This book was recommended to me by a denizen of r/longevity. Fair warning, my expectations are NOT high. I am not interested in reading this book, and the odds of this review coming across as anything other than shitting on the author are low (even though that is not my intention – I have great respect for anyone who puts it out there). I have already picked Consilience by Ed Wilson as a pre-emptive palate cleaner for #4, even though I suspect it hasn’t aged well.
Lol, okay maybe that level setting wasn’t the right way to go with this since my brain was in full revolt before I even started. Got stuck in the “other stuff I didn’t want to do now suddenly seem more appealing” mode.
Oh what the fuck, so I hadn’t really looked at the cover, but there’s a booster quote from the Song of The Cell author on it. I’m not sure how I feel about this.
I’m noticing that books really lean heavily on this whole “three act” conceit. Hrm.
Summary: Yeah, fucking hated it. In this book, a “Serial entrepreneur” attempts to get buy in for increased funding to their businesses. We manage to conflate minor achievements into lab into huge predictions about the future. That always works out well. Reading this book felt like listening to someone pitch timeshares.
Introduction: Sigh. We lead up with a story about his moms life. It had events. Good ones. Bad ones. Then she died badly at 92. But wait, you don’t have to die badly! Or maybe even at all! Death comes for us all, except maybe it doesn’t have to? Honestly, if this introduction was transposed outside of the context of this famous author from this famous university we’d instantly think it was an advertisement for vitamins or something.
Oh boy… he has the inside dope because he works with biotech startups and this book is going to give us the secrets to longevity his labs are introducing before they reach the public. Fuck me, when’s the SPAC IPO? Like everything about this so far raises alarm bells as a scam.
Having received the equivalent of a knighthood in Australia and taken on the role of an ambassador,
Jeffy Spaghetti. Believe in me and I shall give unto you the secrets to eternal life. This whole section reminds me of that Chapelle meeting Kanye West bit, he’s lead a dope life and does dope shit. Straight into a great man, and comparing themselves to the great man. Fucking hell. Wow, this guy is really going for it. He’s promising that due to his great work humans living past 120 and kicking around like Uncle Joe after Charlie found the golden ticket.
And by the turn of the next century, a person who is 122 on the day of his or her death may be said to have lived a full, though not particularly long, life.
Haha, this feels like watching movies from the 70’s and 80’s and their predictions about The Year 2000…. Lulz. Anyone want to bet that the author dies before a single person makes it to 122 years old again?
One: Eh, there’s pretty decent evidence that “life”, or at least the foundations of RNA world were in place ~4.3 billion years ago. Sigh, opening the book confidently asserting things about controversial topics. And if I’m reading this right, is the author asserting that it took a week for genetic material to start “competing” for resources? Wow, scanning my receipts seems really interesting right now.
Oh. This is a philosophy book. The day a philosopher understands that “evolution” is not directed toward anything, that traits get passed on by essentially weighted dumb fucking luck rather than an active mechanism is the day.. I don’t know. It’ll be a weird day. “Evolution” has no goal, not even “survival”. There’s no more “reason” to it than waves having a reason for changing, or planets, or stars, or galaxies, or whatever lies above our nervous system’s ability to comprehend.
TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A REASON
Man, people are suckers for this kind of shit. It’s religion so let’s be reverent! Oh shit, I forgot about the whole “Cancer Moonshot” bit, that explains the 1/4 of all drug development is immune related bit in Song of the Cell. So this section is fudging a tiny bit, while rate of deaths are down (diagnosis/deaths), raw death numbers are stable to increasing. Heh, this idea that individual genes have a “will to exist” is fucking bonkers (yeah, Dawkins is wrong). Please, please, no more abuse of evolution. I’m begging.
All, that is, except one: Homo sapiens.
Of course. It wouldn’t be a philosophy book without shit like this. Fuck this is masochism. He’s even “large braining” it. Our large brains are designed by evolution to beat evolution. But just our large brains of course. Not the bigger brains. Or more “efficient” brains. Or any other particular trait in human brains that supposedly sets us apart. It’s obvious, dolphins don’t build skyscrapers you see?
