Blood transfusions are old and safe tech. I don't see any reason why you couldn't right now go into a nursing home and begin intensive transfusion therapy and see what happened. in fact, the weird thing here is that only Stanford is doing something like this.
Which leads me to believe that one of the real obstacles here is going to be the legalities and logistics of actually testing something and bringing it to market. If you have a cough and I give you a pill, either you stop coughing or you don't. We have a very tight feedback loop: in the order of hours or days. But if you're 50-years-old and want to live another ten years? We just can't wait around for 40-year feedback loops. It simply won't work.
So I'm convinced that some improvement is possible over the next decade: perhaps on the order of 10-20 extra years of life. But treatment is going to exist in a really weird grey area. You could either travel to a country with little or no drug oversight or you could try getting off-label or black market treatments. The drug approval system in the U.S. is simply not equipped to make serious decisions about medicines with these kinds of effects.
Sidebar: the interesting question is whether or not we're close to the point where increases in lifespan happen faster than aging itself: have we reached the 1000-year person point? I'm almost certain the answer is no, but I think we may be within 100 years of it. My intuition is that as we keep pushing the human biological machine, it will find new and unique ways of breaking down. The most obvious example is cancer. The longer you live, the more likely you are to get cancer -- and we're a long ways from a cure for cancer. Still, this is a very fascinating field to watch.
One problem is the unknown blood transmitted illness (something like AIDS, or Hepatitis C, some years ago before the blood tests were common). In the normal case, you are in an ER and your options are dying now or a blood transfusion with a low probability of an unknown illness. In this case, you are trying to live for a looong time, and receive a lot of transfusions. Each transfusion increase the probability of a problem, and the possibility that your life expectancy is reduced.
Which leads me to believe that one of the real obstacles here is going to be the legalities and logistics of actually testing something and bringing it to market. If you have a cough and I give you a pill, either you stop coughing or you don't. We have a very tight feedback loop: in the order of hours or days. But if you're 50-years-old and want to live another ten years? We just can't wait around for 40-year feedback loops. It simply won't work.
So I'm convinced that some improvement is possible over the next decade: perhaps on the order of 10-20 extra years of life. But treatment is going to exist in a really weird grey area. You could either travel to a country with little or no drug oversight or you could try getting off-label or black market treatments. The drug approval system in the U.S. is simply not equipped to make serious decisions about medicines with these kinds of effects.
Sidebar: the interesting question is whether or not we're close to the point where increases in lifespan happen faster than aging itself: have we reached the 1000-year person point? I'm almost certain the answer is no, but I think we may be within 100 years of it. My intuition is that as we keep pushing the human biological machine, it will find new and unique ways of breaking down. The most obvious example is cancer. The longer you live, the more likely you are to get cancer -- and we're a long ways from a cure for cancer. Still, this is a very fascinating field to watch.