48 The Dream of Elixir Vitae THERAPY AS INFORMATION A disease, any type of disease, is a time-dependent change in  the  body  that  leads  to  discomfort,  pain,  or  even  death. Therapies aim to delay, stop, or reverse those changes from occurring either by large-scale interventions, such as surgery, or by transmitting the necessary information to the body. For example, a bacterial infection may be reversed by penicillin, which is an information vector that ‘tells’ the bacterial wall to ‘open’, thus killing the bacteria and reversing the disease state. Most pharmaceutical interventions are, in essence, informa- tion  vectors  transmitting  instructions  that  are  intended  to delay, stop, or reverse the time-dependent changes related to a  given  pathology.  Antibiotics,  pain-killers,  corticosteroids, anti-depressants, and many more products fit this description. Yet present therapies transmit relatively simple instructions: a pain-killer ‘tells’ neurons to stop transmitting pain signals and corticosteroids ‘tell’ the immune system to diminish its response. Curing aging will most likely require the transmis- sion of much larger amounts of information. Aging is a sexually transmitted terminal disease that can be defined as a number of time-dependent changes in the body that lead to discomfort, pain, and eventually death. In order to cure aging we will need to target multiple types of cells and address different types of molecular damage and malfunc- tion. That is why organ transplants and surgery will not be the solution for aging, at least not a definitive cure. The future of medicine is not in large-scale interventions but in smaller, less invasive but more precise therapies. The solution to aging is not in addressing individual age-related pathologies but rather in tiny structures that are able to instruct our body to become young again. Thanks to the enzyme telomerase, it is possible to prevent cells in culture from certain forms of aging. [2] It is equally