Haha, he’s taking shots at prior failed longevity theories, particularly anti-oxidants. And clearly got their eye on the “market” for products that support them. Wow. Bro is straight up strongly implying (but not directly saying of course) stem cell therapy is curing/extending the life span of people experiencing dementias (e.g. Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s). Holy shit. I hate this digital/analog analogy with the fiery passion of a disturbed ant.
Okay, we finally get to the point. There are magic longevity genes, and those genes are… sirtuins. Fuck me, when was this written? And mTOR? Without looking I’m betting between 2012 and 2014.
In this way, we can mimic the benefits of exercise and intermittent fasting with a single pill (I discuss this in chapter 5).
Seriously, how does this not sound scammy as hell? If the author has any nuts they’ll list the current clinicaltrials.gov IDs for his magic pills. I don’t even know that I’ll try to hunt those down, even though this is the type of shit I usually do. Thank god, end of chapter. I feel battered.
Chapter 2: In 2003, we announced the human genome had been sequenced! Except it hadn’t, the secret longevity genes were hiding in “genetic dark matter”, which account for 69% of the genome. Fucking hell this guy. It’s funny that they used 2003 as the starting point and not say… 2012 – 2014 (assuming this is when this was written).
Like, there better be a fucking miracle in the later chapters because this whole “We have a magic pill which will change the function of this particular gene and cure aging!” is absolutely horrible. I don’t want to read your autobiography dude, I want to read about your shitty magic pill. Haha, the southern blot, the high quality method that brought us two decades of alzheimer’s bullshit.
It occurs to me how pervasively work like this ripples through research reading this. Like a lot of the specific genetic targets I’ve look at are essentially copies of copies of copies of work like this. And no one ever stops and asks “Why isn’t this working!?”, they just keep replicating it until the next fad comes along. These ideas, that there’s a single pill that can be neatly packaged and sold, driven purely by profit incentive obscure the metabolic complexity of life. Because complexity is expensive and expensive cuts into margins. Our magical evolution destroying brains are tripping over themselves.
You know, in one aspect all of this is kind of cool. It’s like a time machine back 10 years ago, and being able to see the last decade of failed longevity research from the hopeful perspective of the time. And it provides a comparison point to examine whether perhaps we are making the same types of mistakes today.
Is “exercise” even correlated with longer life spans? We can argue sedentary lifestyles are negatively correlated, if we ignore the other negative environmental aspects associated with it, but has there ever been any work which consistently states anything other than light activity contributes to longer lifespans? I mean, ultramarathoners seem to die in the 50’s with shocking regularity. Same with body builders.
Wow, so I was wrong, this was written in at least 2017. Oh wow. WE GAVE THE MOUSE SIRTUIN BOOSTERS AND NOW IT’S MEGA MOUSE! Lol, it’s like the 10 million dollar mouse, it’s faster, stronger, smarter. Since built it, now it’s building justice. Or something. Lol.
Chapter 3: Is it ethical to live longer? Please just punch me in the face.
“the idea that people die of pure aging, without pathology, is nuts.”
And yet… that’s exactly what happens. This fucking book. The author is complaining that we treat “illness” too simply while attempting to sell magic genes to cure death. Is this real life? Yes, modern medicine still sucks ass. The author isn’t self aware enough to realize their philosophies are the product of modern medicine.
Okay, end of chapter, I need to take a break and put my head in the dryer with a brick in it. I hope that helps.
Chapter 4: Lol. He should have been honest and said “Every day I ignore messages from around the world, I can’t believe they messaged me about their damn hamster. Brb, gotta check to see if the mouse has stopped running.”
Heh, buried in the middle of this back patting about the miracle of modern medicine is that the greatest modifier of average human lifespans is, and always has been, external biologics. We’ve had a couple of localized blips where we managed to exceed that by killing each other even faster than the pathogens could, but in the end, the interaction between our immune system and the environment guides our lifespans.
