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In Brief:

  • A drug seems to be showing signs of reversing the effects of aging in dogs and mice. Studies are being conducted on the effectiveness in humans.
  • The drug has some major side effects linked to it and there is no guarantee it will be as effective in humans.

Aging is a spectre we all must face one day…but is this the way that it will always be? Medical researchers hope to delay or even reverse the onset of aging, and some are already claiming that they’ve made inroads to immortality.

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Clearing out senescent cells could lead to better fitness and health as we age.


From around age forty we start to lose muscle mass due to various aging processes, one of these processes is the accumulation of senescent cells. Senescent cells are simply cells that have become damaged or have reached their maximum number of divisions. Normally these cells are shut down by a kind of self destruct program inside the cell, ready to be disposed of by the immune system.

However as the immune system ages, it stops clearing house properly, leaving many of these senescent cells in place. This would not be such a big deal, but senescent cells actually send out toxic inflammatory signals that block tissue regeneration. This includes the compromised formation and repair of muscle tissue[1–2]. Some researchers suggest that removing senescent cells could potentially lead to better performance and extending peak, allowing you to enjoy sports and remain competitive for longer.

There have been some interesting results on cardiovascular health and performance seen in pre-clinical studies so far. In tests aged mice had significantly improved vascular health when treated, compared to control mice left to age normally[3–4]. Perhaps even more exciting is the discovery that this therapy can also make an impact on heart disease. So reducing senescent cells could be a route to better cardiovascular health and improved fitness as we get older[5].

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Are you an avid supporter of aging research and a keen longevity activist?
The Biogerontology Research Foundation is offering select summer internships for talented individuals. You’d join a passionate and supportive team in researching diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic strategies; advising a panel of investors in developing a roadmap to promote longevity science and related technologies across the globe.

The advertised positions are 3 month internships, with the possibility of continuing afterwards. Free accommodation will be provided for in London, alongside a negotiable salary.

The Biogerontology Research Foundation is a UK based think tank dedicated to aging research and accelerating its application worldwide.

Apply to: [email protected]


Are you an avid supporter of aging research and a keen longevity activist?

The Biogerontology Research Foundation is offering select summer internships for talented individuals. You €™d join a passionate and supportive team in researching diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic strategies; advising a panel of investors in developing a roadmap to promote longevity science and related technologies across the globe.

Read more

I’m aware of a number of the world’s most important publications soon to be covering it. As a result, I encourage all of you that are in leadership and public positions to temper your political perspectives and posts in social media (whatever side they fall on), and instead to focus on pushing life extension and transhumanist themes forward. We should strive to show that we are united by our aims and love of radical science and technology, and not divided by politics. If pursued correctly, #transhumanism can grow into a multi-billion person movement that will ensure global prosperity, protect liberties, and eliminate biological death and most suffering of humanity. Thanks for considering this! And please let others know. #future

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Science isn’t the easiest thing to understand especially biology, but are we getting the message right about rejuvenation biotechnology? Reason at Fight aging delves into the issues and offers commentary about our recent blog article at LEAF.


For those of us who immediately understand, at first recognition, that the opportunity to live a longer life in good health would be a fantastic thing, and in fact so wondrous that we should jump up and do something to make it happen, it is a continual puzzle that we find ourselves in a minority. How is it that we live in a world in which the majority simply doesn’t care, or if prompted on the topic, declares their desire to age, suffer, and die on the present schedule? After a few years of this, one might be forgiven for thinking that we are just not very good at advocacy. But given a second consideration, we might ask why we should have to be good at advocacy at all in this situation. Isn’t more good health and vigor, and an absence of horrible, debilitating age-related disease, an obvious and unalloyed good? Isn’t the whole point of medicine to defeat disease and prolong health? Isn’t it the case that all of these people in favor of aging and age-related death nonetheless go out and visit the doctor when they get ill, while supporting research into treatments for cancer and other age-related diseases? I don’t think that we are the irrational ones in this picture.

After going on fifteen years of writing on this topic, I don’t have much more of an idea than I did when I started as to why greater human longevity isn’t an obvious and highly important goal for everyone. The same questions and theories back then are still here today, and there is still little data to pin down their accuracy: fear of frailty, of overpopulation, of any change, even positive, and so forth. Since it was an immediate and evident revelation for me, rather than a gradual conversion, perhaps I am not the right person to achieve that understanding. I am, however, pleased to see that despite the challenges our community of iconoclasts, heretics, revolutionaries, and rational thinkers on the subject of longevity science is greatly expanded these days. More of these folk than ever are writing and persuading, both inside and outside the scientific community. We have progressed and grown as a community, alongside progress in the state of the science.

For today, I see that the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation has set up a blog in order to help bring spread our message to new audiences. As noted by the author here, the best evidence so far suggests that the fear of being old and decrepit for longer as a result of life extension therapies is the most important factor in public opposition to greater longevity, despite the fact that scientists and advocates have repeatedly disclaimed this as a goal, and that many have noted that such an outcome is implausible to achieve even if someone was trying. On the one hand that suggests that it is simple ignorance that might be dispelled, but on the other it seems very resistant to the efforts already made, over and again, by near every public figure involved in the aging research community.

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Answers to rejuvenation objections #1: The Tithonus Error.


We certainly agree on this one! Living longer when your body keeps falling apart would suck big time, but that is not what rejuvenation is about. In fact, it is about preventing that from happening, in the short and long runs alike.

I probably have made the above concept clear enough on the website as a whole, but then again dealing with it separately in the objections section may be a good idea. In case anyone hasn’t read the explanations on ageing and rejuvenation first and jumps directly to the answers to objections, they might not get the full picture and think we’re just trying to make people live longer without curing them of the ill health of old age.

The concern of more life in a sicker body is well illustrated by the greek myth of Tithonus. In short, Tithonus was a mortal who was in love with Eos, the titan of the dawn. She fancied him back, but they had a problem: As a deity, she was immortal, but Tithonus was not. One day he’d give up the ghost and their idilly would be broken. Thus, Eos pleaded with Zeus to make Tithonus immortal as well. Problem solved, right? Yeah, not really.

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Aging fosters sickness and disability, increases human suffering, and makes us more likely to die. Previously, I argued that curing aging must be a top priority for society, yet there are also a number of possible objections to this endeavor. Most of these are unfounded myths that can be disproved while others raise relevant social, philosophical and ethical issues. This essay draws on my own lectures, and publications (Sethe and de Magalhaes, 2013), on this subject and attempts to answer the most commonly raised questions and concerns about the work of gerontologists and a possible cure for aging.

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