Curing disease correlates with insight, not blind effort. There is an eternal trade-off between insight and effort. If we think carefully, understand the problem, and plan, then effort is minimized. If (as too often happens) we think carelessly, misunderstand the problem, and rely on hope instead of planning, then effort is not only maximized, but […]
Innovation requires novel thinking, not incremental actions. We can cure age-related diseases – such as Alzheimer’s – not with funding, intelligence, or effort alone, but only if we reassess our assumptions. Until we look carefully at our conceptual foundations, we cannot expect to build a therapeutic structure. Ironically, the key problem lies in our looking […]
Often, when problems seem intractable, we’re asking the wrong questions. We want to get to the moon: how can we jump higher? We want to get to the stars: how can we make bigger rockets? As Henry Ford once suggested, people wanted a better way to travel, so they wanted to know how to breed […]
Everyone favors innovation and diversity, as long as you’re not innovative or diverse. This remark, snarky as it is, is also (heartbreakingly) accurate. We argue that we support innovation, but we fight to prevent innovative concepts or industries. The more innovative an idea, the more we actively resist, regulate, and revolt against that idea. Diversity […]
It’s funny how often we make assumptions that are not only wrong, but that we are completely unaware of making. Having spent more than twenty years dealing with the clinical implications of cell aging, telomeres come to mind as an immediate example of this mistake. Hardly a week goes by without another claim that some […]
Hardly a day goes by, and never an entire week, without my seeing yet another article, often a cover article, that suggests we will soon cure Alzheimer’s disease. If articles were anything to go by, then the increasing tempo of those articles, to say nothing of the increases in both research and funding, would suggest […]
We waste stunning amounts of money and effort on comprehensively ineffective trials. As a recent article points out, in the past 15 years, there have been 123 Alzheimer drug failures and, while four medicines have been approved, none of them affect the progress of the disease. Symptomatic therapy at best, we have no medications – […]
Perspective often shrinks personal problems. Late Sunday night, I received a cry for help from a woman whose mother has Alzheimer’s disease: she asked me to meet her family and offer professional advice. Their concern was not only her medications, but the ability of her physician, the stress on the family, and the patient’s own […]
Early last Saturday, I received a short, sad email from an old friend. Many of you may know Leonard Hayflick, who first pointed out that cells age, more than fifty years ago. He stood up for himself and for the truth of his data, in the face of strong opposition and irrationality, and finally proved […]
I hope that all of you will take a look at the free chapter of my new book, The Telomerase Revolution, that has just been posted on Singularity. If you find the chapter provocative, please buy the book and read it carefully. The question of “Why we age” (the title of the chapter excerpted here) […]
Reversing Human Aging was the first book in history to describe how aging works, how to reverse it, and the consequences of doing so. Originally published in 1996, it has largely passed the test of time. On October 1st, I published an electronic edition of this book on Amazon.com and made it available for those […]
What is aging? The question has always been hard to answer, making it difficult to change the process, let alone to reverse its clinical progress. Unfortunately, much of the problem derives from the way we look at aging in the first place. Making the wrong assumptions, we arrive at the wrong conclusions. While human beings […]