Eat less is actually decent advice for reduction of insults, but the author misses the WHY part completely. Actually even better advice than “eat less” is “don’t be more than 1std deviation taller than median height”. Mortality tables get increasingly ugly past 6ft tall, and people like Kareem Abdul Jabbar are mega mega outliers (he won’t make it to 80). In this context it’s kind of ironic that the author focused on Okinawans, who have some of the smallest average adult heights in the world. The evidence supporting the caloric restriction conceit isn’t nearly as strong as he’s implying.
“Don’t eat red meat”. Here we go again over weighting statistical significance for effect size. Not eating “red meat” gets on average a few years more (and considering this is his #2 advice and we need to make up about 40 years worth of average lifespan… dude), but of course these studies don’t account for the differences in lifestyle between your average vegetarian and “red meat” eater. These studies are fun because they completely ignore entire populations of vegetarians which aren’t convenient because the lifespan isn’t that different (e.g. for religious groups).
“Exercise puts your body into constant survival mode, and that makes you healthy!” Of course the next study reads “Constant survival mode stresses your body, and that makes you unhealthy!” Sigh. Literally all of those so far is the same advice for the last 50 years. The problem? It literally hasn’t changed the slope of the curve at all. If anything it’s slightly flattened since the 1970’s (even ignoring the last few years)!
In the US, overwhelmingly, the most significant predictor of lifespan is SES. Hands down, regardless of lifestyle, diet, or genetics. But that’s a way harder product to sell isn’t it?
Wow, multiple pages talking about DNP. And he’s selling it as a magic obesity cure. With a wink wink don’t do this kids it’s dangerous. But boy is it effective! Heh, this hot/cold thing reminds me of these books I read as a kid – I want to say the name of the character was doctor something, but they made a big deal about this hot/cold extreme thing. Want to say the series was from the 50’s or something?
Lol, don’t get exposed to “radiation”. If I remember correctly, lung cancer was so rare before the 1950’s that the medical profession in the US was skeptical of it. It wasn’t until Readers Digest (of all magazines) started publishing articles skeptical of the health claims made by cig manufacturers that they started taking lung cancer seriously.
Chapter 5: Heh, this guy is an alchemist. Does the science of how to lengthen your life make your eyes gloss over? You aren’t alone! Sigh.
On to Rapamycin, which shouldn’t be surprising after the wink wink about DNP. What he doesn’t say is that Rapamycin, like DNP, absolutely destroys your energy levels, making you more sedentary. At least it doesn’t smell as awful as DNP. Metformin cures everything! Including DEMENTIA. Just not in any actual studies phased clinical studies on dementia. This is spinning out into a mix of r/nootropics and r/longevity. The irony of average lifespan curves flattening over the last 50 years, even sans COVID effects, despite this wealth of knowledge is pretty thick.
I don’t remember who said it, but they had a quote that it was important to hurry up and use the newest miracle drug before it has a chance to stop working in the real world. That should be a idomatic law on the level of Murphy’s or Moore’s (or I guess Godwin’s on the internet). Only problem with metformin is that it isn’t new at all. Resveratrol now. I get the book recommendation now.
He’s very careful to avoid saying this so far, only imply that the effects are similar to a mechanic he believes may extend lifespans, but not a single one of these drugs has a demonstrable effect on human lifespans. And I’m totally up for betting a kidney that he has a financial stake in companies that sell some or all of these products. We can make it a parlay with him dying before we get our next 122 year old.
It does strike me how similar this book is to song of the cell, down to the historical examples used. Like, I’d be suspicious of plagiarism if I was a publisher. Why was song of the cell so interesting while this is such garbage? Is it the constant attempt to sell something that’s killing it? Is it the overconfidence? What’s going on here?
Heh, I feel guilty about starting dead pools on people, but when a book is claiming they’ve reversed aging… what’s the over/under on his dad’s age when he dies? The hilarious “my dad was depressed after my mom died, I gave him this stuff and over time he got a lot more active!” Or the depression faded. IDK, just guessing.
