Category Archives: Transhuman News

The summer before she started her neuroscience degree at the University of Texas, Celine Halioua interned at a clinic in Germany, working with patients who had age-related brain cancer. She formed a bond with one of them. He had a large, bushy moustache and a permanent smile the picture of a kind father, she told me. My German was not great, and neither was his English, but what struck me was his kindness despite the fact he was there to discuss his terminal diagnosis.

Halioua was shadowing a doctor, and found it hard to grasp that nothing could be done for this patient. I always thought that doctors were magical that if you put the effort in, youd be able to fix it. The realisation that you cant made me feel that we dont have free will.

She resolved to find that fix: not a cure for cancer, but an end to ageing itself. Now, at only 27, Halioua is a leading light in the relatively new field of anti-ageing biotech. Im confident well have an ageing drug by the time its relevant for me, she told me. She estimated that time as within a decade, and aims to dominate the market before then. Transparently, my goal is to build the ageing pharma company there will be many. The ageing field will one day be larger than the cancer field. Halioua described ageing as deviation from optimal biological function. Optimal is subjective, of course: Olympic gymnasts peak at a much younger age than Olympic sprinters. Old is easier to define: Halioua described it as when the physical body gets in the way of the thing that you want to do.

Haliouas speech was so rapid that the internet connection from her office in San Francisco could barely keep up. She looked every inch the digital nomad in her black T-shirt and AirPods: part biogerontologist, part CEO, part Gen Z-er. Haliouas mother is Moroccan and her father German; she was born in Texas but studied in Sweden, Germany and the UK, and dropped out of her PhD at Oxford University and began to work for the venture capitalist Laura Deming, now 27, at the California-based Longevity Fund, a firm that invests in anti-ageing businesses. Halioua launched her own start-up in 2020.

The quest for eternal youth may not be new, but it is now bankrolled by some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations on Earth. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Oracles Larry Ellison are among the many billionaires who are investing. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page helped launch Calico, a Google subsidiary focused on combating ageing, in 2013. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is in the game: not long after touching down from his maiden space flight in July, he was reported to have invested an undisclosed sum in Russian billionaire Yuri Milners Altos Labs, which will have a research base in Cambridge, UK (most anti-ageing start-ups are in the US). It is estimated that the industry will be worth $610bn by 2025.

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The field shouldnt be confused with the kooky subculture of life extensionism, whereby the determined and ascetic experiment with severe calorie restriction, intensely calibrated exercise and cocktails of daily supplements in a bid to extend a life that is arguably not worth living. Instead, anti- ageing science works at the level of gene therapy, cell hacking and reconstituting human blood; the medical treatments at its heart are based on bleeding edge science and aimed at the mass market. Some focus on biological reprogramming: adding proteins known as Yamanaka factors to cells, causing them to revert to a previous state. Others look at genomic instability or the way DNA damage that accumulates over time might be repaired.

The entrepreneurs in this fledgling field are determined that the end of ageing will come via therapies approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The elixir of youth wont be a single drug, but a regimen of treatments that knock out different hallmarks of ageing and allow us to get older without losing our bodies and minds. We will still die: there will be accidents as well as diseases unrelated to age (children still get fatal cancers, after all). But death will become increasingly remote, and no longer preceded by years of inevitable decline.

Its advocates argue that, once ageing is cured, the financial, medical, societal and emotional burden of taking care of the elderly will disappear. But have these entrepreneurs thought about what a post-ageing world would look like? And if they have, would anyone want to live there?

As it stands, a drug will only get regulatory approval if it is marketed as a treatment for age-related diseases such as arthritis, cataracts and macular degeneration, diabetes, certain cancers, dementia and Parkinsons rather than ageing in its own right. This, then, is where the science is focused. The thinking is that, if the ageing processes that underlie those diseases are treated, other rejuvenation benefits can be smuggled in.

Based in San Francisco, Unity Biotechnology is developing a class of anti-ageing drugs called senolytics. These work by eradicating senescent cells those that have stopped dividing and then gather in the body, spewing out factors that harm the surrounding tissue. Its a completely new way both of thinking about a disease and targeting it, Anrivan Ghosh, Unitys CEO, told me. Senolytics reprogramme the tissue. They raise the possibility that I can restore a previous state that a tissue or a body was in. It was first thing in the morning for Ghosh (we were speaking over Zoom), but he was fizzing with enthusiasm. He is 57 but looks younger, with a neat goatee and hair that is only flecked with grey.

Senolytic drugs are designed to be taken prophylactically, during what Ghosh refers to as a window of time when senescent cells are known to accumulate (this varies in different parts of the body). He was keento tell me about Unitys ongoing clinical trial in people with age-related eye disease the first evidence of a senolytic treatment working, he said. Twelve patients with severe vision loss due to macular degeneration or diabetic macular oedema (two of the major causes of age-related blindness) had been put on a course of Unitys lead senolytic. One of the patients could not see any letters on an eye chart, even with her glasses on, from four metres away. Everything she once needed help with, she can now do independently. The majority of those patients showed an improvement.

I would have been happy if they just maintained their vision, Ghosh said. It raises the possibility that you may somehow be able to reverse trajectory and restore a better state. Thats another level.

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Unity was an early success story, with Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos signing up as seed investors. People like Thiel and Bezos arent interested in financing the kind of incremental gains a next-generation medicine might offer, Ghosh told me. They are drawn to the idea of being able to do something that changes the way we think about disease, that changes the way we live. Over time, Unitys funding has come increasingly from bigger, more mainstream investors.

Promising paradigm change can be a risky business. Unity was valued at $700m at its initial public offering in May 2018, but shares fell by more than 60 per cent in August 2020 after its flagship product, a senolytic treatment for osteoarthritis of the knee that had worked on mice, was shown to have no greater effect than a placebo in human trials. It tells you something about the translational gap in that case sometimes the animal studies do not replicate in the human case, Ghosh said. There will be many bumps before we have success.

Up to 30 biotech companies around the world are developing senolytic drugs. British biogerontologist and computational biologist Andrew Steele, who wrote Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old (2020) after studying ageing in nematode worms and a stint at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told me he thought we were two or three years away from having the first senolytics in the clinic for specific conditions. It could be within a decade that were using these things preventatively. Like most other advocates, Steele was ambitious about the timeframe, given the relatively small number of human trials.

Ageing isnt officially defined as a disease, which is a problem for the biotech companies, Steele explained. Its currently very difficult to get a drug approved because it isnt an indication in the pharmaceutical industry. That means theres no way to say, Ive reversed or slowed someones ageing. But he remained optimistic. Were in a position, unique in human and scientific history, where weve finally got a handle on the processes. Unless youre very old or very, very unwell, theres going to be an anti-ageing drug in time for you.

