“Old age isn’t a battle,” she says, quoting Philip Roth, “old age is a massacre.” In the past few years, she has given up on screenings and scans. Not that she is lazy or suicidal. But at 76, she considers herself old enough to die. All the self-help books aimed at her age group tell her otherwise; they talk of “active ageing”, “productive ageing”, “anti-ageing”, even “reverse-ageing”, with a long life promised to anyone who makes an effort, regardless of factors such as genetics or poverty. But to her, ageing is “an accumulation of disabilities”, which no amount of physical activity or rigorous self-denial can prevent. If she has symptoms, she’ll have them investigated. But when a doctor tells her there could be an undetected problem of some kind, she won’t play along.
A great iconoclast has written a polemic about ageing that sends up New Age platitudes and is full of scepticism of the wellness industry.
Blake Morrison
Thu 12 Apr 2018 02.30 EDT Last modified on Fri 13 Apr 2018 19.10 EDT.
Peripheral Elevation of a #Klotho Fragment Enhances Brain Function and Resilience in Young, Aging, and α-Synuclein Transgenic Mice.
Klotho is a longevity factor associated with cognitive enhancement when genetically and widely overexpressed over the lifetime of mice. Leon et al. show that peripheral delivery of a klotho fragment, αKL-F, acutely enhances cognition and neural resilience in young, aging, and disease model mice, establishing its therapeutic relevance and dissecting its underlying mechanisms.
Happy birthday to dr. aubrey de grey bigsmile
How many biologists does it take to make nontrivial progress on an unsolved mathematical problem for the first time in nearly 70 years? The answer is one, at least if the biologist is Dr. Aubrey de Grey, the pioneer of the repair approach to aging.
Yes, you read that right. Today, in occasion of Dr. de Grey’s birthday, we’ve decided to take a short break from biology and rejuvenation to tell our readers about the recent scientific achievement of one of the world’s most famous biogerontologists—unexpectedly, but pleasantly so, in the field of mathematics.
The chromatic number of the plane
Don’t worry if mathematics is not really your thing; we’ll keep it simple. Imagine that you have an infinitely large plane, where all points located at distance 1 from one another are connected by a straight line; any number of so-connected points, finitely or infinitely many, is called a graph. Further suppose that, for some reason, you wanted to color each point in such a fashion that no two connected points have the same color. How many different colors would you need to do this for the entire plane?
Y Combinator announces the first wave of support for biotech startups working on aging.
Earlier this year, the Y Combinator (YC) community showed interest in supporting biotechnology focused on healthspan and age-related disease. The YC community is an influential part of the Bay Area technology-focused industry in California. It was great to hear that it was planning to support biotech startups working on aging through its YC Bio program.
The first area we’re going to focus on is healthspan and age-related disease—we think there’s an enormous opportunity to help people live healthier for longer, and that it could be one of the best ways to address our healthcare crisis.
YC Bio launches in June with lab space for biotech startups
The YC Bio program has started to move forward with an announcement that from June, the bio companies will all have access space at Bonneville Labs.
A new open access paper takes a look at the potential of regenerative medicine for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease [1]. The review covers approaches such as spurring the production of new neurons and transplanting new neurons while taking a look at the disease-modeling approaches and techniques that science is now using to refine approaches to treating Alzheimer’s.
The authors here investigate how induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are contributing to the growing knowledge in the field by allowing researchers to create increasingly refined models of Alzheimer’s disease. A current problem we have is that animal models do not emulate the disease closely enough to lead to translational therapies that work in humans; this is why so many new medicines that work in mice fail in clinical trials. The review takes a look at the challenges and how science is working to develop better models.
Introduction
Today we bring you an interview with author and researcher Dr. Josh Mitteldorf who runs the aging research blog Aging Matters.
Dr. Josh Mitteldorf is an evolutionary biologist and a long-time contributor to the growing field of aging science. His work in this field has focused on theories of aging. He asks the basic question: why do we age and die? This can seem like a silly question to people encountering it for the first time because most of us would quickly respond, “Because that’s just how it is; all creatures age and die eventually as their bodies wear out.”
Essentially, Josh is saying, “Not so fast. In fact, a lot of creatures don’t age and die. Humans, as well as most other animals that do age and die, are programmed to do so. So, humans are programmed to die in much the same way that salmon are programmed to die after spawning.”