Cancer - the Road to Immortality?

For those who want to live forever, there is currently only one approach - which is rather sketchy: I'm not talking about freezing, which causes cells to burst.

Basically, you can pickle your brain. Have your brain removed and put in a preservative liquid. This will enable to brain to survive - without freezing - until the relatively near future, when we can reconnect a brain to a body or cyborg or whatever.

It is so simply I don't know why it's not being done. There are businesses based on freezing dead people - which may never work. Why not pickling?

But there is something else that occurs to me - cancer. In cancer, the cells lose their natural inner clock - they become immortal.
Normal cells have a limited number of times they can copy. Not because they can't, but because they are programmed to die. That is why each species has a certain number of years it lives, and why people cannot live past a certain age, and why horses live so many years and tortoises and such.

So, in cancer, the cell loses this programming - programmed cell death. But isn't that a good thing? It means your cells become immortal. They don't die. The problem with cancer is they grow uncontrollably, because they lose "contact inhibition" - the tendency of a cell to stop growing when it hits another cell (this is why your skin stops growing after you get a cut. It fills in the cut but then stops.

So - many cancer is an intermediary step, between dying and immortality?

Suppose we could leave the immortality in cancer cells, but restore the contact inhibition? Wouldn't this mean that these cells would safely live for ever?

I'm not a cancer expert, so there may be something I'm missing, but if so, somebody tell me!

I Don't Want to Die - Do You?

I don't understand billionaires.

Why don't they put all their money into NOT DYING. They will support the best medical care, but why not trade their mansions, paintings, etc for MEDICAL RESEARCH that will save their lives?

Yes, Bill Gates is spending billions helping people in Africa with AIDS - that is a good thing - but why doesn't he try to save his OWN LIFE? He is aging and eventually he will die - most likely from a heart attack, cancer, or stroke. So will his wife and his children and everyone he knows and cares about and everyone they know and care about.

But if these billionaires and millionaires got together...they could start a medical research campaign to stop aging, stop heart disease, stop cancer...while they are STILL ALIVE.

These billionaires are supposed to be so super smart, so I guess I'm missing something.

I wish I could ask Bill Gates or Warren Buffet this simple question: Why don't you support research to save your own life? I would be curious to find out what they say but of course I am a nobody and have no access to them.