Colossal Biosciences, valued at $10.2bn after raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from investors including celebrities spanning from Tiger Woods to Paris Hilton, has provoked a stampede of acclaim as well as denunciation after announcing last year it had made the dire wolf, a species lost from the world for more than 10,000 years, de-extinct via the birth of three new pups.
The Israeli gerontologist has been studying healthy centenarians for years and has observed that many follow a pattern similar to Reichert's. They do not always lead a monastic, carefully balanced life. There is a great deal of biological lottery involved in longevity. But Barzilai wants to hack that lottery—to understand which numbers are the winning ones and pass them on to the rest of humanity.
Researchers administered one of four doses of stem cells to 118 people between 70 and 85 years old, all of whom had frailty. In a timed walking test nine months after treatment, those who had received the highest dose could walk about 60 metres farther, on average, than they could before treatment.
I am running. Ahead lie endless mangrove swamps, behind the green-blue waters of the Caribbean. My mind is rising away from my lurching body, which is on a treadmill and attached to a beeping machine by wires and tubes. Nurses circle. The gradient increases, as does the speed. Dignity slips away as my body fights for breath. They're after my "VO2 max", the amount of oxygen my body can absorb during my maximum capacity for exercise.
It's more than likely that the NAD+ supplement craze has already crossed your path. The Biebers have infused it. Joe Rogan has podcasted about it. Gwyneth Paltrow swears by it and, of course, sells her own Youth-Boost NAD+ Peptide Rich Cream. NAD+ is the latest biohacker's darling. It's in longevity clinics and the wellness aisle, in your dietary supplements and your topical skin care.
Biology is undergoing a transformation. After centuries of studying life as it evolves naturally, researchers are now using a combination of computation and genome engineering to intervene, generating new proteins and even whole bacteria from scratch. The use of artificial-intelligence tools to design biological components, an approach known as generative biology, is set to turbocharge this area of research. Just last year, scientists used AI-assisted design to produce artificial genes that can be expressed in mammalian cells.
Morry Kernerman, an accomplished violin prodigy, commits YouTube recordings of classical music to memory, hikes in a hilly ravine with his son and volunteers to teach music in South America. As he prepares to celebrate his 101st birthday next week, Kernerman is convinced that music has played an outsized role in contributing to his long and active life. The Toronto resident is what's known as a super-ager, someone 80 or up who retains the memory abilities of those in their 40s or 50s.
We are all going to die. No one is happy about that. Today, the internet is full of claims about diets and supplements that will help us live longer. One writer suggested that there are at least 320 longevity clinics operating around the world; some charge $100,000 or more annually for access to their magic elixirs. Unfortunately, the search for a formula that can prevent death, or delay it for a very long time, has a long history of failures.
"As we get older, the immune system is shifting away from good inflammation," which is the body's short-term, acute response to fend off injury or infection and promote healing, explains Dr. Thomas Marron, one of the researchers leading the new study. Marron directs early phase clinical trials at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.