beta amyloid

I confess that I’ve yet to find time to continue through each of several age-related diseases. In partial recompense, let me offer the following, which is adapted from the quarterly newsletter that I put out for Telocyte. While it focuses on Alzheimer’s disease, the import is generic, applying to all age-related diseases. How Alzheimer’s works […]

The human body represents a “system” in the engineering sense: all parts (cells, tissues, organs) are interdependent. To understand how the body functions (and how it ages), we may appropriately study individual cells, but we must also study the interactions between cells. We may start by looking at small communities of cells (local, homogenous tissues), […]

The human body contains perhaps a bit short of 40 trillion cells, which is an impressive number, yet a large part of our body – a quarter to a third, depending how you measure it – isn’t intracellular, but extracellular. This includes not only the fluids within the blood and lymphatic spaces, but the space […]

Effective maintenance is a product of the rate and the quality of the maintenance process. If we look at a car, for example, the long-term condition of the car depends on how often we institute maintenance (once a month or once every few years?) and the quality of the maintenance procedures (do you replace and […]

Changes in gene expression underlie aging and age-related diseases. There is all-but-universal (and equally unwarranted) assumption that both aging and age-related diseases are genetic. We see articles on “aging genes” and “genes that cause Alzheimer’s disease” (or genes that cause heart disease, osteoarthritis, etc.). The reality is that both aging and age-related diseases are not […]

How does aging work? So far, in the prologue (section 0) and the section 1 posts, we have discussed a perspective, what aging isn’t (and is), and what we need to explain in any accurate model of aging. In this post, I provide an overview of how the aging process occurs, from cell division to […]

What IS aging? An explanation of aging must account for all cells, all organisms, and – if we are candid – all of biology and isn’t merely entropy. Prior posts defined our boundaries: what we must include – and exclude. We know that we cannot simply point to entropy, wash our hands of any further […]

Our understanding is limited by our vision. If we look locally, our understanding is merely local; if we look globally, our understanding becomes more global; and if we look at our entire universe, then our understanding will be universal. When we attempt to understand our world, we often start with what we know best: our […]

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. – Mark Twain Twain was right, particularly when it comes to the aging process: there is a lot we think we “know for sure that just ain’t so”. For example, most people (without even […]

About a century ago, in a small American town, the first automobile chugged to a stop in front of the general store, where a local man stared at the apparition in disbelief, then asked “where’s your horse?” A long explanation followed, involving internal combustion, pistons, gasoline, and driveshafts. The local listened politely but with growing […]

A physician friend asked if a patient’s APOE status (which alleles they carry, for example APOE4, APOE3, or APOE2) would effect how well they should respond to telomerase therapy. Ideally, it may not make much difference, except that the genes you carry (including the APOE genes and the alleles for each type of APOE gene, […]

Why do Alzheimer’s interventions always fail? Whether you ask investors or pharmaceutical companies, it has become axiomatic that Alzheimer’s “has been a graveyard for many a company”, regardless of what they try. But in a fundamental way, all past and all current companies – whether big pharma or small biotech – try the same approach. […]

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 […]