I read Long For This World and both gunk and cancer were on Aubrey De Grey's list of 7 Deadly Killers (or whatever it was). The impression I came away with from that book was gunk was a plausible target for future technological remedy but cancer presented a much more difficult problem (for reasons explained in the book.)
The careful qualifications to your case above seem to catch this objection, but based on my reading that book, I would gather that supercenternarians dying of gunk not cancer aren't necessarily immune from cancer. They may just be lucky in that gunk, at this period in history, got to them first.
If it isn't luck but something else, there's also the problem of extrapolating a therapy from that. De Vere's solution to cancer was replacing every cell in the body every 7 or 8 years to circumvent the effects of telemerase ( or something like that, I'm not a gerontologist obviously.) It would be interesting if these supercenternarians's bodies were doing something like this, but it would be more interesting if it led to a more practical therapy.
The careful qualifications to your case above seem to catch this objection, but based on my reading that book, I would gather that supercenternarians dying of gunk not cancer aren't necessarily immune from cancer. They may just be lucky in that gunk, at this period in history, got to them first.
If it isn't luck but something else, there's also the problem of extrapolating a therapy from that. De Vere's solution to cancer was replacing every cell in the body every 7 or 8 years to circumvent the effects of telemerase ( or something like that, I'm not a gerontologist obviously.) It would be interesting if these supercenternarians's bodies were doing something like this, but it would be more interesting if it led to a more practical therapy.