Topic
Longevity
Everything we've written on Longevity — 6 articles covering the mechanism, the evidence, comparisons, and practical considerations.
6 articles
Anti-aging and cellular healthThe Bryan Johnson "Don't Die" phenomenon — what the protocol actually does and what it doesn'tIn February 2023, a photograph of Bryan Johnson standing shirtless next to his 17-year-old son and his 70-year-old father circulated widely across social media. The premise was that Johnson, then 45, had biomarker readings suggesting his biological age was younger than his chronological age — and the photograph was offered as evidence of some kind of metabolic convergence across three generations. People reacted the way people react when something is simultaneously compelling and uncomfortable: they shared it while expressing ambivalence about whether they were supposed to find it inspiring or disturbing. Both responses were tracking something real.10 min readAnti-aging and cellular healthFOXO transcription factors — the longevity nodes you didn't learn aboutIn 1993, a graduate student named Cynthia Kenyon made a worm live twice as long. The organism was Caenorhabditis elegans, the one-millimeter nematode that had become molecular biology's favorite model because its entire nervous system — 302 neurons — is mapped, its genome is sequenced, and its lifespan, normally around three weeks, is short enough to run multiple generations of aging experiments in a semester. Kenyon's lab found that a single mutation in a gene called daf-2 doubled the worm's lifespan. Not extended it modestly. Doubled it. The worm also remained healthier for longer — more active, more stress-resistant, physiologically younger at the midpoint of its extended life than normal worms were at their natural endpoint. The finding was so extreme that the field initially questioned whether it was real.11 min readAnti-aging and cellular healthKlotho — the longevity protein and the cognitive aging connectionThe mouse looked old at three months. Not sickly in the way of a diseased animal — old, in the way of an animal whose systems had outpaced their design envelope. Muscle wasting. Skin atrophy. Vascular calcification. Emphysema-like lung changes. Hearing loss. Infertility. Osteoporosis. Cognitive decline. Death, typically before the animal reached two months of age when the phenotype was fully penetrant. Makoto Kuro-o, working at the National Institute of Neuroscience in Tokyo in 1997, had been doing conventional insertional mutagenesis screens — randomly disrupting genes in mice to see what happened — when he produced a mouse that had accidentally become a model of premature aging. He named the disrupted gene after the Greek Fate who spins the thread of life: Klotho.5 min readAnti-aging and cellular healthPeptides for longevity and aging — what research has explored across the hallmarks of agingYou notice it not as a single event but as an accumulation of small ones. The recovery after a hard workout takes two days instead of one. The cut on your hand heals, but slower than you remember. The focus that used to arrive automatically needs to be summoned. None of these changes are dramatic enough to take to a doctor. Cumulatively, they sketch something you recognize and don't want to name.11 min readAnti-aging and cellular healthPeptides vs rapamycin for longevity — the decision frameworkYou're trying to decide where to start. You've read enough to know that the longevity pharmacology space has more than one lane, that something called rapamycin exists and appears in research conversations with unusual frequency, and that peptides occupy a different part of the landscape. What you haven't found is a direct comparison that treats both honestly — where the evidence is strong, where it's speculative, and how to think about the choice rather than just hand you a preference.9 min readAnti-aging and cellular healthFeeling like you're aging faster than your peersThere was a reunion — or a photo, or a run into someone from a former chapter of your life — and the comparison was unavoidable. They looked the same. Roughly the same as a decade ago, the same as your memory of them. You looked at yourself in the same context and recognized that you don't. The skin has changed more. The hair is thinner, or grayer, or both. The body composition has shifted in ways that feel less like normal variation and more like drift in a direction you didn't choose. It might have been a single photo. It might be a persistent, private sense that the gap between your chronological age and how you look and feel is not running in your favor.8 min read