Oddbean

I’ve watched the lifespan/healthspan extension field, which I’ve been a big believer in, go from being viewed as a complete joke and ridiculous (and even impossible (which is insane)) by scientists (and the public) 15 years ago, to one of the hottest sectors. We can talk about the personal, special interests of VC and oligarchs, but I’ve always thought it was an obvious cost saving strategy for the government due to the rising costs of healthcare, which are largely due to age related decline. I was right on this one and everyone scoffing at me as a young pup in PhD school was wrong 🤙

I mean even the people who write books on it still say the best thing you can do is just fasting, eat well and exercise. I doubt there will be some miracle breakthrough anytime soon… but sometimes I look at the implausible world around me and wonder

Science has identified ways to turn on some of the pathways, often with dietary compounds, that help maintain youthfulness. This and knockout studies have given us a handful of key genes involved as well. Whether the breakthrough is a cocktail of natural compounds or a genetic/pharmacological approach will depend on clinical studies but as someone in biotech it feels very obvious we’ll have some significant treatments in the next 5-25 years. Two standout recent papers I’ve seen were discoveries in IL11 inhibition and another on simple taurine supplementation, showing significant lifespan extension in animal models. Even if neither IL11 or taurine are the “answer” in the final product, identifying these models will open up a huge understanding in the next few years which probably will lead to a product. I’ve seen this same pattern of discovery and drug breakthrough happen over and over and over, and it’s always faster than people think (eg will be in your lifetime).

Yeah it’s a lot of fun, the downside for doing it in your garage is cost and the availability of materials. I’ve always envied the computer people who can just do creative random shit on a laptop willy nilly. There is a middle ground though, basically crunching publicly available datasets and databases 🤙

i heard of the human cell atlas project recently. just having a map and raw data to explore will be a great start for new people getting involved to figure out this insanely complex system. And now with all the computation and ai algorithms available, i think we can start making huge headways into this https://www.humancellatlas.org