Fight Aging! Reports From the Front Line in the Fight Against Aging Reported by Reason
Fight Aging! exists to help ensure that initiatives with a good shot at greatly extending healthy human longevity become well known, supported, and accepted throughout the world. To this end, Fight Aging! publishes material intended to publicize, educate, and raise awareness of progress in longevity science, as well as the potential offered by future research. These are activities that form a vital step on the road towards far healthier, far longer lives for all.
The Public Cannot Distinguish Between Scientific versus Unscientific, Likely Good versus Likely Bad Approaches to Longevity August, 2020 One of the challenges inherent in patient advocacy for greater human longevity, for more research into aging and rejuvenation, is that journalists and the public at large either cannot or will not put in the effort needed to distinguish between: (a) scientific, plausible, and likely useful projects, those with a good expectation of addressing aging to a meaningful degree; (b) scientific, plausible, and likely unhelpful projects, those that will do little to move the needle on life expectancy, and (c) products and programs that consist of marketing, lies, and little else. This last category is depressingly large, and the first category still depressingly small. There are examples of useful, high-expectation scientific projects in the senolytics industry, working on the means of removing senescent cells from old tissues. In animal models this is far and away the most impressive approach to rejuvenation attempted to date, applicable to many age-related diseases. The first good senolytic therapy will be revolutionary for human health in later life. As a counterpoint, an example of a poor and unhelpful scientific project is the use of metformin as a geroprotective drug, an approach that appears to very modestly and unreliably slow the progression of aging. Beneficial effects in animal studies are haphazard and small. The single study in diabetic humans shows only a small effect size. If devoting vast expense to clinical trials that target the mechanisms of aging, then why do so for a marginal therapy? Lastly, for examples of marketing and lies, one has to look no further than the established “anti-aging” industry and all of its nonsense and magical thinking. Apple stem cells. Random peptides with cherry-picked studies. Clearly no meaningful effects in the many humans using these products. www.alcor.org
As meaningful attempts to produce rejuvenation therapies progress, and begin to attract greater attention in the world at large, we continue to see articles such as the one I’ll point out today, in which no attempt is made to differentiate between sleep strategies, stem cell therapies, senolytics, metformin, and other approaches good and bad. High expectation versus low expectation of gains in health, good data versus bad data in animal studies, scientific or unscientific, it is all just lumped into the same bucket. This is unfortunate, as it leads to the situation in which any arbitrary health-focused demagogue selling branded coffee is presented just as legitimate and useful to the field as an industry leader in the clinical development of actual rejuvenation therapies, or another industry leader working on projects that can in principle only produce small gains in late life health. Which is clearly not the case. As a 60-year-old, you can practice changing your sleep and coffee habits, you can take a calorie restriction mimetic, or you can take senolytics, and only one of those three things is going to make a very sizable difference to your health and remaining life expectancy. Why Silicon Valley Execs Are Investing Billions to Stay Young Dave Asprey, 48, is the founder of the Bulletproof wellness empire and a vocal champion of the movement to extend human life expectancy beyond 100 years. He’s made millions by experimenting on his own body and packaging his homebrewed discoveries into books, a podcast, consulting services and consumer products (you may have even tried his butterlaced coffee). Thanks to a recent explosion of advances in longevity medicine, Asprey’s vision of living healthfully into his second century might not be so crazy. In fact, for people in middle age right now, a handful of therapies in clinical trials have the potential, for the first time in human history, to radically transform what “old age” looks like. If the life extensionists are right, a person who’s 40 today might reasonably expect to still be downhill skiing, running a 10K or playing singles tennis at 100.
Cryonics / 1st Quarter 2021
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