For Steele, who is 36, this cant come soon enough. We have been completely ignoring the single largest cause of death, human disease and suffering, he told me. I dont think barbaric is too strong a word. Being old steals your independence: its what puts you at risk of all kinds of things not just the internal stuff like cancer and heart disease, but external threats like falls, infectious disease.

Steele told me about some 24-month-old mice (around 70 in human years) he had observed in a lab while researching his book. After a dose of senolytics, the mice thrived. They get less cancer, fewer cataracts, fewer heart problems, they are fitter and less frail, he said. Theyre cognitively younger as well. And they have better fur, thicker, plumper skin, less grey hair they just look fantastic.

Celine Halioua doesnt have to worry about the translational gap between mice and humans. She left the world of longevity venture capital in 2019 to become founder and CEO of Loyal, a biotech start-up dedicated to extending dog lifespan. It aims not simply to stretch the length of time a dog can live anything from an extra six months to three years, depending on the breed but to ensure that those months and years are healthy. (Halioua herself is a devoted dog owner, and lists her husky, Wolfie, as the companys chief evangelist on the Loyal website.) But dogs are just the beginning. Were planning to take what we learn in dogs to help pet parents and non-pet parents live longer, too, she told me.

Dogs develop the same age-related diseases as we do, Halioua explained, at approximately the same point in their life-span (the exception being heart disease, because they dont eat a lot of McDonalds or whatever). Their fur loses pigment and goes grey, just like their owners hair. They share an environment with us, and environmental factors are huge in ageing. Its also possible to see whether an intervention is working much sooner in dogs than in humans: You can do a preventative measure when theyre two or three, and youll know by six or seven, probably sooner, whether the intervention did or did not do the thing. Dogs will make the pathway to regulatory approval smoother, Halioua believes. If something can work in a complex species like a dog, that isnt super-inbred like a mouse, its a more robust justification to pursue that in people.

Significantly, dogs have devoted owners who are prepared to pay over the odds though Halioua said she was determined not to exploit that devotion. It is important to me to price our products so that they are accessible for the majority of dog owners. The final cost will depend on the materials but, order of magnitude tens, not hundreds, of dollars a month.

The first of two Loyal drugs in development targets cellular mechanism and glucose metabolism in large- and giant-breed dogs. Due to a quirk of animal husbandry, the larger the dog, the shorter its lifespan. A Great Dane might live seven to nine years on average, while a Chihuahua might live 16 to 18. Thats weird. You normally dont see a times-two differential in lifespan within the same species you dont see it in people of varying heights. This, Halioua explained, was due to an antagonistic pleiotropic effect: the thing that caused the dog to grow big quickly has a negative impact on lifespan.

The second drug targets metabolic fitness in dogs of any breed and size, in order to replicate the same effect on lifespan that calorie restriction does in mice. This will be better for late-in-life intervention. Of course, prevention is optimal, but there are people who already have grey-faced dogs and we wanted to have something for them.

Other anti-ageing therapies have emerged from more gruesome animal experimentation. The biotech company Elevian, founded in Silicon Valley but now based in Boston, began 15 years ago after Harvard professor of regenerative biology Amy Wagers stitched live mice together, fusing the circulatory systems of old and young specimens, in a process called parabiosis. The mice lived fused together for four weeks before their organs were removed and studied. Elevians CEO and co-founder, Mark Allen, described an experiment that sounded like Frankenstein and Dracula combined: The old mice exposed to young blood grow biologically younger by many different measures, and the young mice exposed to old blood grow older.

[See also: The spirit of the age: Why the tech billionaires want to leave humanity behind]

A 51-year old medical doctor turned tech entrepreneur, Allen told me he had read about Wagers work and thought it might be turned into a therapy. But its not an easy thing to translate. In the parabiosis model, the old animals are getting a continuous transfusion of young blood, 24/7, for four weeks. You cant really have a blood boy tied to you, he said, with a dark grin.

The Harvard team identified the recombinant protein GDF11, the critical factor circulating in blood that appears to be behind the rejuvenating effect. Just injecting GDF11 once daily was able to reproduce many of the different effects, Allen said. I fell in love with this work because of the breadth of effect. He reeled off a list of diseases that GDF11 might combat: emphysema, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease and potentially some cancers.

Still, Elevian had to choose one specific indication they could tell regulators they were targeting, and decided its best bet was stroke: the worst possible disease that we could treat for the shortest possible duration, and see clinically meaningful effects, Allen said. Stroke is the second biggest cause of death worldwide and a leading cause of long-term disability; the few treatments that currently exist need to be given within a few hours after a stroke if they are to be effective.

Allen said animal trials were looking positive. When we give GDF11 after a stroke, it significantly improves sensory motor function recovery. And we can give it late we can start it 24 hours or later when no other treatments exist. Our primary focus today is taking it into clinical trials. For Allen, this would be the start of something more ground-breaking. Part of the game is getting it to market as soon as possible and then beginning to expand its indication.

The entrepreneurs I speak to might be taking different paths to eternal youth, but they agree on one thing: ultimately, ageing will be cured. None wants to hazard a guess at how long people will live there may be some yet unknown physical side effect that we discover in our 200s but they believe the only obstacle to an infinite human lifespan is our inability to imagine what that might look like. This means that the potential negative effects can only be raised delicately. The ageing process causes two thirds of death globally, Steele reminded me. Any objection you want to come up with to say we shouldnt do something about it has to be larger than that.

But Paul Root Wolpe, 64, director of the centre for ethics at Emory University in Georgia in the USA (and a former senior bioethicist at Nasa), told me that a world without ageing would be an economic disaster. The argument some advocates make for its enormous social benefits is a misdirection, he said. I find their arguments extremely naive, sociologically unsupportable, and most importantly, deeply narcissistic. Ive never heard a single plausible argument of how radical life extension would benefit society only an egocentric desire not to die. The truth is, they want to stop ageing. They want to live healthily to 150.

In Wolpes view, anti-ageing scientists and entrepreneurs minimise or ignore the profound implications of significantly increasing the human lifespan. The International Monetary Fund has stated that an ageing population in Japan has led to a vanishing labour force, higher demands for social services, a shrinking tax pool, greater wealth disparities and thats just from living what is currently our lifespan. If we increase it, all of those things would increase exponentially.

But in the future envisaged by the biotech start-ups, we would work into our hundreds: an elderly population would still be a labour force. Wolpe had little patience for this idea. That is a profoundly elite perspective. Do you really think that the longshoreman, the hard labourer, the person who works as a clerk in a store, at the age of 65 is going to say, Great! I get to work for another 50 years! Its absurd. Polls show that large percentages of people hate their job. Elitists who work entirely with their brains are a small minority of the human population. They have a very blinkered point of view. It was no coincidence that Silicon Valleys tech billionaires were early investors, Wolpe said. This is one of the great scientific, intellectual areas to conquer. These people have already conquered the world in new ways. They are the first group to touch the lives of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. They have so much cash, and they dont know what to do with it.

