Aging Matters
Rebalancing proteins in the blood is the single most promising strategy for age reversal in the present environment. There are two competing schools for how to approach this. I’m calling on both to put their heads together and develop a strategy that combines their insights. <rant> Please forgive me while I rant for a paragraph … Read more
Sickening by John Abramson, MD. Mariner Books, 2022, ISBN 978-1328957818 This book describes the top-to-bottom control over medical research and its dissemination exerted by large drug manufacturers. Of course, they have their own research staff, paid to test their patented drugs and make sure those tests come out favorably. In addition, they are the largest sponsors … Read more
Harold Katcher’s patent was unveiled last week, and it’s not what I thought it would be. I thought it would be a list of several molecular forms, together with recipes for how to make them and how to administer them intravenously for increased longevity. I hoped it would inspire laboratories around the world to replicate … Read more
Preliminary results from lifespan studies with E5 Harold Katcher has developed a protocol for lab rats using intravenous injection with a blood plasma fraction he calls “E5”. Three years ago, he announced that treated rats evinced many features of rejuvenation, including improvements in grip strength, endurance, and learning capacity. Two years ago, he announced that … Read more
I have promoted the idea that aging is programmed and that the program is epigenetic. Hence epigenetic age is fundamental. But what is it that imprints epigenetic age on the chromosomes and keeps it updated? Is the “methylation clock” responding to a higher authority, a separate clock which coordinates epigenetic age throughout the body? Do … Read more
Surviving Death: a journalist investigates evidence for an afterlife by Leslie Kean Readers of this blog are interested in life extension. We relish the experience of being alive, and we struggle with dread of death, and there is diversity among us how much relish and how much dread we harbor. We believe in the … Read more
Antioxidants proved a bust for life extension almost 25 years ago, but glutathione stands out as an exception. We lose glutathione as we age, and supplementing to increase glutathione levels has multiple benefits, possibly on lifespan. Glutathione is manufactured in the body via an ancient mechanism taking as input cysteine, glutamic acid, and glycine. Supplementing N-Acetyl … Read more
A methylation clock is an empirical construct. There is no understanding of physiology or metabolism built into the process. The clock is engineered to do the best job predicting (in the case of the GRIM-Age clock, for example) future mortality and morbidity based on methylation patterns. The whole process is agnostic about biological mechanism. It … Read more
One reason I love this topic is that I have centered my academic career around the thesis that aging is a socially-evolved phenomenon. Another is that it’s even more fun than intermittent fasting. There has been a great deal of prejudice against this topic since the most popular evolutionary theory of aging [1957] hypothesized (with … Read more
The genome of Omicron has taken the community of public health scientists by surprise. Not only are there a large number of mutations, but some of these mutations have not been observed in the many previous genome analyses, thousands of which are being conducted in labs around the world. Among scientists, there are five competing … Read more