I was taking a Biology class today about cloning and DNA. My professor explained that if you made a clone of yourself, it would still be “your DNA age.”
So my question is: why does DNA age?
Will it be possible for humanity to discover a way to make clones that are born with new DNA?
In: Biology
DNA is like a picture.
When you’re born, you get the best, highest quality possible picture.
Whenever your cells duplicate, a tiny bit of quality is lost. (like when you convert a picture to JPEG)
Over time this accumulates and some copies can end up so low quality they start being faulty.
Sometimes the faulty cells cannibalize other cells. (cancer)
If you clone someone, you need their DNA. But all their current DNA has lost a bit of precision that you cannot recover. The same way you can’t take a picture, convert it to JPEG, and convert it back to the original format and expect the picture to be pixel perfect. There is information loss.
However you might be able to “fake” younger DNA the same way we do AI upscales: ask a program to fill in the blank to end up with what it “should” have looked like before. But it’s not perfect.
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