Chapter Six: Now that I think of it, I’m 1000% sure I’ve gotten spam emails with many of the drugs he’s listed so far. This shit completely replaced cialis and viagra spam. Yeah, what the hell, it feels like a lot of the structure in Song of the Cell was lifted from this book.
A life expectancy of 50 and beyond was simply not a reality for most of our evolutionary history.
Sigh. Again, OVERWHELMINGLY, the most significant modifier of human lifespans has been control of external pathogens, PERIOD. And these things always have stupid shit like “Hunters and prey!”. The bears or lions or wolves or whatever ate those who weren’t taking our special formulation of supplements that kept them young! No, even 40k years ago humans had pretty stable societies. Both Plato and Socrates lived well into their 70s. In fact for “most of our evolutionary history” it was not uncommon for individuals of high SES to live well into their 70’s.
The irony of this stupid plane “trolley problem” is that we actually experienced this during the COVID outbreaks, and we just quarantined them. Gasp. I know it’s not as sexy as a movie like Outbreak but. In the dozens of species ending diseases we’ve had since, they all get pretty well controlled by policies and procedures already in place, including everything from ebola to monkeypox. It’s kind of sad that evoking heroic violence is the limit of the author’s imagination.
Holy shit, even the same iPSC example. HRM, someone’s getting called into the Dean’s office.
Heh, like nearly every one of his drug ideas so far revolves around nuking or cranking the immune system. Is it shocking that these results don’t survive outside labs?
It’s bugging me that the author keeps mentioning DNA methylation instead of RNA methylation. Especially considering his body of work. Come to think of it, outside of the opening chapter has RNA been mentioned again? And wasn’t this exactly the same problem as Song of the Cell, no mention at all, then a quick realization in later chapters of the oversight and a bit got added in? Yooooooooo. Even He Jiankui? Wow. Dude. I’m having a crisis right now.
Chapter 7: I swear to christ, if this book uses the phrase “In the future” 12 or 17 more times I’m going to be mildly put out.
Our flawed, symptom-first approach to medicine is about to change.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh fuck me that was a good one. I’m up for his standup routine I guess.
More in the year 2000… It’s not that I disagree with the need for personal biodata, I even have some ideas on the workbench, it’s just presented in such a bizarrely naive fashion. The biggest barrier right now is that everyone wants to make a buck selling that biodata, and the only real even somewhat longitudinal data point that’s predictive of much and sufficiently easy to capture are changes to heart rate variability.
Heh, Zika is a great example of SES variability when it comes to outcomes. When it was isolated to “low” SES regions, we gave fuck all about it. Like we knew about some of the effects for decades. But like the day it showed up in the US it got contact traced and exterminated within a few weeks. And is another good retort to the stupid plane trolley. Boo to Bill Gates for invoking “bioterror”. Okay, we are getting into the privacy issues around biodata (the absolute worst of which are people GIVING AWAY their genetic information to companies like 23 and Me which will be able to leverage it for the rest of your life, your kids life, your siblings life, and your parents life).
Ugh, now that I’ve noticed the similar formatting, I can’t unsee it.
How easily do the words “Fifty is the new thirty” slide from our lips these days?
And how often do we silently acknowledge how stupid that is? How many pages did the author spend talking about how even the extreme outliers like Tom Brady fall off after 30 in their respective sports? Wilford Brimley, the diabetic smoker looked way older than his apparent age? /shock/. The overweight dude making commercials about his diabetus since what looks like at least the 1980’s? The clearly overweight and not giving a fuck about caloric restriction Wilford Brimley? 85 years. Haha, Brimley was in his 40’s in Cocoon. Oy vey.
