved younger version of your adult stem cells as opposed to harvesting them when needed from a clinical perspective...but from a basic science perspective people have found rejuvenating effects from giving old mice transfusions of young blood, neural progenater cells, etc so it’s promising.
(Also, if anyone’s going to do this, you might be able to collect free goodness points by going on the bone marrow registry at little additional inconvenience.)
Upvoted for altruism.