Julian's Polymath Explorations

"You are incredibly prescient!"   I woke up to those words from a former colleague on Jan. 19, 2022: the bombshell announcement that the Chief Science Officer of pharma giant GSK, where I worked until recently, will become the CEO at the new, $3 BILLION longevity science company Altos (presumably also funded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos.) Big Pharma is at long last embracing Longevity Science. The corollary: longevity science is entering Mainstream (with capital "M") But let me backtrack... The Decade of Longevity Science When Harvard professor David Sinclair declared the 2020's to be the " decade of the paradigm shift about age reversal ", one could perhaps be dismissive of it as just an outburst of enthusiasm... But in the past couple of years, we're seeing strong evidence that his forecast is right on the mark! While I worked at GlaxoSmithKline - a giant, top-10, pharma company - I vigorously advocated forming a Longevity Science dept., and sp...

Ending Age-Related Diseases 2021 The conference just ended on Aug. 22.  Here's one of the talks... Link to conference  (Notes and screenshots taken - and sometimes annotated - by me.) Science at SENS Research Foundation 2021 Talk by Alexandra Stolzing , Professor for Biogerontological Engineering, VP of Research at SENS Research Foundation ("Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence".) This overview talk immediately emphasizes that the aging process involves multiple broad fundamental categories of physiological change.  Those are related to what are often referred as "the Hallmarks of Aging" , as I detail in my intro post on Longevity Science .  In this talk, 7 of those categories are identified, and given convenient icons (rightmost column) that make it easier to refer to them: The SENS foundation has both intramural and extramural projects happening, and tries to have at least one project in each of the above broad categories.  (But currently no projec...

Last updated May 2023 Q: "How is aging a disease?" A: It's a dynamic system that veers away from its homeostasis (normal equilibrium point): hence a form of slow-progressing illness. Labeling it as 'natural' is a surrender to our traditional state of ignorance and powerlessness, which fortunately is beginning to be changed! Aging is "normal" only from the point of view of the "selfish gene", for whom the body is a disposable carrier. Individuals organisms - for whom self-preservation has a different meaning than for genes - have received scant help from evolution... with rare exceptions such as the T. dohrnii jellyfish (which I discuss here )... but now the time has finally arrived for our rational design to remedy some of the cellular flaws that evolution never bothered to correct!   The above is my standard answer to an oft-asked question. The science of aging is by all evidence very misunderstood by the general public.  Hype,...