This isn't going to be easy, but an alternative to molecular cures is an organismal-level cure.
Replace the whole body. All the cancerous, pre-cancerous, and worn down, aging and diseased cells wholesale.
Grow monoclonal headless human bodies in a lab. Innervate, artificially supply with hormones, and grow until puberty. No head. (Genetically or surgically stop precursor cells early on in development.) Grow the bodies artificially in pig uteruses at scale. Make it a monoclonal line that is O-, HLA neutral, etc. to avoid transplant rejection and the need for immunosuppressants.
Before these are ready for human use, they can be used for population studies and in situ experiments. They can also be used for organ transplants.
Develop and perfect human head transplantation. Try it on terminal patients, paralyzed patients, et al. Get good at it. Early results won't be good, but given time to develop, we might be able to reattach the spinal system.
Transplant recipients get a new pulmonary, cardiovascular, and circulatory systems. New thymuses with better immune systems. This could be a non-negligible boost to human lifespan.
New bodies can be genetically modified to have higher VO2 max and other stats. You could choose the height, build, and gender of your new body. Literally everything.
This is better than duct taping aging components in place. It's replacing everything but the head and brain, which is where we should be moving as a society anyway.
It won't cure brain, blood cancers, or Alzheimer's. But it'll be useful against heart disease, lung disease, liver disease. Everything else.
> It won't cure brain, blood cancers, or Alzheimer's.
Blood cancers are some of the most successfully-treated cancers. One of the effective--but risky--treatments of last resort is close to this futuristic fantasy you're imagining: there are leukemia/lymphoma patients who've been cured by destroying their bone marrow and then replacing it with healthy bone marrow. It's done using donor marrow, umbilical stem cells, or even the patient's own marrow that's been extracted, treated, and returned to the patient after they wipe everything out. It's pretty close to a full replacement.
Most of what you're suggesting isn't possible with any current or likely near-future technology, but curing blood cancers this way is already mainstream medicine. In some cases, patients that have undergone this treatment have also been cured of AIDS and other "incurable" diseases.
This is unlikely to work, as the brain regulates many bodily functions on a neurohormonal basis, so the headless body won’t develop properly. You can get abnormal heart rhythms from a stroke in certain parts of the brain for example.
i could see science getting to a point where you could grow a human body, but I don't think we could surmount the challenge of transplanting a head and successfully integrating the brain from your "old body" onto your "new body".
More specifically, I think even if you could perfectly reattach every nerve from the brain to the spinal cord, your brain might still not know how to control the new body.
(There's my armchair scientist contribution for the month)
Phantom limb syndrome is thought to be caused by the brain adapting to changed signals from the limb's nerves. It means years of pain, itching, false sensation. I can't even begin to imagine what it would take to address phantom body syndrome.
A medication (topomax) once gave me the reverse. My left arm felt like a complete stranger. Was terrified of it. Intellectually I understood it was just the medication screwing with me. Emotionally I wanted to take a chainsaw to that arm.
We are the ancient Greeks, we’ve invented written language and some of our famous philosophers and orators are very upset about how this is changing the human condition.
In the same way the ancient Greeks made the Aeolipile[0] and could probably imagine it doing something useful, we can bioprint tissue and imagine it doing something useful.
If full-body printing is as far off as the industrial revolution, mind uploading is as far off as the internet — while we can detect neuron firing when it happens, AFAIK we don’t have any way to read even a single synaptic connection strength, despite the OpenWorm and Neuralink projects and similar, because nobody has been willing to fund that research.
I love how geeks readily fantasize over this "no body" experience when everything we know about how our conscience is shaped is determined by our body.
You can't really separate the two without us turning into something else. Our bodies define the human experience.
I know that we really, really want to be some ethereal beings, but we're not.
I'm not even sure the "no body" situation is superior, we'd probably be psychologically very different and I'm not convinced we'd be better (not feeling pain, for example, is a pretty sure fire way to lose empathy).
Replace the whole body. All the cancerous, pre-cancerous, and worn down, aging and diseased cells wholesale.
Grow monoclonal headless human bodies in a lab. Innervate, artificially supply with hormones, and grow until puberty. No head. (Genetically or surgically stop precursor cells early on in development.) Grow the bodies artificially in pig uteruses at scale. Make it a monoclonal line that is O-, HLA neutral, etc. to avoid transplant rejection and the need for immunosuppressants.
Before these are ready for human use, they can be used for population studies and in situ experiments. They can also be used for organ transplants.
Develop and perfect human head transplantation. Try it on terminal patients, paralyzed patients, et al. Get good at it. Early results won't be good, but given time to develop, we might be able to reattach the spinal system.
Transplant recipients get a new pulmonary, cardiovascular, and circulatory systems. New thymuses with better immune systems. This could be a non-negligible boost to human lifespan.
New bodies can be genetically modified to have higher VO2 max and other stats. You could choose the height, build, and gender of your new body. Literally everything.
This is better than duct taping aging components in place. It's replacing everything but the head and brain, which is where we should be moving as a society anyway.
It won't cure brain, blood cancers, or Alzheimer's. But it'll be useful against heart disease, lung disease, liver disease. Everything else.