Aging Matters
The big news: (1) the active ingredient in E5 is exosomes. (2) Young exosomes retain their ability to rejuvenate across mammalian species lines. Work that remains: (1) calibrate a new generation of methylation clocks. (2) Combine removal of old exosomes with addition of young exosomes. Optimize dosage and timing of treatments. What is in E5, … Read more
Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) have only been studied in the 21st century. Think of them as natural lipid nanoparticles, or endogenous viruses. They transmit information around the body and they’re small enough to be exhaled and carried in the air to communicate with other individuals and even other species. EVs are encapsulated in fats that facilitate entry … Read more
The Yamanaka factors (four proteins, abbreviated OSKM) are a treatment that can completely reset any ordinary, functional cell into a pluripotent stem cell, able to regenerate tissues of any type. In the process, the cell loses epigenetic markers of age and reverts to an embryonic state. But differentiated cells are differentiated so they can be … Read more
There is still confusion about what happened during the Pandemic. The public health response was innovative, defying historic precedent. Was it effective? One reason it is hard to know is that the health records are administered by the same agency (CDC) that managed the pandemic. Death certificates are subjective, and the listed cause of death … Read more
Aspirin is an old staple for life extension. Lately it has received bad press. For those who wish to replace aspirin, there are two actions that must be considered: anti-inflammatory and blood thinning. There are many good anti-inflammatories, all of which act through similar pathways, so that in the end we don’t know have optimal … Read more
Experience tells us that it is much easier to extend median lifespan than maximum lifespan. Katcher’s trial of E5 in 8 rats breaks this expectation. The last of Harold Katcher’s rats has died, and she outlived her sisters by 7 months. Compared to controls, the average lifespan of treated rats increased 9.6%, while the maximum … Read more
I begin from the paradigm that aging is not a random process but an adaptation, a programmed self-destruction. This was my entree into the field 27 years ago, and has been the theme of much of my research, including two books. For a summary of the evidence, here’s a blog post from 2015, and here’s the … Read more
It seems too simple to explain much, but according to a study out of Northwestern University, large proteins are more prevalent in young animals compared to old. For those of us who believe that aging is programmed into the life cycle, gene expression seems the most likely transmission of information about age through the body. … Read more
Can methylation clocks be relied on in this context? The earliest clocks were trained on chronological age only, and yet they predicted morbidity and mortality better than chronological age. I’ve been enthusiastic about the technology since 2013. But recently there have been substantial challenges to the validity of all the existing clocks. An article published … Read more
The work of George Church combines a broad knowledge of science with an ambitious imagination. Our world needs visionaries, and Church is one of a kind. His Harvard laboratory is at the cutting edge of several key areas of biochemistry. Please construe the following criticism narrowly. There’s just one of his ideas that I think … Read more