Okay, it’s really bugging the shit out of me that I’m having such a viscerally negative reaction to this compared to song of the cell. While I definitely pre-biased against it, that was just a cognitive trick to lower expectations enough that I could be “pleasantly surprised”. It obviously failed. I thought about it a bit more and I still hate this book so far. Maybe the doctor stories were less ego centrically focused, song of the cell never compared themselves to the great men through inference or implication. It didn’t make any wild claims of miracle cures, like “I doped my dad, he’s running around like a teenager now!”. And more importantly, I think a lot of work in Song of the Cell has survived outside of the lab, something that work in this book demonstrably has failed to. But still, it’s weird.
Perhaps it isn’t the actual structure that’s the issue, I’m having a problem with the financial angle it feels like it’s obviously pushing. Or perhaps this book has an inherent arrogance that’s putting me off, the anthropocentric arrogance that human brains have cracked nature, and what essentially amounts to blaming humans themselves for allowing themselves to age when aging has been solved. Yeah, I think that’s it, this doesn’t really respect “nature” at all, it feels like it treats life as a product, and doesn’t have enough skepticism of itself to pass my smell test.
I’m also thinking the reason I have such a tough time with the story about drugging his dad and his dad being a teenager again is that it’s such a perfect opportunity to add some really strong evidence regarding his theory by showing that his dad’s epigenetic clocks have indeed been rolled back. The physical effect is apparently obvious for all to see, he spent nearly an entire chapter’s worth of content discussing sequencing this clock… so do it. Demonstrate that dad’s change in behavior has been accompanied by a significant roll back of his epigenetic clock.
Especially now, five years after the book was written, the difference between Dad now and Dad then should be unarguable. Where’s the evidence?
Chapter 8: Okay, last section, I’m a naive little train, I’m a naive little train.
Okay dude. You don’t get to say “Let’s be conservative and assume everything works as planned.” That’s literally the opposite of what being conservative means. “Let’s be conservative and assumes none of this works”. “Let’s be conservative and assume that everything stays the same”. Holy cow.
DNA monitoring will soon be alerting doctors to diseases long before they become acute.
Wow. Smell test, in five years how close is this? Like the level of specialist necessary to get a genetic screen is absurd. From my own experience, Kaiser Permanente will only genetic test for a condition after you’ve been obstinate enough to run though a few dozen specialists for nearly anything. Like even their “Autism” screening is limited to things like FMR, there’s no way in hell they offer full karyotype screening for ANYTHING.
Holy shit this is naive in the year 2000 shit. It’s not even “You Will” level naive (where at least most of those came to fruition in a completely different way than imagined).
The result of any one of these innovations could be decades of prolonged healthy life.
Wow. I’m staring at this lifespan data thinking the data must be broken or something.
Let’s say, though, that all of these developments together will give us a decade. Once people begin to accept that aging is not an inevitable part of life, will they take better care of themselves?
I mean a) even adding a decade still means aging is a part of life (is this what is implied by “conservative”?) and b) Lifespans have nearly doubled in the past 100 years… even if we subtract out effect of infant/maternal mortality we’ve still easily tacked on more than a decade to the high end of lifespans. We haven’t seen anyone live to 130 yet. Maybe in the year 2000.
What is far more likely is that individuals will go to their doctor demanding this magic deaging treatment this book is convinced of and keep a similar lifestyle. Maybe even worse, knowing that lifespan isn’t even assumedly limited by their own behavior. Telling people that being fat shortens lifespans hasn’t put a dent there.
These are remedies available to most people regardless of socioeconomic status, and the impact on vitality has been exceptionally well studied.
Holy shit. Oh wait, making these changes “conservatively tosses another five years on the life pile! Why not. We’re already in fantasy land. This chapter is not off to a great start. It sounds like a financial adviser trying to assure me that stonks can always go up! There’s literally no doubt about whether any of these things can make things go tits up. Not an ounce of skepticism.
Imagine if people who have lived beyond 110 had had access to all these technologies. Could they have made it to 120 or 130? Perhaps.
This is literally what’s happened so far! And so far the percentage of centenarians compared to total world population IS DROPPING.
Fellow scientists often warn me not to be so publicly optimistic. “It’s not a good look,” one well-meaning colleague recently told me. “Why?” I asked. “Because the public isn’t ready for these numbers.”
