You might not guess it from the title, but Philip Ball's article on "The tech lords’ quest for eternal life" is a balanced take on the science of ageing.  There are interesting experiments in the field, but there's also quackery: What tends to happen instead [of clinical trials], however, is that, at the slightest hint...

The British Society for Research on Ageing (BSRA) has started running public lectures under the banner of "Understanding Ageing: Meet the Scientists". The first was from Janet Lord, Professor of Immune Cell Biology at the University of Birmingham. The main takeaway from the lecture was: your immune system doesn't work...

Reading: Is aging a disease?, Longevity Tech, 18 July 2025. We know that the diseases of ageing take decades to creep up on us, and so there’s interest in intervening to prevent them—somehow. Putting aside the “what” you might do, there’s the question of when and why.  Is (biological, as opposed to chronological) ageing...

Listening to: Eric Topol on the Changing Face of Medicine and Aging, Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast, 5 May 2025. I like Eric Topol’s writing, and I’ve pre-ordered his latest book, which is on ageing. So somewhat spoiling it for myself, I listened to this book-tour podcast. These notes are the bits I found most...

Reading: Cohort trends in intrinsic capacity in England and China, Beard et al. Nature Aging5, 87–98 (2025).Following up from yesterday’s post about the increasing healthspan-lifespan gap, here’s some good news: […] we found that more recent cohorts entered older ages with higher levels of capacity, while subsequent...

Reading: Global Healthspan-Lifespan Gaps Among 183 World Health Organization Member States, JAMA Network Open, 11 December 2024. Life expectancy grows, but years lived without disease are not catching up: the “healthspan-lifespan gap” has increased.  There are two things being measured here:  life expectancy—or...

Reading: Gladyshev et al., Disagreement on foundational principles of biological aging, PNAS Nexus, Volume 3, Issue 12, December 2024.This is a survey of mainly academic researchers and students, with 106 responses collected at a conference in 2022. The headlines have been: “No one agrees on what ageing is!”—and that’s...

A recent podcast and a conference talk both addressed the topic of why we age. My summary: evolution has trade-offs to make.Why we age and what we can do to stop it with Professor Richard FaragherThe Doctor’s Kitchen, 20th Nov 2024There’s a succinct introduction near the start:  aging likely evolved a billion years ago;...

Reading: Senolytics target cellular senescence — but can they slow aging?, Nature Medicine, 2 Sept 2024.Recall that senescent cells are “zombie” cells, and there’s interest in killing them off properly: […] senescence-targeting therapies might prove a promising avenue for the treatment of age-related diseases in the...

Reading: Dietary restriction or good genes: new study tries to unpick which has a greater impact on lifespan, The Conversation, 17 October 2024. Caloric restriction sounds intolerable. Cutting food by 30% or 40% to live longer doesn’t sound worth it. But does it improve healthspan?On lifespan, it works, but not as well...

Reading: A primer on the current state of longevity research, by Abhishaike Mahajan and Stacy Li, 27 July 2024. A very nice kind of Q&A on changes in longevity research over the last 3 years. Sirtuin: not worked out. Cellular reprogramming: interesting, no trials yet, but being pursued by a bunch of organizations....

Reading: ‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman, The Conversation, 13 September 2024. Seen via a boost by Aegir.I absolutely love this. Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension...

Reading: Inflated expectations: the strange craze for translational research on aging, Gems, Okholm & Lemoine (2024), EMBO Reports, 1–5.Brief and highly readable insight into where aging research is at, and where it should be.In short:  The current mainstream is to translate observations into therapies, to hell with the...

When I say “longevity science” I mean in the sense of minimizing chronic disease of ageing, and understanding the systems at work.It’s in the news again, most recently with Lord Lebedev during the King’s Speech debate in the Lords on 22 July 2024: Just imagine: by developing therapies that reverse age-related diseases,...

The term for a single gene having effects on multiple traits is pleiotropy (/ply-ot-ruh-pee/). Some genes are antagonistic, meaning they have a positive fitness impact on one trait, but negative for another.In relation to ageing, natural selection can favour AP genes which  are beneficial early in life. It is blind to...