Can humans become immortal

FYI, actually, it has sort of happened already, but the results were not good. In 1993, a baby girl named Brooke Greenberg was born in Baltimore, MD and appeared to be a normal child. Unknown to her, her parents, and her doctors, however, she was born with a genetic mutation to some key “control genes”, that caused her body and organs to age at vastly different rates. Her brain, body structure, and some organs for example, stopped aging after a few months to years … completely stopped. Parts of her became immortal in a way. They remained toddler-like for almost 2 decades. Her brain froze in neural development at about 9 months of age. She could not speak or talk or learn language. Conversely, her bones, teeth and blood biologically aged (but did not grow larger) at different rates. Geneticists studying her in America had to name a new condition for her, called “Syndrome X”. Here is a photo of her at age 20:

Several media outlets, including NBC’s Dateline, did stories about her and even called her “Immortal”, an obviously eye-catching claim. Fortunately, her family was very caring and she remained with them. She died in 2013 at 20 years old of a rare cartilage/bone condition probably related to her genetic abnormalities. The photo above is of her shortly before she died. Note that the definition of Immortality does not include indestructibility. “Immortal” organisms could still suffer injury or death. Since then, a few other children worldwide have been discovered with arrested stages of development, but none appear to have had Brooke’s genetic mutations. What is of key interest here, is the bigger problem of human Immortality. If we could somehow edit our genome to stop us from aging, WHEN it kicked in would be of paramount importance. Either we age normally, or we don’t. If we program our cells and organs not to age, then we would be trapped in an infant or toddler’s body for decades or longer, being unable to read, speak, think properly, mature, reach puberty, mate, have children or pass on our immortal nature. What good is immortality if we can’t talk, walk or grow up. The only way this might work is if we were allowed to age normally but then somehow HALTED our aging process, only when we reached say 20 - 30 years old (stopping it as a teenager would be bad, because teens are not yet developmentally ready to handle living in the world’s troubles and foibles). Unfortunately, there is nothing genetically that occurs to us at age 25 or so, that humans could reasonably target. We would have to make major wholesale changes to many different genes. Timing of this change genetically would be the toughest, most complex Biochemical problem our species would ever face, even if we had the brains to do it. Also, the odds of some scientist making a big mistake and creating a “freak” would be high. In the meantime, we would probably blow each other up, poison our planet, destroy the atmosphere, biologically attack each other, create genetic super-soldiers that hunt us down, or die of nuclear war. Frankly, I dearly hope something stops us from creating immortality. The Earth is reeling enough from the disaster that is Homo sapiens, to have to face billions more of us living for centuries. God help us all!

Can humans become immortal