The political ramifications of an indefinite lifespan are equally huge, Wolpe argued. The elderly vote at much higher rates than the young, and, in America at least, the highest echelons of power have become the preserve of the over-70s. Politically, young people will be squeezed, and the fresh ideas they bring to politics and innovation more generally will be suppressed.

Do you think that if the last generation or the generation before that lived to 100 or 150, there would be gay marriage, diversity inclusion movements, #MeToo? Wolpe said. The vast majority of the great innovations of the last 50 years were created by young people. A life well-lived hands its torch to the next generation. It doesnt try to override them for its own narcissistic needs.

Overpopulation and the climate crisis are other obvious counter-arguments. If death becomes rare, and humans remain at optimal health, how soon will the world run out of space and resources? Wont humans die from starvation and natural disasters instead?

[See also: Toxic relationships, burnout, productivity dysmorphia why do we medicalise societal problems?]

This is not a technology in isolation, Allen argued when I put this to him. Were figuring out how to have cleaner energy, how to have food that is healthier and less polluting, how to live more peacefully, how to travel into space. There is not a real estate problem here on Earth if we live better. Its an argument typical of Silicon Valley optimism: the solution is always more tech.

Im sanguine about overpopulation, Steele told me. If we had to work a little bit harder to solve things like climate change, resource use, land use and all those things that Im genuinely concerned about, Id happily do so if it meant suddenly no one was dying of cancer or Alzheimers.

Both Steele and Halioua dismissed the idea that indefinite fertility would lead to a population crisis, seeing it instead as an opportunity for a fairer world. Halioua pointed out that, if women want to have children, they are currently forced to make compromises at a critical time in their careers. Im going to be in my thirties soon, theoretically the ideal age to have kids, and Im not going to want kids at that age hopefully I will still be building Loyal. Thats a societal pressure that men dont have. [This] will free up 50 per cent of the population who inevitably have to take the hit.

Already, the wealthy live longer: men in the most deprived areas of England can expect to lead lives nearly a decade shorter than those in the wealthiest parts. Anti-ageing drugs will surely amplify these inequalities, when only the individuals and nations that can afford them can buy ever longer life-spans. Halioua said she had factored these concerns into her development plans: The ideal ageing drug is going to be like a statin, in terms of not being expensive. Steele added that this was a long game: expensive drugs have patents that expire after 20 years, after which generic drugs can be made at a fraction of the cost. Im not saying its right, but its normal for rich people in the West, and then everyone in the West, and then poorer countries to benefit from various kinds of medical intervention.

[See also: How life without germs has left us newly vulnerable]

I asked the anti-ageing entrepreneurs about Wolpes point that longer lives will increase intergenerational inequalities. In a future where people keep their minds and bodies, never losing their edge, how will the young ever compete in the workplace?

That kind of thinking assumes that if people were to live in good health for a very long period of time they would want to continue to do the same things, Ghosh said. I know I would not want to do drug discovery for the next 30 years. I have a bazillion other things Id like to do, and I would happily let other people take this role.

Halioua took the question personally. With Loyal, there are plenty of people who are double my age, in their 40s and 50s, completely cognisant, who have been working in ageing a long time, and didnt have the idea or desire to build this company, she said. Experienced people come with baggage and biases. Being naive has actually been one of my best traits, she said. In other words, the young will still wield their advantages.

Allen was the only anti-ageing advocate I spoke to who entertained any ethical discomfort. The biggest thing that concerns me is despots, dictators, he said. They die over time. With this, they might be able to live.

Even if we believe the claims these proponents of eternal youth make that the planet can cope, that societies will be no more unequal one problem remains: death. Its proximity directly affects our appetite for risk, making clinical trials into new vaccines possible, and encouraging billionaires to go into space. In a future where death occurs only as a result of rare disease, suicide or tragic accident, will we become paralysed by the fear of it?

For the first time, Halioua didnt have an answer. I dont know, she replied, after a long pause. I would argue that this is already a huge latent paralysis in the average human. Maybe it will get better. I dont see a world where we start becoming extra- terrified of car accidents, but maybe we will. Her face brightened: she had an idea. Maybe Tesla needs to get all their self-driving cars on the market and market it this way Number One Cause of Death Eliminated By Tesla! There it was again: the answer to a problem created by technology is more technology. The future looked bright once more and endless.

Jenny Kleeman is the author of Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex and Death (Picador)

This article appears in the 13 Oct 2021 issue of the New Statesman, Perfect Storm

Link:
Do you want to live forever? Big Tech and the quest for eternal youth - The New Statesman

Now humans

Renewal Bios precise technical plan remains under wraps, and the companys website is just a calling card. Its very low on details for a reason. We dont want to overpromise, and we dont want to freak people out, says Omri Amirav-Drory, a partner at NFX who is acting as CEO of the new company. The imagery is sensitive here.

Some scientists say it will be difficult to grow human embryo models to an advanced stage and that it would be better to avoid the controversy raised by imitating real embryos too closely.

Its absolutely not necessary, so why would you do it? says Nicolas Rivron, a stem-cell scientist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna. He argues that scientists should only create the minimal embryonic structure necessary to yield cells of interest.

For his part, Amirav-Drory says he hasnt seen a technology with so much potential since CRISPR gene-editing technology first emerged. The ability to create a synthetic embryo from cellsno egg, no sperm, no uterusits really amazing, he says. We think it can be a massive, transformative platform technology that can be applied to both fertility and longevity.

To create the succession of breakthroughs, Hannas lab has been combining advanced stem-cell science with new types of bioreactors.

A year ago, the stem-cell specialist first showed off a mechanical womb in which he managed to grow natural mouse embryos outside of a female mouse for several days. The system involves spinning jars that keep the embryos bathed in nutritious blood serum and oxygen.

A. AGUILERA-CASTREJON ET AL., NATURE 2021

In the new research published this week, Hanna used the same mechanical womb, but this time to grow look-alike embryos created from stem cells.

Remarkably, when stem cells are grown together in specially shaped containers, they will spontaneously join and try to assemble an embryo, producing structures that are called embryoids, blastoids, or synthetic embryo models. Many researchers insist that despite appearances, these structures have limited relation to real embryos and zero potential to develop completely.

See the article here:
This startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting - MIT Technology Review

Renewal Bio, a newly formed biotechnology company focused on infertility and longevity, today announced it has acquired an exclusive license from Yeda Research and Development Co Ltd, the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science, to a newly developed synthetic embryo technology. The technology was spearheaded by Prof. Jacob Hanna, Ph.D., M.D., as recently published in Cell, and builds on his research published in Nature last year. Renewal Bio plans to develop a bio platform that combines biology, hardware, and software to drive advancements and develop therapies for infertility, genetic diseases, lab-grown organs, and blood system rejuvenation.

