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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

One of the things that happens to our immune systems with age is that a preponderance of naïve B-cells (in youth) gives way to a diverse body of memory B-cells (in older adults), each trained to respond to a specific pathogen from the past. (Valter Longo claims that fasting eliminates some of the memory B-cells, which are … Read more

A new approach to methylation clocks from Morgan Levine uses massive computer resources and sophisticated mathematics. I am enthusiastic about it, not just because it produces better results than previous methods, but because I suspect it is better aligned with the way that biological systems actually work. The Clockmaker’s Dilemma Your goal is a robust … Read more

The Pfizer vaccine is on a fast track for FDA approval, hearings possible today according to the NYTimes. I suspect the political pressures are enormous. Still, how can approval be possible when the safety record of this vaccine is far worse than any vaccine in the past, including many that were pulled from the market? Efficacy … Read more

I struggled since childhood with night terrors, about death as an eternal void. My csreer as aging scientist helped me to crack that open, then gain insight through meditation practice. Fear is not helpful. It is the worst motivation for life extension. Joyful living is the best. Fear is just a chenical programmed by evolution … Read more