If You Could Rejuvenate Three Parts Of Your Body

Suppose you find a lamp that contains a genie. Suppose the genie grants you 3 wishes to make parts of your body young again. You have to use the wishes by age 55 (before most old age diseases become apparent) or immediately if you are already over 50. The wishes are for only parts of the body. Each could make an organ (and the skin is an organ) or subsystem (e.g. immune cells or spine) young again. You couldn't wish your entire chest or entire leg be young again. But you could wish your heart or your muscles to return to youthfulness. Also, you could wish any other single organ (or pairs in the case of eyes, kidneys, or other organs that come in pairs or all the parathyroids that come in quadruplets) to be young again.

Okay, with these restrictions in mind what would you wish to make young again in your body?

A woman friend of mine would waste no time in wishing her skin young again. No sags, discolorations, wrinkles. But she'd be at least partially disappointed since the bones in her face and the rest of her body also age and shift around. Also, one would really need to rejuvenate fat cells as well in order to rejuvenate the face. Would you go for appearances? You could opt for younger skin, fat cells, and bones. This would yield benefits other than with appearances.

Some people will have an easy decision to make if they already have heart problems or perhaps failing kidneys or liver damaged by hepatitis C or alcohol. Imminent threats make prioritizing a much simpler task.

Before reading further have you made up your mind? Next I'll say what I would choose for my top rejuvenation wishes.

The first thing I'd go for is a totally rejuvenated vascular system. This would greatly reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke among other cardiovascular diseases. But it would also help the brain substantially by cutting back on brain microbleeds, probably reducing inflammation that leads to Alzheimer's disease, and reducing risk of dementia. My problem would be in deciding when to opt for the therapy. At 50? Or at 55? If I wait longer will I suffer from some otherwise avoidable brain damage? Or will I benefit more by protecting my body into a more distant future?

After the rejuvenated vascular system I would opt for a rejuvenated immune system. Why? Of course some old folks die from influenza and other diseases because their immune systems are too weak. But that is not my biggest reason. One of the most interesting research reports of the last year reported aging immune systems become less able to kill early stage cancer cells. If I could know exactly which organ I might get cancer I would opt to rejuvenate that organ. But since I can't know which organ poses the biggest threat the next best way to cut my cancer risk (short of total body rejuvenation) is to make my immune system young again and far more able to kill aberrant cells before they develop into a full cancer.

Notice how I'm not going for internal organ rejuvenation. That's because I do not know which internal organ of mine puts me at greatest risk. Now, maybe 5 or 10 years from now blood tests and biopsies of internal organs will provide us much longer warnings of which organ looks likely to fail first. In the future then I'd want to have up-to-date lab tests before using my wishes. Heck, given such wishes I would want to go for a full physical even with today's testing capabilities. But absent a firm idea on which organ will fail first my preferences lean toward the circulatory system and immune system.

My third choice is hardest. I could just guess on some internal organ like the heart or maybe the liver or prostate and say "give me a new one". Maybe it would make sense to look at a list of causes of death and choose the organ that rates highest in combined causes. For example, liver failure and liver cancer both kill.

But I'm strongly biased toward rejuvenating my brain. First off, doing so will boost my productivity. Second, I'll avoid the risk of assorted causes of dementia, especially when combined with vascular rejuvenation. Plus, the brain does a lot of chemical endocrine signaling to the rest of the body (e.g. from the hypothalamus). That signaling will be done better by a younger brain.

So what's your list? Got good reasons for rejuvenating one part of your body or another?