The Problem: Humanity is Getting Older and Sicker

Since the turn of the century, developed nations have seen a clear trend: declining birth rates and fast aging populations. With significant socioeconomic implications, this trend threatens to upend health systems, retirement programs, and workforces across the globe. At the beginning of life, this is shown by a 5-10% increase in infertility treatments by U.S. couples each year. Towards the end of life, these issues are manifesting in fast-aging populations that balloon healthcare costs. In the U.S., the aging population is driving national health expenditures to increase at a rate of 5.5% per year, and are expected to reach more than $6 trillion annually by 2027.

The Solution: A Bio Platform to Renew Humanity

To solve these complex and compounding issues, Renewal Bio aims to make humanity younger and healthier by leveraging the power of the new stem cell technology. The technology can be applied to a wide variety of human ailments including infertility, genetic diseases, and longevity.

Renewal Bio's founding team includes:

Anyone interested in joining the company's mission of making humanity younger and healthier can learn more at renewal.bio.

About Renewal Bio

Founded in 2022, Renewal Bio mission is to renew humanity - making us younger and healthier. The company was founded by Omri Amirav Drory and Jacob Hanna to develop therapies ranging from infertility treatments to lab-grown organs using novel stem cell technology developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Learn more at renewal.bio.

About Yeda

Yeda Research and Development Company Ltd. is the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Yeda currently manages approximately 500 unique patent families and has generated the highest income per researcher compared to any other academic technology transfer operation worldwide. Through the years, Yeda has contributed to the commercialization of a number of groundbreaking therapies, such as Copaxone, Rebif, Tookad, Erbitux, Vectibix, Protrazza, Humira, and the CAR-T cancer therapy Yescarta. For more information, visit http://www.yedarnd.com/.

About the Weizmann Institute of Science

The Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel is one of the world's top-ranking multidisciplinary research institutions. Noted for its wide-ranging exploration of the natural and exact sciences, Weizmann Institute's scientists are advancing research on the human brain, artificial intelligence, computer science and encryption, astrophysics and particle physics, and are tackling diseases such as cancer, while also addressing climate change through environmental, ocean, and plant sciences.

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Renewal Bio Acquires Breakthrough Stem Cell Technology With Applications in Infertility and Longevity - Benzinga

A recently published study has called into question the long-held belief that women tend to outlive men. The study found that the belief might, after all, not be true, especially in the case of men who are married or possess a university degree. The study, published on Tuesday in the British Medical Journal Open, spanned two centuries across all continents and concluded that while men have a lower life expectancy than the opposite sex, they do have a substantial chance of outliving females.

A blind interpretation of life expectancy differences can sometimes lead to a distorted perception of the actual inequalities (in lifespan), researchers wrote in the published paper.

Why women have been thought to live longer than men

What does the latest study have to say about this

The researchers in Denmark have challenged this conventional knowledge stating, Despite females having a higher life expectancy than males, not all females outlive all males. On the contrary, a sizeable portion of males might live longer than a sizeable portion of females, even if the life expectancy shows a female advantage.

After collecting data from 199 countries between 1751 and 2020, the scientists discovered that men have a high probability of outliving women, especially if they have a university degree or are married. For married couples, the study pointed out that couples influence each others health and that men benefit more from being in a stable relationship than women.

Males who are married or have a university degree tend to outlive females who are unmarried or do not have a high school diploma, the study read.

In the United States, married men had a 39 per cent chance of outliving women compared with a 37 per cent chance for unmarried women. In terms those with university degrees, they have a 43 per cent chance of living longer than women as opposed to a 39 per cent chance for men who didnt complete a high school diploma.

According to the analysis, between 25 and 50 per cent of men have lived longer than women based on the country and the time period. In other words, data has shown that one to two out of every four men have outlived a randomly paired woman for almost all points as reviewed by the study.

The study also said that male expectancy tends to be lower since a small number of males will live very short lives to result in that difference. For example, more baby boys die than baby girls in most countries.

These findings challenge the general impression that men do not live as long as women and reveal a more nuanced inequality in lifespans between females and males, the study concluded.

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Get married or get a degree to live longer says study, debunking theories of womens longevity over men - Times Now

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TEL AVIV, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nucleai, a leader in AI-powered spatial biology transforming precision medicine by unlocking the power of pathology data, today announced the appointment of Kenneth J. Bloom, MD, FCAP as the companys new head of pathology. Dr. Bloom brings more than 35 years of clinical experience in pathology, oncology, telemedicine and bioinformatics to this critical role at Nucleai.

In his most recent role, Dr. Bloom was Chief Medical Officer of Advanced Pathology and Genetic Services at REALM IDx, including operating companies: Invicro and Ambry Genetics. Previously, he was President and Head of Oncology and Immunotherapy for Human Longevity Inc. In this role, Dr. Bloom was responsible for all sequencing products and for establishing and leading the Oncology program. Under his direction, the team developed and commercialized an industry-leading cancer exome product and commercialized a technique for validating neoantigens predicted from sequencing.

Earlier in his career, he spent 12 years as a top executive at Clarient Pathology Services where he led the development of hundreds of laboratory-developed tests, including those using IHC, ISH, Flow Cytometry and molecular methods. He has also served as a principal investigator in more than a dozen clinical trials and as an advisor to various pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Before his industry experience, Dr. Bloom spent 15 years at Rush Medical Center.

I am excited to welcome Dr. Ken Bloom, a world-renowned thought leader in pathology, to our team. His experience, knowledge and innovative ideas are an asset for Nucleai, said Avi Veidman, CEO of Nucleai. The appointment of Dr. Bloom as the Head of Pathology strengthens our ability to unlock the power of pathology data through our AI-driven spatial biology platform. As we have assembled a team of world-class physicians, scientists and technologists, Nucleai is uniquely positioned to help advance precision medicine more rapidly.

Nucleais state-of-the-art spatial biology and machine learning platform empowers researchers and pathologists to improve workflows and unleash data previously hidden within pathology slides, transforming the practice of pathology and improving patient outcomes, said Dr. Bloom. I look forward to working with Nucleais CEO and other visionaries within the company to make Nucleais approach pervasive in the medical field.

About Nucleai

Nucleai is an AI-powered spatial biology company with a mission to transform drug development and clinical treatment decisions by unlocking the power of pathology data. Nucleai provides pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations, and diagnostics laboratories with a state-of-the-art AI platform to improve clinical trials and clinical decision-making. For more information, please visit http://www.nucleai.ai.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220802005702/en/

Anthony PetrucciBioscribe[emailprotected]512-581-5442

Source: Nucleai

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Nucleai Appoints New Head of Pathology to Support Expansion in Biopharmaceutical and Clinical Markets - StreetInsider.com

Wards wry survey of the weird world of immortalism goes heavy on the early history of cryonics (freezing corpses until we work out how to revive them) but it is light on the science of what we actually know about ageing. To fill this gap, at least partially, I recommend Methuselahs Zoo () by the zoologist Steven M Austad.

