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JenniferRM comments on Possible Implications of the neural retrotransposons to the future - Less Wrong Discussion

17 Post author: whpearson 16 February 2012 09:05PM

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Comment author: JenniferRM 17 February 2012 11:30:08PM *  3 points [-]

If they are deleterious elements then instead of making cryonics harder, my bet would that it functions as another kind of "aging" that SENS would need to be able to fix in situ in order to achieve the grand vision of truly negligible senescence. My first thought in that direction is that you might need to create artificial work-alike "cells" to incrementally replace the ones whose DNA was becoming ever more infested with endogenous parasitic transposons... which sounds like a mature nanotechnological invention to me :-/

Comment author: thelittledoctor 18 February 2012 01:15:39AM 1 point [-]

The thing is - they may have started out as a retrovirus infection, but now serve some important purpose. It's hard to say. Very butterfly effect-y.