Examine your assumptions. There is no inherent reason that there has to be a catch. We are all from a long line of cellular reproduction that has lasted billions of years. There is no inherent reasons why cellular mechanisms can't keep maintaining/replacing a collection of those cell lineages...our relatively short lifespans are probably the products of evolutionary fitness functions acting on more fruitful strategies for reproductive success than staying off aging.
When the upside is extraordinary, it’s very reasonable to expect some downside, just based on experience of, like, everything ever.
As well as the undeniable benefit to individuals, a cure for aging would unleash a whole new bunch of problems that have been kept in check through the mechanism of people dying off regularly. A society of immortals could be quite alien to us.
Biology is one of very few areas of science where you do just find free lunches sometimes. Human bodies are adapted to environments with harsh constraints about injuries, pathogens, temperature, energy usage, etc. The only catch to counteracting those adaptations is that it makes you worse at being a hunter-gatherer.
> Biology is one of very few areas of science where you do just find free lunches sometimes
Good example is vitamin supplementation. There isn't a downside. It's just a fuck-up we can't synthesise vitamin C. (There may be path-dependent benefits, e.g. our jaw muscles getting smaller thereby permitting a larger brain. But we don't need to be vitamin C restricted anymore.)
Catch is perhaps a strong word. Trade-off would be more accurate.
Every action in the known universe (and surely in some unknown ones too) results in a trade-off. This is maybe the only precept on software architecture that doesn't "depends" on anything and is closer to natural law.
Sure, but there's usually plenty of other tradeoffs in any system of notable complexity. This is certainly a system of notable complexity. We may find that there is mental degradation that's not covered by this. We may discover that cancer is practically unavoidable if you live long enough, and the problem compounds even further with age than we can anticipate now. There's never just one lever being pulled in isolation.
I mean, if you gain +20 years of longevity to most of the body, but not to mind? That's still 20 extra years of lifespan if you're lucky. And if you aren't, it's still better health in general, until your mind goes.
There are old people who remain lucid and active well into their nineties, not getting dementia or cancer - through some combination of good luck, good genes and good lifestyle choices. They live a good life - until a stroke cripples them, or the heart fails them, or a very mundane illness like flu puts them in bed and they never quite recover from it. If that couldn't happen to them, how many more good years would that buy them?
Any treatment that addresses the aging-associated systematic decline in bodily functions should be extremely desirable. Even if it wouldn't help everyone live longer, it would help a lot of people live better lives nonetheless.
My personal thought on the "catch" (of "curing death") is that we seriously don't understand how removing or slowing evolution in the equation at the population level plays out over time. Evolution seems to be a fairly robust and complex subsystem of reality.
My assumption is, there are lots of rich people who want to live forever and lots of people who want their wealth and breakthroughs with anti ageing were quite rare or rather non existent as far as I know.
My assumption is that I'd feel more certain if this science had been conducted in the U.S. or Europe, but your assumptions is a little too conspiratorial for me.
