Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life

Not really, no. There are examples of complex multicellular animal life with negligible senescence: some species of tortoises, of sturgeon, naked mole-rats — they don't die "of old age", only by illness and violence.

But even if there was no free lunch, we might just be able to pay the price in a way that evolution can't; I'd be very surprised if we could even engineer a gene for an organic MRI machine, let alone have one evolve naturally, but we can use what genetics evolution gave us to build a machine to liquify helium to turn unnatural rocks into superconductors to peer within our bodies and look for growths.

We don’t know what it will take to make us healthier/love longer.

All we are doing is trying to understand our bodies.

All cancer and heart healthier research is also trying to effectively increase human lifespan. So are anti smoking campaigns and seat belts.

No one would comment the way you did for these. We just take these for granted as a good thing.

But trying to understand the genetic basis of aging is however you put it.

The main advantage we have found so far is that drug studies done on rats can serve as a reference for safe and potentially effective dosages, as there's very little veterinary literature on rodent care otherwise. All meds for rats are typically repurposed cat, dog or human meds and determining the dose needed for treatment is trial and error more often than not – even in the hands of an experienced vet.

I see DNA as a code that has been written by nature over millennia.

We don't understand the genetic code well enough to hack or rewrite our DNA to grant us longevity. However, we might discover a species in nature with relevant genetic traits and replicate those parts, assuming that the species is not extinct.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7...

If we've managed to wipe out 70% of animal populations in just 50 years, it doesn't seem like it will take long for those remaining populations to collapse.

- More losers than winners: investigating Anthropocene defaunation through the diversity of population trends [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.12974]

- The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately [https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap...]

https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline

Wild mammals have declined by 85% since the rise of humans

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204892120

The total mammal biomass:

- livestock (≈630 Mt)

- humans (≈390 Mt)

- wild marine mammals (≈40 Mt)

- terrestrial wild mammals (≈20 Mt)

Of the last category, about half is mice. And that's just mammals. Look at insects (80% decline), sharks (80-90%), fish (seas virtually empty in 2040's), birds (about 30-50% decline), etc. etc.

https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation

The primary driver of deforestation and subsequent biodiversity loss is animal agriculture, which occupies 80% of all agricultural lands. Our industrial agriculture, excluding animal agriculture, is also a significant contributor to biodiversity loss and soil degradation (also a form of biodiversity loss) due to its use of pesticides, herbicides, and over use of fertilizers.

The majority of our pharmaceuticals originally stem from nature. We've just learned to read, and manipulate the genetic code, while simultaneously depleting the largest repository of such code.

And this discussion doesn't even touch upon the ethical or moral implications of such behavior or the theft from future generations or zoonotic diseases ...

- Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/]

- Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss [https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries#Nine_boun...