Good fucking god, this reads like r/thatreallyhappened. How about “Because you haven’t proved it yet?”. How about because “Lab Mice are not Humans?”. How about because “Science without skepticism is bullshit”. Instead we get “No man, you’re gunna blow their minds!”. Sigh.
Today, many of my colleagues are just as optimistic as I am, even if they don’t admit it publicly. I’d wager that about a third of them take metformin or an NAD booster.
GREAT. LETS SEQUENCE AND TEST. Holy crap, what the hell?
If I am wrong, it might be that I was too conservative in my predictions.
Well, it does say might, so that might make this less retarded. Maybe. Like everything about this chapter is just pure FOMO hype. Wow. The problem may not be that you’ll lose money, but you’ll be richer than you ever imagined! Think about the people who didn’t buy Apple when it was founded! Or Bitcoin in 2015!
So it will be several decades, at least, before we know if I’m right about this, and it could take 150 years before someone steps over that threshold.
Sigh.
Only the fastest, smartest, strongest, and most resilient tended to survive. We rapidly evolved superior bipedal and analytical skills but at the expense of millions of brutal lives and early deaths.
Bro, I’m ready to fight now. Dude is shitting on Fenner now. More FOMO fluff. Look at all these people that were WRONG. Instead of getting the real point, that predicting the future like this is fucking stupid, it somehow supports his own dumb prophecies.
Lol, I think he’s advocating we go Children of the Corn here. I mean, it’s not the worst idea in the book.
By the early 2000s, the difference had increased dramatically. Those in the upper half of the income spectrum could expect nearly six additional years of life, and by 2018, the divide had widened, with the richest 10 percent of Americans living thirteen more years of life than the poorest 10 percent.
He completely dances around this the entire book and brings it up now? Heh, funny he brings up Gattaca considering his whole premise relies on the manipulability of genetic metabolic outcomes.
Heh, missing from his exuberance about the expansion of lifespans in London? Caloric reduction. Metaformin. Shit, anything not related to controlling sanitary conditions.
I love the “how many humans can earth support” arguments because they are always full of such rotten assumptions on the high end. What if we covered every square inch of earth with humans? There’s plenty of space! What if we completely replaced the entire ecosystem of the planet with human mediated ones? Plenty of resources! Oh damn, he’s taking shots at Ed Wilson now. Well I feel less guilty about my comments about this book.
Scientists generally pride themselves on rejecting the notion that anything “should be obvious.” Evidence, not obviousness, drives our work. So at the very least, the overwhelming certainty that a limit exists deserves to be debated, as any scientific idea does.
Fucking LOL. I wish he spent more time talking about the ethological consistency of this “survival circuit” bullshit since it’s being evoked every few pages now.
I just can’t. This GDP argument is so factually bad. Like he didn’t look at countries with the highest GDPs retirement ages bad. He just picked a few random countries that supported his argument. Sigh. This is not fun. This whole full throated celebration of capitalism is exactly why his In the year 2000… predictions have failed/will fail. Heh, looking at the last paper he was a co-author on, we already have a small army chasing down this philosophy, with pretty massive economic resources behind it. How’s that working out? A mouse lived 10% longer in the lab?
Chapter 9: H.G. Wells was prescient? Clarke was prescient? Sigh. At best Clarke was “You will” level prescient, and Wells… well I don’t see any time machines or martians.
And there is no God-given mandate to die after fourscore years. Indeed, in Genesis 35:28, Isaac is claimed to have lived “one hundred and fourscore.”
Yep. Yep Yep. Yep. …..
What type of world do you want? The solution is to invest more money in the fields my businesses exist in! I guess I knew it was coming from the first chapter. We should stop researching Alzheimer’s and put it all into aging. Yep. Yep.