Austads big beef and hes not alone in this is that too many experiments are done on mice. For anyone interested in ageing, the trouble with mice is that they dont live very long, even relative to their size. Which terrestrial mammals live the longest? The answer to this, funnily enough, is humans. As Austad points out, mice should really be experimenting on us.

The rationale of this smartly written book can be summed up by whats known as Orgels second rule, after the British chemist Leslie Orgel: namely, that evolution is cleverer than you are. So if you want to know how to extend the longevity of humans, one way might be to examine the superior longevity of other animals, then try to work out how they manage it.

As weve seen, this is tricky, since humans already have a high longevity quotient, yet there are animals that outdo us and this gives Austad his cue for an entertaining tour of the whole animal kingdom in all its mad variety. I had no idea I would so enjoy reading about the naked mole rat, or indeed the human fish, a type of salamander that lurks in Balkan caves.

The one disappointing thing about this urbane volume is that even though Austad knows more about his subject than anyone on the planet, on the key points he still doesnt know much. His chapters often end by asking rhetorically what lessons we have learnt from the exceptional longevity of such-and-such a beast only to conclude that, as yet, the answer is none. More research is needed.

Specifically, Austad recommends we trigger a Manhattan Project to uncover the longevity secrets of birds. Or bats, for that matter. In this, he brings to mind Nikolai Fedorov, the Russian philosopher and godfather of immortalism, who argued in the 19th century that the quest to combat death should be put on a war footing.

Now that Jeff Bezos and other multi-billionaires have put their financial heft behind the quest to understand ageing, this may be what were getting. For anyone with cash to spare, Id recommend channelling some of it towards the katabatic heroes at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences. New technologies often originate in identifying and harnessing new scientific principles. In this case, the researchers would be descending into the unknowns of lifes thermodynamics and a theory of immortality.

Like the Greek hero Pirithous, who failed to make it back from hell, they might never be seen again. On the other hand, theres a chance they might return with quite a story to tell.

To order a discounted copy of either book call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

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Some species are immortal but dying of old age is humanity's secret weapon - The Telegraph

Healthy aging is a shared goal of most humans, but the body has a nasty habit of breaking down over time. Tantalizing research suggests it is possible to develop nutrition and lifestyle interventions that can delay aging and extend healthspan. In model organisms, including rodents and nonhuman primates, caloric restriction (CR) has proven to be an effective method for mitigating aging-related deterioration of biological functions and for extending healthspan and lifespan. But more than 80 years since its discovery, the underlying mechanisms by which caloric restriction extends either are still largely undefined.

Researchers have linked a number of biochemical pathways to longevity, including those involved with nutrient signaling, metabolism, growth, genome stability, and oxidative stress. Translating this knowledge, derived mostly from mouse studies, to humans is an additional barrier that must be overcome. For example, it is almost impossible for the majority of people to maintain severe dietary restriction over their lifetime. Thus, more viable solutions for promoting health- and lifespan in humans must be found.

We have been studying the behavioral effects of CR in mice and have found that it leads to dramatic changes in feeding behavior. In contrast to mice given continual access to unlimited food, which spread their daily food consumption over the course of the day and night, mice on caloric restriction adopt a stark feeding and fasting pattern in which they consume all of the food provided within a few hours each day. Thus, under CR, mice not only consume fewer calories, they voluntarily adopt a time-restricted feeding pattern with a long fasting interval. All these factors have been shown to have numerous health benefits, again primarily in animal models.

More than 80 years since its discovery, the underlying mechanisms by which caloric restriction extends lifespan are still largely undefined.

To disentangle the contributions to longevity of calorie restriction, periods of fasting, and alignment of eating with an animals circadian clock, we recently completed a comprehensive study that contrasts these three factors. We found that CR is sufficient to extend lifespan but that the pattern and circadian alignment of eating act synergistically to extend lifespan further. While CR alone increases lifespan by approximately 10 percent, eating that CR diet only at night, when mice are normally awake, extends lifespan by more than 35 percent compared to mice eating regular diets. We also found that circadian alignment of feeding enhances CR-mediated benefits for survival independently of fasting duration (2 vs. 22 hours) and body weight. Aging promotes increases in inflammation and decreases in metabolism in the livers of mice with constant access to food, whereas a CR diet fed at night ameliorates most of these aging-related changes. Thus, eating only at certain times of day appears to promote longevity in animals and could provide a new mechanism for the treatment and management of aging in humans.

A significant aspect of our study was that there were no significant effects of the pattern or time of eating on body weight in mice. In addition, body weight was not associated with lifespan. This finding is consistent with a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) comparing weight loss in two groups of human subjects that were assigned to CR alone or CR with an 8-hour time-restricted eating window. The authors of this paper report no differences between these groups and conclude that there was no benefit of time-restricted eating for body weight. As we showed in our study, however, body weight does not serve as a good biomarker for longevity under CR conditions. So it would have been more useful in the NEJM study to have measured other endpoints besides body weight, such as inflammatory biomarkers associated with aging. In addition, previous studies that demonstrated health benefits of time-restricted eating were performed under conditions of overeating, not CR. Obviously, CR and overeating engage fundamentally different metabolic processes, and thus time-restricted eating of a CR diet should not be expected to yield the same results as time-restricted eating of a calorie-rich diet.

Our discovery that CR functions in concert with time-restricted eating and circadian alignment to optimally extend healthspan and lifespan is potentially transformative because it may yield a novel method for promoting healthy aging and lifespan increases in humans. Because lifespan in humans is primarily determined by lifestyle (less than 25 percent is genetically determined), these findings may be translated in future work to humans and are amenable to widespread adoption because they can be achieved by behavioral intervention: a CR diet eaten at the correct circadian time of dayi.e., when one is normally awake. This might involve, for example, a 12-hour eating window that begins at breakfast time.

A significant aspect of our study was that there were no significant effects of the pattern or time of eating on body weight in mice.

In addition, ongoing research in our labs seeks to test whether enhancing circadian clock function by behavioral (lifestyle), genetic, or pharmacological means can delay the aging process. Pharmaceutical agents were identifying in our labs that enhance circadian clock function may one day be used in humans as comprehensive therapies for aging. For now, were planning experiments for testing their anti-aging and pro-longevity effects in mice. Our lab and others have already provided evidence that the circadian clock system is an upstream regulator of all of the known anti-aging and pro-longevity pathways. So enhancing circadian clock function may rescue multiple aging pathways at the same time. We are testing this hypothesis by boosting Clock gene expression in genetically engineered mice. These animal studies can then lay the groundwork for the isolation of small molecules that target the Clock protein and the development of drugs that might safely modulate clock function and enhance health and longevity in people.

