Methylation clocks promise to revolutionize testing of anti-aging interventions in humans, by measuring their effectiveness in a few months instead of having to wait years to see if they affect mortality statistics. But there are signs that the clocks we have can be deceptive. I think this is because the clocks capture aspects of aging that are defensive and aspects that are programmed, and there has been no effort to tease them apart. To the extent that the body is defending itself against perceived damage, the clocks are measuring the wrong thing. (This summary probably won’t make sense unt ..read more

The Levin laboratory has found the developmental blueprint that tells the embryo how it must grow. The language of morphology is not genetic or epigenetic, not biochemical at all, but bioelectric. If, as I and others have speculated, aging is an extension of development into a program of self-destruction, then maybe aging follows a bioelectric blueprint. Maybe electrical interventions have a role in anti-aging therapies, supplementing or replacing the biochemical interventions that have dominated research in gerontology. Below I review a prospective analysis from the Levin lab. Background — L ..read more

I’ve learned a great deal from Dr Mercola over the years. His orientation toward natural approaches to long-term health, using diet and lifestyle in preference to pharmaceuticals, aligns with my own. I agree with most of what he has to say. So, when he launched a campaign vilifying seed oils in the diet, I stood up and paid attention. “Linoleic acid found in vegetables and seed oils may be the biggest contributor to chronic disease in the Western world.” [from Dr Mercola’s Censored Library] Last spring, he published a review article on health hazards from Ω 6 fatty acids in general and linole ..read more

It would be just like me to tease you with a clever, ironic headline like this introducing a long, detailed analysis of the British mortality data. But in this case, I’m being serious. This article is about why I think the data are unreliable and unworthy of our credence. In August, the British Office of National Statistics (ONS) released data on all-cause mortality broken down by age and vaccination status. The ONS data covers months from April, 2021 through May, 2023. This is exactly what we need to determine if the COVID vaccines have saved lives. Data by “cause of death” are tai ..read more

The big news: (1) the active ingredient in E5 is exosomes. (2) Young exosomes retain their ability to rejuvenate across mammalian species lines. Work that remains: (1) calibrate a new generation of methylation clocks. (2) Combine removal of old exosomes with addition of young exosomes. Optimize dosage and timing of treatments. What is in E5, Katcher’s fountain of youth? From the beginning, it was described as a “plasma fraction”, leaving us guessing. Blood plasma contains thousands of chemical species in tiny quantities that nevertheless have powerful, systemic signaling effects. I thought on ..read more

Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) have only been studied in the 21st century. Think of them as natural lipid nanoparticles, or endogenous viruses. They transmit information around the body and they’re small enough to be exhaled and carried in the air to communicate with other individuals and even other species. EVs are encapsulated in fats that facilitate entry into cells, and inside they contain proteins, RNA, DNA, lipids — all of which carry information. EVs are a universal biological language, a barely-explored medium of communication. Last week, an extraordinary paper was publis ..read more

The Yamanaka factors (four proteins, abbreviated OSKM) are a treatment that can completely reset any ordinary, functional cell into a pluripotent stem cell, able to regenerate tissues of any type. In the process, the cell loses epigenetic markers of age and reverts to an embryonic state. But differentiated cells are differentiated so they can be functional. Taking them all the way back to stem cells destroys their function. Remarkably, differentiated cells can be taken part-way back, becoming younger but not losing its functional identity. This has been done with pulsed doses of OSKD or with ..read more

There is still confusion about what happened during the Pandemic. The public health response was innovative, defying historic precedent. Was it effective? One reason it is hard to know is that the health records are administered by the same agency (CDC) that managed the pandemic. Death certificates are subjective, and the listed cause of death is prone to error and outright manipulation. Death counts are often reliable, even when cause of death is debatable. The CDC has recently released death counts from 2021, and they are even higher than 2020. In addition to the deaths attributed to COVID ..read more

Aspirin is an old staple for life extension. Lately it has received bad press. For those who wish to replace aspirin, there are two actions that must be considered: anti-inflammatory and blood thinning. There are many good anti-inflammatories, all of which act through similar pathways, so that in the end we don’t know have optimal control over increasing inflammation. There are many prescription blood thinners, but no evidence that they increase life expectancy. Nattokinase and lumbrokinase are natural products, in a class by themselves. They show great promise, but there are no good studies ..read more

Experience tells us that it is much easier to extend median lifespan than maximum lifespan. Katcher’s trial of E5 in 8 rats breaks this expectation. The last of Harold Katcher’s rats has died, and she outlived her sisters by 7 months. When I last wrote about Katcher’s rats, there were just two left alive, and the survival curve conformed well to the Gompertz rule, which says that mortality rates increase exponentially with age. (There is no theoretical basis for the Gompertz rule, but it has been found to be a good empirical model for aging in many species.) From a Gompertz fit to the first 6 ..read more