Suppose we could isolate and inactivate the genes responsible for bringing humans into puberty. Would this also shut down the ageing process? Suppose you were able to alter a human’s DNA in this way-would such a person live forever?
I am not an expert of any kind but since castratos still aged and died, I would doubt it.
Besides, who wants to spend all of eternity insulting the entire Universe? 
DNA doesn’t cause puberty directly. That is the work of hormonal processes and we know how to shut most of those down either through surgical means or biochemically via drugs. As noted, it doesn’t halt the aging process. Nobody knows exactly what causes human aging but it seems to be related by the number of DNA replications that a particular organism can survive and probably several other factors. It wouldn’t be unheard of to find a cure for most aging but your idea is not the best way. Shutting down those hormonal systems would have some very severe effects both mentally and physically. They may not be completely dysfunctional but normal sexual differentiation would be interfered with or altered. Even then, we would still need separate cures for things like osteoarthritis (aka wear and tear joint problems) as well as other kinds of mechanical injury anywhere in the body.
Isn’t there a disease that causes people to not go through puberty? They still age, IIRC, just -uhm- differently.
We’re more likely to achieve immortality by research into [url=]http://www.telomeres.net/ These are little tails on the DNA that reproduce fully when we are young but only partially as we age.
I hear the current thinking about mortality is that we all carry dozens or hundreds of genetic diseases whose onset is well after childbearing age and which evolution has had little or no motivation to fix - or, who knows, maybe motivation to not fix (so we get out of our descendent’s way).
Whatever genetic mechanisms facilitate puberty aren’t really like links in the same chain.
Perhaps some later-onset ailments build upon the effects of puberty, so these ought to be reduced or eliminated if you skip puberty. For example, male hormones increase the incidence of heart attack, one reason why people with more ear hair are liklier to have one. No cite, but I’m guessing the castrati had fewer heart attacks.
Of course, you should be careful what you wish for. Men have more heart attacks, but unless they have them at an unusually young age, they also survive a greater fraction of their heart attacks than women. Seems men grow more little arteries around their heart - “collateral circulation”, I think it’s called, in an apparent evolutionary remedy for the higher heart attack rate. So, when a man’s arteries plug, he’s liklier to have other pathways serving the same bit of heart muscle. So long as he waits until middle age when these pathways have had a chance to grow, that is.
Would stopping puberty have more of an effect of reducing the liklihood of a heart attack, or more of an effect of retarding the development of collateral circulation? When the same underlying phenomenon influences contradictory effects, you don’t know how the overall result is going to change when you change the underlying phenomenon.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
(Susan Ertz)
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
(Woody Allen)