Joseph S. Takahashiis an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor and chair of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centers Peter O Donnell Jr. Brain Institute. He is also a member ofThe ScientistEditorial Advisory Board. Carla B. Green is a professor and Distinguished Scholar in the Department of Neuroscience at the same institution.

The rest is here:
Opinion: Changing When and How Much We Eat May Extend Health Span - The Scientist

From a cup of caffeine to the exact shade of your vegetable, from how much and what kind of exercise you should do to whether broccoli is doing you more harm than good, the era of personalised food, fitness, and medicine is here.

That's the greatest thing that can happen and is a solution that will ultimately help people to live long, says Sajeev Nair, the Co-founder and Chairman of Vieroots Wellness Solutions.

Founded in 2019 by Sajeev and Co-founder Adityanarayan, Bengaluru-based healthtech startup Vieroots Wellness Solutions has pioneered the Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered and Personalised Epigenetic Lifestyle Modifications (EPLIMO) mobile app.

Our goal is to healthfully transform the lives of one crore people through EPLIMO by 2025, Sajeev says.

"As COVID-19 made people realise that they need to take charge of their own health, they started searching for tools and processes to do it. EPLIMO was on time in the market as a solution to their search," he adds.

With the option to store healthcare records for quick reference and locate nearby practitioners, EPLIMO puts everything at its users fingertips.

As COVID-19 altered the dynamics of health and healthcare, bringing several technological interventions in its wake, the pandemic also induced a long-term shift in consumer behaviour and attitudes, redefining relationships with the body and the mind.

The earlier approach of reactionary medicine, as Sajeev calls it visiting a doctor only in times of sicknesshas been steadily changing owing to a quick shift towards slow and sustainable living, and a holistic transformation in lifestyle choices.

The shift is towards long-term solutions and as Sajeev calls it, an early adoption of preventive medicine/preventative healthcare.

In fact, according to Indian market research firm, Numb Research, Indias 443 million millennials spend an average of Rs 4,000 per month on health and wellness services and products.

This is validated by the 5,000+ active user base of EPLIMO, a steadily growing tribe.

More than 200 lifestyle coaches and 500+ wellness consultants are on board with Vieroots.

At one point in time, I used to consume a lot of nutritional supplements and exercise a lot, but I soon learnt that not everything is for everyone. I learnt that some of these supplements can do more harm than good, while some of the exercises can actually kill you. And, that was a big revelation, Sajeev recalls.

In 2005, when I had gone to the US I came across a concept called nutrigenomics (also known as nutritional genomics, the term is broadly used to define the relationship between nutrients, diet and gene expression), which is to primarily decode nutritional aspects based on genomics, he says.

In 2003, the Human Genome Project was completed.

Sajeev soon learnt that one would be able to decode the diverse nutritional requirements of the body based on the DNA.

Hailing from Kerala, serial entrepreneur Sajeev, a well-known wellness evangelist and one of Indias first biohackers, was already working on his wellness business at that time.

The author of The Making of a Superhuman, Sajeev experimented on himself some of the DIY biohacks or personalised lifestyle modifications that he came to understand through his research.

As he started cultivating the space of long healthy fulfilling lives, he soon discovered how it was intrinsically connected with personalised health.

Typically, a customer is delivered a kit enabling them to take 2 ml of their saliva, and the sample is reverse-picked and dispatched to the genomic lab. The lab then decodes ones DNA and assesses it across the metrics of 250 different health conditions.

The DNA report card lets a user receive a host of information: from their risk to lifestyle diseases like diabetes as well as autoimmune diseases to how minerals and vitamins are getting absorbed in their cells and their musculoskeletal structure generativity.

However, Vieroots soon realised that it was not enough.

Imagine when you visit a good doctor for a certain condition or any illness. They sometimes ask seemingly unrelated questions regarding sleep cycle etc. To a lay person, it might seem unrelated, but Sajeev explains that these are deeper questions directly related to ones body and health. For example, whether one is getting good sleep or not is also a determinant of their digestive function.

Vieroots curated a questionnaire of 70 metabolism-related questions, pre-loaded onto their mobile app, EPLIMO. When a user visits the website they are directed to the app, and when they download the app, the user is directed to answer these questions.

Sajeev gives an example: Suppose if you look at a genomic report, an individual might genetically have a higher risk for lactose intolerance. To address the issue of lactose intolerance, the suggested recommendation must be in the nature of don't use dairy products. However, once you go read through the report further, maybe, you will find a higher risk for lower concentrations of calcium, and the stated recommendation would be consume more of calcium-rich foods like milk.

The correlation is missing; the report is only based on condition-to-condition parameters. EPLIMO claims to provide a highly accurate recommendation by correlating the various conditions using the power of ML and AI.

Sajeev describes the personalised health bulletin as an operating manual for the rest of your life as genomic data never changes.

The good thing is that our target group is very defined; they are health-conscious people. We are only targeting people who are already health-conscious, but making mistakes. For example, people who need to make informed choices, be it in exercise or diet, Sajeev explains.

So far, the number of app downloads stands at 5,500 with Tier I comprising 70-80% and the Northeast comprising up to 20%. The average age profile of the user base is between 25 and 55 years.

The entire EPLIMO process, including the counselling and coaching, costs Rs 30,000 plus taxes.

Vieroots has trained wellness or lifestyle coaches with a background in life sciences. Some of them are dieticians, and professionals who have pursued biotechnology courses. All work on a commission basis for generating and supporting sales.

The lifestyle coaches undergo a two-month course, for which Vieroots has affiliated with the Indian Association for Functional Medicine.

The entire process takes about four weeks to six weeks, starting from the delivery of the genomic kit through to the counselling session. The final virtual counselling session takes place in addition to the PDF-format epigenetic personalised lifestyle recommendation manual that the user receives on the app.

Talking about the challenges, Sajeev explains, The first name that comes to a users mind when we talk about healthcare is the doctor. And, yet, you normally visit a doctor when you are sick. Also, most doctors do not have the time or bandwidth to look into preventive healthcare, because they are too busy working on diseases.

In the case of autoimmune diseases, the only medicine available is immunosuppressants. Some genomic report findings have revealed that for some people, nightshade vegetables, the likes of tomatoes and potatoes, have an adverse effect. And interestingly, it was observed that when such people stopped consuming them, their autoimmune disease, for which they have been suffering for years, also subsided, he adds.

Sajeev says that there are no direct competitors or services like EPLIMO. However, he names some of the top players in the "personal genomics market" in India: MayMyGenome, Genebox, and Medgenome.

The bootstrapped startup follows the direct-to-customer revenue model.

We completed a full financial year this year on March 22, and locked in Rs 14.8 crore with a narrow profitability. We have two revenue streams: one is a service, and the second is our nutritional supplements, Sajeev states.

