The quest for immortality - statistical approach

For long time I've been thinking how can be achieved health, youth, longevity and maybe immortality. There are several methods, most famous being, replacing the body parts, including the brain with mechanical/cybernetic parts and manipulating genes, cells, chemicals, etc in the body, so it can be made to rejuvenate or at least to stop ageing. For me the first method seems to be too far fetched for the technology available at the moment, but the second one looks pretty credible. So I looked further down in this idea and found that, essentially there are two overlapping approaches. First making or finding and infecting ourselves with genes which will command the body to do the task, or the other somewhat based no Richard Dawkins ideas is to see what changes, how and why and trying to trick with chemicals or something else our systems to start functioning like young/fit ones. Now both lines of work require huge amounts of work, experiments, etc, which will take long time and resources until the results start appearing. However like many other things in the life, there should be one or more ways to shortcut though all this. One idea is to see what the evolution and technology managed to achieve until the moment and applying the statistics to try to find something unnoticed. For example if we compare enough genes across of enough species we'll be bond to find something. Or to compare the enough biochemical information from young/healthy and old we maybe able to find the answers.

Why I am writhing this? Well in the light of the last two articles I have read on the topic seems that this method for finding cues is getting more and more common. One is group of scientists compared the genomes of nematode, zebra fish and mice and the other is the finding that certain drug for diabetes extend the lifespan. In the net there are enough articles on the topic so I am not going to repeat all of them again, but I think it was worth mentioning that these methods are part of new trend which relies on recently made technologies for comparing and working with big amounts of data. And the best part is that we haven't yet even approached the already available capabilities of these technologies. Just imagine what could come from properly brute forcing the genomes and the information from billions of people and creatures (some of which are actually immortal).

Sources:
ScienceDaily
NZHerald