Age-related disease

Perseverance is critical to innovation. If you try to change the world, you might fail, but if you don’t try, you will certainly fail. In 1616, the church banned Galileo’s theory that the Earth went around the sun, which is now accepted as obviously true. Relativity and quantum theory were once derided by classical physicists, […]

The problem with prediction is that everyone disagrees about the future (and don’t look ahead anyway). Most of us look backward and assume that the view will be just the same (but more so?) if we turned around and looked ahead. The wonderful thing about hindsight is that not only is it easy, but everyone […]

Last week I attended a global conference on aging research. The presentations were professional and thoughtful, as befits an organization of researchers with impeccable academic and clinical credentials. These are bright, well-educated people who work hard to understand not only the basic science that underlies aging, but the possible interventions that might cure age-related diseases. […]

A friend pointed out that a recent Danish study suggested that short telomere lengths in circulating peripheral lymphocytes account for about a quarter of the variance in mortality. Does this mean that lymphocyte telomere lengths (LTL’s) are really only a minor factor in age-related disease and mortality? Probably, but it’s not the important question. A […]

Things are slowly beginning to move ahead on our project to cure Alzheimer’s disease. It’s clear that not only is the role of microglia slowly becoming accepted, but there are more and more investors who see an opportunity to help move biotech and medicine from the old paradigm (BAPP and Tau cause disease) to the […]

An odd thing is happening in the world of biotechnology: an avalanche is starting. The context is also interesting, for over the past twenty five years, a profound revolution has occurred in our understanding of aging. Where once we took aging for granted, we now reexamine the process, looking for a way to reverse it. […]

At the moment, there are four companies planning human trials to reset telomeres using telomerase genes. In every case, the intent is to put the telomerase genes (hTERT and hTERC) into human patients in an effort to cure age-related diseases. Let’s look at the diseases and then the companies involved. Essentially, all age-related diseases occur […]

What is aging? There are literally dozens of answers to that question, even if we restrict ourselves to purely academic views. In the days when I was the executive director of the American Aging Association, there were – or so it seemed – as many aging hypotheses as we had members of the association. Almost […]

Most of us assume that aging equals illness. To be honest about it, we don’t usually put it that bluntly and we often deny it, even to ourselves, and yet we tend to assume that unless we are struck down suddenly – an unexpected automobile accident, a sudden pneumonia, a fatal heart attack – we […]

As of 2013, we can neither cure nor prevent a single age-related disease. Even at our absolute best – and then only questionably and in one or two cases – can we even slow the unrelenting progress of any of our myriad age-related diseases. Trying for an optimistic view of current medical interventions, and even […]

The notion that telomeres play a central role in both age-related disease and aging itself is generally misunderstood and is often criticized without an actual understanding of either disease or telomeres, yet there is a growing sense of the obvious about the role of telomeres in human aging and disease. More and more people – […]

Almost twenty years ago, I gave a talk at the National Institutes of Health and had the audacity to title it “Reversing Human Aging”. Looking up at a packed audience, I said the following: When I’m done, anyone who leaves this room thinking we can reverse human aging is a fool. Likewise, anyone who leaves […]

Looking back on aging Until quite recently, the notion of reversing human aging was mere fantasy, absent any scientific support. Throughout history, going as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh 4,700 years ago, we have dreamed of being able to cure aging and the diseases that accompany it, but every claim of a “fountain […]