See the rest here:
Vieroots uses genome testing to win over a growing tribe of wellness enthusiasts - YourStory

The existence of the human body is incredibly intriguing and lovely. Many physical processes and defence mechanisms that keep the body safe and healthy are part of who we are naturally. Our skin is same, even.

Therefore, using natural products is the ideal method to enhance the natural properties of skin, and what better way to achieve it than by utilising the superpowers of the legendary Ayurveda! In India, Sri Lanka, and other South Asian countries, the ancient medical system known as Ayurveda is still used today.

The use of Ayurvedic cosmetics was intended to promote longevity and excellent health in addition to improving one's outward beauty. There are many Ayurvedic skin care formulae available today, but in order to get the best results, it's important to know the quality and ingredients of your products.

Haldi (Turmeric)

We all know the benefits of Haldi when it comes to our food but do you know it is also extremely good for our skin. Turmeric contains curcumin, which has anti-aging, anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial properties. As a result it increases the natural glow and radiance of your skin.

Chandan (Sandalwood)

Sandalwood is an essential Ayurvedic plant that is utilised in many Ayurvedic herbal products. This ancient ingredient contains cooling properties as well as organic brightening components that help heal sun tans, black spots, and uneven skin tone.

Giloy (Heart-leaved Moonseed)

Giloy is an antipyretic herb loaded with antioxidants, which helps to reduce oxidative stress hence delaying skin aging. It also has anti-inflammatory properties that assist in skin tissue regeneration and inflammation reduction.

Amla (Indian Gooseberry)

Amla, or Indian gooseberry, is abundant in Vitamin C and antioxidants, making it a good anti-aging herb. It tightens your skin and gives it a healthy glow. Regular drinking of amla juice increases the collagen production in your skin. External use of Amla extracts in the form of face packs and washes helps to prevent acne, pimples, sunburn, and other skin disorders.

Neem

Neem is another beloved medicinal herb in South-Asian countries. The antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and therapeutic effects of neem leaves and extracts are the reasons for its popularity. It can be used to treat acne and dry skin. Since it stimulates collagen production, it can also help reduce wrinkles and reduce scars.

Kumkumadi Tailam

KumkumadiTailam is an Ayurvedic natural oil with a bunch of brilliant medicinal properties. Its blessings for the pores and skin are extraordinary. It can lessen wrinkles and different symptoms and symptoms of aging, minimise zits and acne, or even deal with pores and skin situations like allergy and more. It additionally reduces melanin formation, lightening the general pores and skin tone and lowering darkish patches.

Since this Ayurvedic oil is antibacterial and anti-inflammatory, it may heal minor wounds at the pores and skin. Moreover, the lac gift as one of the components is an effective antifungal agent, which prevents a bigger variety of infections.

Read the original here:
Herbs radiate and give you youthful skin - The Hans India

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Everything in America is getting older these days. In practically every field of human endeavorpolitics, business, academia, science, sports, pop culturethe average age of achievement and power is rising.

Politics is getting older. Joe Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. Remarkably, he is still younger than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. And they arent exceptions to the general rule: The Senate is the oldest in history.

Businesses are getting older. The average age of new CEOs at Fortune 500 companies is very likely at its record high, having gradually increased throughout the 21st century. And its not just the boss; the whole workplace is getting older too. Between the 1980s and early 2000s, Americans under 45 accounted for the clear majority of workers. But that's no longer the case, since the large Baby Boomer generation has remained in the labor force longer than previous cohorts.

Science is getting oldernot just in this country, but around the world. Discovery used to be a young persons game. James Watson was 24 when he co-discovered the structure of DNA, and Albert Einstein was 26 when he published his famous papers on the photoelectric effect and special relativity. But in the past few decades, the typical age of scientific achievement has soared. Nobel Prize laureates are getting older in almost every discipline, especially in physics and chemistry. The average age of an investigator at the National Institutes of Health rose from 39 in 1980 to 51 in 2008, and the average age of principal investigators receiving their first major NIH grant increased from about 36 in 1990 to about 45 in 2016. In fact, all of academia is getting older: The average age of college presidents in the U.S. has increased steadily in the past 20 years. From 1995 to 2010, the share of tenured faculty over the age of 60 roughly doubled.

In pop culture, the old isnt going out of style like it used to. The writer Ted Gioia observed that Americans have for several years shifted their music-listening to older songs. In film, the average age of movie stars has steadily increased since 1999, according to an analysis by The Ringer. So far this year, the seven highest-grossing American films are sequels and reboots. Sports such as tennis and football are dominated by superstars (Nadal, Djokovic, Brady, Rodgers) who are unusually old for the game. Incredibly successful young artists and athletes obviously do existbut older songs, older stars, and existing franchises are dominating the cultural landscape in a historically unusual way.

So, whats going on?

1. As rich Americans live longer and healthier lives, American power is aging.

The average American lives longer than they did in 2000, despite life expectancy flatlining in the past decade. Rich Americans have it even better: The wealthiest Americans live at least 10 years longer than the poorest Americans, and that gap is growing.

Since the rising ages of prominent politicians, CEOs, and Nobel Prize winners are whats at issue, a focus on the elite seems appropriate. For most of this century, the richest quartile of men have been adding about 0.2 years to their life expectancy each year. If we extrapolate that annual increase to the entire century, it would suggest that rich men have added roughly four years to their lifespans since 2000. The average age of U.S. senators did, in fact, rise from 59.8 in 2001 to 64.3 in 2021a roughly four-year increase.

But many positions and institutions are getting older much faster than that. A few years ago, Inside Higher Ed noted that for college presidents, 70 seems to be the new 50.

The average age of new CEOs at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies increased nine years since 2005from 46 to 55. The average age of leading actors in films increased about 12 years since 2001from about 38 to about 50 for male stars.

Maybe we should consider not just life spans, but health spans. In sports, for instance, a superior understanding of diet, exercise, and medicine has allowed stars to extend their careers. The tennis stars Novak Djokovic, 35, and Rafael Nadal, 36, are old for their sport, but theyve somehow won 15 of the last 17 Grand Slam mens tournaments. Three of the last five NFL Most Valuable Player Awards went to quarterbacks over the age of 36Tom Brady in 2017 and Aaron Rodgers in 2020 and 2021. In basketball, LeBron James recently became, at 37, the oldest NBA player to average 30 points per game in a season. The winningest pitcher in Major League Baseball is Justin Verlander, who is 39.

So the longevity factor is twofold. Not only are Americans overall living longer, but richer Americans are living even longer, and rich Americans with access to dietitians, personal exercise, and high-class medical care are extending their primes within the context of longer lives. As a result, we should expect older workers to vigorously contribute to their fields much longer than they used to.

2. As work becomes less physical and more central to modern identity, the old elite are spending more time at work.

Another way to frame the central question here: Why are the Boomer elite working so hard, so late into their lives?

