In June, a human being received a treatment designed to make old cells behave younger. And not just behave younger. Be younger. This was a matter of science fiction, until it wasn’t.

ER-100, developed by Life Biosciences, is an experimental therapy for optic neuropathies, or any damage to the nerve that relays visual information from the human eye to the brain. The treatment isn’t meant to make anyone immortal, but simply to demonstrate, as proof of concept, that the treatment is safe. The company had already conducted multiple rounds of treatment in animal clinical trials, including mice and primates, before this trial was approved by the FDA in Jan. 2026. The science behind the treatment itself, though, is based on a controversial, yet provocative idea: that some of the biological changes associated with aging may be entirely reversible through certain stem cell factors.

Researchers have spent years investigating whether cells can be partially returned to a more youthful state through a process known as epigenetic reprogramming. Epigenetics is a field of genetic study on how genes are controlled and expressed in cells. For example, while a skin cell and stomach cell contain the same DNA, a skin cell would express genes that are left unexpressed in a stomach cell and vice versa, allowing cells to carry out specialized functions despite originating from the same DNA. These switches for genes, however, start to function improperly over time, switching on and off the incorrect genes for specific cell types. Epigenetic reprogramming is when scientists turn on and off certain genes within a cell to facilitate proper function. The proposed treatment would enable epigenetic reprogramming by switching on three Yamanaka stem cells transcription factors (OCT4, SOX2 & KLF4) present in all cell types, allowing for any cell to reset its epigenetic clock and thereby function correctly while silencing the rest of genome again. This would, in essence, functionally reset the cell’s age. This was demonstrated in recent mice and primate trials and, now, will be attempted on human clinical trials though Life Bioscience’s new ocular treatment.

Now, this is not to say that we are anywhere near close to proving that humans can reverse aging, much less live indefinitely. A successful result in mice does not guarantee a successful treatment in humans. Even if this therapy works, it may ultimately be useful only for treating specific diseases. But I think we should ask the uncomfortable question anyways: What happens if it works? I believe we have a responsibility to think about the consequences of transformative technologies before they become a reality.

Modern society is built around aging. We educate young people because they will eventually enter the workforce. We spend decades working because we expect to eventually retire. We accumulate savings because we expect our productive years to be limited. We pass wealth from one generation to another because each generation eventually dies. Each and every one of those cycles would be broken in a world where scientists develop a treatment that allows people to remain healthy for decades longer than they otherwise would have. Everything we have ever known about these cycles would transform the way humans operate.

Would retirement still begin at 65? If someone remained healthy and cognitively capable at 90, why should they leave the workforce? Would people have three or four careers over the course of their lives? What would happen to the socio-economic ladder? Would someone go to college at 18, work for 30 years, return to school at 55 and begin an entirely new profession? The stages of life that currently seem natural might begin to look arbitrary. These are issues that society will have to grapple with in the coming decades if we are to prevent another coming of Artificial Intelligence.

With AI involved, longevity research becomes a part of a much larger issue. AI did not suddenly appear when ChatGPT was released in 2022. The field had been developing for seven decades by then and had already made significant breakthroughs beginning in 2015 with Google Deepmind’s AlphaGo, an AI model that beat the world’s top player at Go, a game with more moves than countable atoms in the observable universe, using a strategy never before considered by humans. Even more significantly, Deepmind released another significant breakthrough only two years later in 2018 when it created AlphaFold, an machine-learning engine that allowed scientists to accurately predict tertiary protein shapes for the first time ever, making significant progress towards one of the largest shortcomings in the biological sciences. In the decade leading up to ChatGPT’s release to the greater public in 2022, it was already becoming clear that increasingly powerful machine-learning systems could eventually have profound consequences. Yet, these developments occurred largely out of the public eye, not because researchers were deliberately attempting to hide them, but because the public itself did not pay much attention to the technology despite tech’s world-wide impact with smartphones and social media at the time. As such, much of the broader public conversation about AI only occurred after AI swarmed classrooms, workplaces and our personal lives.

Today we are still determining how schools should respond to AI-generated work, how governments should regulate capable and increasingly autonomous systems, how employees and companies should adapt to automation and how individuals should protect themselves against new forms of misinformation. Perhaps we could have asked some of those questions earlier, even if in 2016, people still believed that AI was a distant reality decades away from impacting our present lives. We couldn’t have predicted what AI would become, but we could have begun thinking about the future while it was still coming.

When a technology is in its experimental phase, we still have the luxury of time to ask what kind of future we want to build with it. Once it becomes ubiquitous, the conversation changes from asking, “what should we do?” to “how do we deal with what has already happened?”

Longevity research gives us the opportunity to practice thinking ahead and it is hardly the only technology deserving of our attention to its potential impacts on society. CRISPR could change how we treat and possibly prevent genetic disease. Gene drives could give humans the ability to alter the fate of species and ecosystems, including and especially our own. Quantum computers could threaten some of the encryption protecting modern digital life, while also promising to revolutionize prediction of nature itself. True nuclear fusion, achieved as a proof of concept in 2022, has since been expanded on in the hopes of allowing humanity to grasp the power of the limitless energy from the sun right on Earth. Brain-computer interfaces could change the boundary between what it means to be human and machine.

None of these futures are guaranteed, but that is no reason to ignore them. It is a reason to discuss them and to begin to have conversations with the researchers responsible for our futures while we still can.