I was thinking of how we could increase the lifespans of our pets so that they could live their lives alongside ours, from birth to death, but quickly realized that it’s a more open-ended question than that. What is the current state of the art thinking on genetically engineering us, our pets, any organism really for increased longevity? Do we basically grasp the ins and outs, do we know why we live 70 years and a dog only 10? Do we know how to do it (in principle), but don’t have the current technology to do it?
Age has more than one cause, a variety of them in fact, and only few are known. I’m almost certain they don’t have the knowledge to fix any of it at a genetic level.
Here is a wiki article about a guy who has bred fruit flies to live ~4 times longer than normal, so it seems that while there is no current answer, some will be found eventually.
A while ago (in the midlle 90’, I would say), researchers did link aging to the activity of an enzyme called telomerase. In brief, when you breed cells, some cells die from time to time, some divide divide from time to time and your culture goes on, generation after generation. However, it was found that cells always stop dividing after a certain number of generations. It works as if there was a counter that counts the number of divisions in a line of cells and stops the division after a while. However, this counter can be reset by the telomerase (look at the link above for the mechanism).
Researchers overactivated telomerase in mice and found that these mice were aging much slower. Bingo ? No. These mice just had a little problem: they would develop a lot of cancers. Indeed, one of the functions of this counter is to prevent cancer. In other words, a cancer will be initiated when the cell division control system has been altered by a spontaneous mutation, but it cannot unless the telomerase has been overactivated by another spontaneous mutation. Therefore, this counter system lowers the rate of cancers occurences in normal mice. In other words, overactivating telomerase results in destroying one of the anti-cancer failsafe. Bad idea.
In general, trying genetic engineering for increased longevity means messing with the cell division control system in a variety of cells type, and this is a fairly dangerous area because a screwed up cells division system is the basic cause of a cancer.
Aubrey de Grey has proposed his Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence, SENS for short, and he claims to be confident that at least some people now living might live to 1000 years of age, or perhaps more – essentially, extending the human lifespan bit by bit, while concurrently developing more effective technologies to do so, enabling us to extend our lifespan by yet another bit, and so on. Here’s a TED talk by him on the subject.
However, to gather evidence that biological immortality isn’t necessarily pure fiction, one need only take a look at a small freshwater organism called Hydra, which does not appear to age and may thus well be biologically immortal.