One explanation for the rapid aging of our political leaders, academic faculty, and chief-executive class is that the Boomer generation is choosing to stay in the workforce longer than previous generations did. This has created what the writer Paul Millerd calls a Boomer blockade at the top of many organizations, keeping Gen-X and Millennial workers from promotions. As older workers remain in advanced positions in politics and business, younger workers who would have ascended the ranks in previous decades are getting stuck in the purgatory of upper-middle management.

If one wanted to frame things more generously, one could say that declining ageism has allowed older Americans to stay in jobs that they really like and dont want to leave. These folks could retire, but they love their work and draw an enormous amount of pride from their careers.

But 70- and 80-somethings loving their work so much that they never retire is awfully close to something Ive called workismthe idea that work has, for many elites, become a kind of personal religion in an era of otherwise declining religiosity. Workism isnt all bad; its nice that the economy has evolved from brawn to brainy labor that gives people a sense of daily enrichment and higher purpose. But workism isnt all good, either: The corner office was not designed to function as a temple, and a work-centric identity can lead to a kind of spiritual emptiness. Whats more, though this subject is complicated and sensitive, a lot of very elderly people in positions of great power are clinging to their jobs long after their cognitive and verbal capacities have peaked. This is not a good recipe for high-functioning institutions.

3. The burden of knowledge: Science is getting older, because were all getting smarter.

Longer lives and increasing workism could explain why our political and business leaders are quickly getting older. But they dont explain the biggest mysteries Ive highlighted in the field of sciencesuch as why the average age of Nobel Prize laureates has increased or why young star researchers are rarer than they once were.

The best explanation for both of these trends is the burden of knowledge theory. We are learning more about the world every year, but the more we learn about any subject, the harder it is to master all the facts out there and push the frontier of knowledge outward.

This theory is pretty obvious when you think about it for a few seconds. Lets imagine, for example, that you want to revolutionize the field of genetics. Three hundred years ago, before any such domain existed, you could have made a splash just by shouting, Ive got a strong feeling that genes are a thing! Two hundred years ago, you could have done it by watching some peas grow in your backyard and using your powers of observation to form a theory of inheritance. But now that we know that genes are a thing and have figured out dominant and recessive genes and have mapped the genome, the most groundbreaking research in the field is really, really complicated. To understand the genetic underpinnings of a complex disease such as schizophrenia, hundreds of people around the planet have to synthesize data on the infinitely complex interplay of genes and environment.

The burden of knowledge affects the average age of scientists in several ways. First, attaining mastery at a young age of an existing domain becomes harder. Since scientists have to learn so much in fields such as physics or chemistry, they take longer to become established, and the average age for achieving breakthrough work (or fancy prizes) goes up and up. Second, the knowledge burden necessitates large teams of researchers to make new breakthroughs, and these teams tend to be led by older principal investigators. Third, scientific-funding institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, may be awarding a disproportionate amount of funding to older researchers precisely because theyre biased against younger researchers who they assume havent overcome the knowledge burdens of their field. Or perhaps, as academia and funding institutions get older, they develop an implicit ageism against younger researchers, who they assume are too naive to do paradigm-shifting work in established domains.

The burden of knowledge theory represents a double-edged sword of progress. It is precisely because we know so much about the world that it is getting harder to learn more about the world. And one side effect of this phenomenon is that science is rapidly aging.

4. Data dulling has made institutions risk-averse (and consumers obsessed with familiarity).

Pop culture in 2022 has been a warm bath of nostalgia. The song of the summer is quite possibly Kate Bushs Running Up That Hill, which was originally released 37 years ago. Its success was launched by the show of the summer, the 80s pastiche Stranger Things. The years biggest blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick, is a sequel-homage to the 1986 original.

Okay, well, thats just one summer, you might be inclined to say. But its not. So many recent albums have fallen short of expectations that The Wall Street Journal has called it a new music curse. Every year in the last decade, at least half of the top-10 films in America have been sequels, adaptations, and reboots. (Even the exceptions are their own sort of franchise: The two biggest opening-weekend box offices for original films since 2019 were for movies directed by Jordan Peele.)

Is this about median longevity, or workism, or the burden of knowledge in physics and genomics? Uh, no. These are cultural stories, and they deserve a cultural explanation. The best Ive got is this: As the entertainment industry has become more statistically intelligent, entertainment products have gotten more familiar and repetitive.

In music, Ive previously called this the Shazam effect. As the music industry got better at anticipating audience tastes, it realized that a huge portion of the population likes to hear the same thing over and over again. Thats one reason why hit radio stations have become more repetitive and why the most popular music spends more time on the Billboard charts.

For the past few decades, the same statistical revolution that reshaped sportsa.k.a. moneyballhas come for entertainment. You could call it data dulling: In entertainment, greater algorithmic intelligence tends to ruin investment in originality. When cultural domains become more statistically sophisticated, old and proven intellectual property takes money and attention from new and unproven acts.

What does data dulling look like in art? It looks like music companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying the catalogs of old hitmakers when, in previous generations, that money would have gone toward developing new artists. It looks like movie studios spending significantly more on the production budgets of sequels than on originals. It looks like risk-averse producers investing more in familiar content, which amplifies consumers natural preference for familiaritythus creating a feedback loop that clusters new cultural products around preexisting hits. It looks a lot like what weve got.

***

Americas multidisciplinary gerontocracy is complex. It comes from a mix of obviously good things (were living longer, healthier lives), dubiously good things (an obsession with the music and tastes of the 1980s), and straightforwardly bad things (a stunning dearth of young political power and an apparent funding bias against young scientists).

Solving this problem is similarly complex. I would be very uncomfortable with laws that ban ambitious 74-year-olds from working. Im not very interested in forcing Bruce Springsteen fans to stop listening to him. But Im enthusiastic about new research organizations that specialize in funding young scientists.

Another matter worth investigating is that other countries dont share the gerontocracy problem across disciplines. In the U.K., for example, the public is getting older, but its leaders arent. I think we should be more open to asking hard questions, such as If the Democratic Party is the preference of Americas young people, why are so few young people represented in its leadership? and How do we balance a respect for the elderly with a scientific approach to evaluating the cognitive state of our oldest political and corporate leaders? In the end, this is about nothing less than how an aging country learns to grow up wisely.

Want to discuss more? Join me for Office Hours August 16 at 1 p.m. ET. This month, Ill discuss whether weve missed our chance to tackle climate change with my colleague Robinson Meyer. Ill continue to hold office hours on the second Tuesday of each month. Register here and reply to this email with your questions about progress or the abundance agenda. If you cant attend you can watch a recording any time on The Atlantics YouTube channel.

Original post:
How Pop Culture, Politics, Science, and Business Got So Old - The Atlantic