I don’t think that’s really going to be such a great idea. Having a new set of organs on a 20 year cycle doesn’t address the real causes of aging and would put undue, possibly lethal stress on you because an “everything replacement” would take days of work and require dozens of specialists rearranging your insides. It also won’t stop your body from losing its ability to repair cellular damage on a macro scale. That’s there we need to look to things like stem cell treatments for tissue and organ rejuvenation, and nanotech.

Of course this is all not to take away from the significance of this success story. It opens the door to create other synthetic organs with stem cells the way doctors always dreamed of and help prevent deaths of those on organ transplant lists as well as drastically increasing their quality of life. But it’s not an anti-aging technology by any means.

I know that, for diseases like type 1 diabetes, this type of treatment is one that researchers are very hopefully to hammer out. We certainly have a long way to go — a pancreas is much more of a challenge than a trachea, as was said already — but just knowing that the basic science is there and up for the challenge is encouraging.

I’d say that in the fight against many diseases, we humans just scored a major victory.