Why do I keep spelling it metaformin? Weird. I imagine my brain is injecting a pun in their somewhere, but I dunno. American HealthCare sucks. Wealth is super concentrated. Government dictated capitalism will help. Yep. Yep. Oh BTW, life extension medical care is really expensive. This is just devolving into pure incoherent madness.
My father thought he was headed for the grave. Instead, he’s most often headed to concerts or the mountains. He spends several nights a week eating out with friends.
AL:JFlkjfL:ASKjdf;LS. Blood test. Sequence. Pls. Oh fuck me, dad is a computer genius now too.
So is the point here that the rest of the world is mooching off the US’s investments? I dunno even more. There’s literally not enough meth in the world to keep me interested anymore. I’m running on pure spite now, momma didn’t raise no bitch.
How fucking weird is it to see an argument for suicide (err.. optional life end dates) in a book about extending lifespans? Recycle, Reduce, Reuse? Naw, make up new technologies!
Among those changes was something that had never existed in the history of labor: the weekend.
Lol. I mean there are whole ass religions that require this.
We’re going to have to be more empathetic, more compassionate, more forgiving, and more just. My friends, we’re going to have to be more human.
By leveraging technology to become… less human? I dunno, I don’t care about anything right now. Where’s my fucking suicide pod?
Conclusion: Shout outs to his homies. Cool I guess. He has compassion for the stupids who don’t believe in his theory, they are just doubting the inevitable. Guess we will see in the 100 years he gave himself to prove all this out. But on the other hand screw you zealots who don’t want it. Wow. Model of compassion. Guess this explains all the stupid religious shit peppered throughout the book.
Hahah, he posts his stack. It’s a lot. What doesn’t he do? A FUCKING BLOOD TEST TO VERIFY THEY ARE DOING WHAT HE THINKS THEY ARE.
It’s impossible to say if my regimen is working for us, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting. I am now 50, and I feel the same as I did when I was 30.
Wha… I mean… Yep. Yep.
A year ago, my younger brother, Nick, was going gray and losing his hair when he demanded to be put on the same regimen after accusing me, only half jokingly, of using him as a negative control.
My ugly brother nick, clearly not as beautiful as I, is now on the same regimen. I could have used this as an opportunity to generate some awesome data to support my claims, especially since doctors will be doing this whole sequencing bullshit s part of their standard diagnostic process! But.. naw. And finally… he’s calling his shot… he’s going to live to 132. I will take a quadrillion to one odds on this for anyone willing to make the bet.
Arc Bio, Dovetail Genomics, Claret Medical, Revere Biosciences, UpRNA, MetroBiotech, and Liberty Biosecurity; and Life Biosciences and its affiliates Selphagy Therapeutics, Senolytic Therapeutics, Spotlight Therapeutics, Lua, Animal Biosciences, Iduna, Continuum Innovation, Prana (now Alterity); and Jumpstart Fertility.
Okay.
Edit:
Thinking about this a bit more, I should probably note that I don’t think indefinite (or even greatly extended lifespans) is impossible, or a goal not worth pursing. My argument is more that in order to achieve this, we would likely need to tweak enough of our genetic function to become an entirely different species, with a genetic construction designed to support the entire metabolic cascade necessary for extended/indefinite life spans. And even then, those changes are going to require pretty strict control of external environmental influences, narrowing the environmental niches such a long lived human could exist in.
What I do have a problem with is this book being pure alchemy, the idea that the philosopher’s stone can be conjured by slightly tweaking some thing which already exists (and ignoring that the underlying process always transforms the inputs into something entirely new). There’s no point in this book where the author seriously questions why do things die, there’s no point where they really explore the process of dying, no look at the effect of dying. This book treats death so casually, and with such little regard, that it’s hard to accept the arguments about modifying life seriously.
Further, in the breathless attempt to sell this alchemy, this book makes some truly outrageous and dangerous arguments, including abandoning research in topics from cancer to dementia and investing all of our resources into this construct. It’s selling the idea that from this single source, health will spring eternal, somehow erasing all other maladies. There’s no point in the book where it doesn’t feel like a sales pitch, at the expense of all else.