|Sci|: Defining Aging—Who’s Holding the Pen? |Fi|: A Singular Panda Chapter 2
Science IRL: Aging rebels shifting medical definitions from chronology to biology + Fic: Celebrity CEO tipped closer to catharsis by insubordinate subordinate.
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|Science IRL|: Defining Aging—Who’s Holding the Pen?
Disclosure—this is not medical advice.
I’m not qualified to provide medical advice. Furthermore, neither my mechanical engineering experience nor my technical sales experience lends me any authority on the science and interventions of aging.
This Anti-Aging nonfiction installment of ScifIRL is an edu-tainment style collection of articles informed by my personal goals and research. I’m hoping they will provide you an introduction to this quickly growing field of study and how it may affect your life.
In last week’s Science IRL, I invited you to join the aging rebellion. I asked you to imagine a world where aging isn’t accepted and is instead looked at as humanity’s original pandemic—something we could cure if we put our heads together.
Being part of the aging rebellion probably won’t require you to do anything so droll as join a picket line. But it should come as no surprise that fighting aging for yourself in the near term will probably require some lifestyle shifts.
Before trading your nightly couch potato session for a low-intensity cycling workout, you’ll probably need more convincing that this anti-aging stuff represents a dependable lifeboat that’s worth swimming for.
Let’s start with where we are.
One of my favorite podcasts, ironically named “You’re Dead to Me,” has a half history half comedy episode structure. Each episode starts with a So, What Do You Know? segment, wherein the lovely host Greg Jenner attempts to guess what the audience already knows about that episode’s historical topic (Link to their show on ancient medicine, which I recommend listening. Let’s call it laughter yoga).
So what do we know—the collective ‘We’ twenty-first century humans—about aging?
We know that aging kills, or more specifically that aging cellular function kills by creating lots of various diseases. We also know the impacts of even non-aging related diseases are complicated by aging.
If you’re a numbers sort of person, here are some US stats to frame up how many deaths can be blamed on aging according to the CDC:
Deaths by “natural causes” accounted for approximately 70% of the 3.2 million deaths in 2022.
Natural causes include everything besides COVID-19 and accidental deaths. If you perceived natural causes to be preventable, aging-related complications, those numbers would be nothing short of tragic.
So why don’t we feel that way?
Who’s responsible for ‘natural causes’ rhetoric and how does a society change how it speaks about what it has always considered inevitable?
While some of our greatest contemporary scientists are focused on creating synthetic intelligence or building societies on another planet, a pocket of medical revolutionaries are trying to cure aging.
Because the mechanisms of our existing ‘health’ industry don't move unless the issue is labeled a disease or pathology, the first step in directing resources to treat the aging problem is to broadly label it a disease.
Think of the scientist in the Dragon-Tyrant allegory: the general public reaction to the mere idea of slaying the age dragon is that it’s a silly, impossible and therefore quite irresponsible expenditure of time and energy. What are our revolutionaries to do first?
If you think about the sparks that ignited revolutions in the past, you’ll likely find that it started with words—with language that redefined a key concept, bolstering its founders and pulling supporters to the cause.
With aging, the narrative has two literal battlefronts: 1) Classifying aging as a disease, not as something inevitable, fundamental, and godlike in its mystery and impact on humans. 2) Defining and measuring the effects of aging in a way that helps us treat them. It’s the engineering equivalent of asking the right question that leads to a useful answer.
First thing’s first: we’ve always measured aging as time accumulated since birth. It doesn’t take any sort of genius scientist to notice that not everyone who has lived the same number of years ages at the same rate or in the same ways. It’s almost like this is measuring the work of a celestial body, not the body in question…
Battlefront 1: Redefining aging in terms of biological age vs chronological age
As this is a very new field, we’re still exploring how to do this best, but we do have some biological metrics/markers providing guidance, because they’ve been statistically associated with health and lifespan.
Current studies are being conducted to redefine your biological age using markers like:
Autophagy: the efficacy of your cells’ recycling center
Mitochondrial Function: the efficacy of your cellular engines
Cellular Senescence: your cells’ ability to proliferate and/or recover from stress
DNA Methylation: your cells’ CEO-like ability to prioritize and direct sub-cellular elements to carry out various jobs
Before the Aging Rebellion started there were two medical schools of thought:
Gerontology: sought to prevent aging by understanding complex cellular metabolism
Geriatrics: sought to manage the diseases brought on by aging
The problem with these two limited viewpoints according to Anti-Aging science forefather, Aubrey de Gray:
“Geriatrics fails because prevention is better than a cure, and gerontology fails because our understanding of metabolism is so limited … Might it be possible to repair damage after it’s been laid down (hence avoiding the need to understand the details of how it’s laid down) but before it spirals out of control hence also avoiding the losing battle that is geriatrics?” (de Gray, et al. 41)1
Thus, the new school of thought was born in June of 2,000.
Senolytics (Age Reversal) seeks to repair cellular damage caused by aging before it accumulates and affects the host as a disease or pathology
Battlefront 2: Defining and measuring the effects of aging helps us treat them
Nowadays, Aubrey and anti-aging revolutionaries are seeking to redefine aging as a disease by proving it’s treatable. In order to do that, the first step is rigorously defining the types of damage caused by aging.
Aubrey and the team at the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Research Foundation already accomplished much on that front. They have classified seven types of aging that occur at the cellular level before they become disease and/ pathologies we’re familiar with today. In traditional medicine, your pathologies would stack up and present symptoms that would cause you to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The resulting diagnosis (heart disease, dementia, etc.) would then saddle you with medicines designed to mitigate the disease by relieving the symptoms or slowing its progress. The old schools of medicine would not often offer options to clean up the cellular damage to ultimately cure you. New school Senolytics on the other hand, will be pursuing just that, targeting the type of aging that has caused your particular issue.
Therapeutic treatments for the seven types of age-related damage are all very early in their definition and experimentation process, but they share a common goal: preventative vs palliative care. Instead of waiting for pathologies to emerge as you age and treating you according to whatever symptoms pop up, you and your doctor would assess a long-term course of anticipatory age reversal treatment. This would ideally be tuned to your particular genetic markers early in life so that you avoid ever developing those pathologies your genetics and lifestyle have set you up for.
So as an Aging Rebel, you walk into a Senolytics appointment. You have a long conversation with the provider about your lifestyle and your family and how they lived and died, or they read your genome map.
Does heart disease run in the family (read: humans)? You may be prescribed a common drug type called Statins—a widely available drug that will likely in the future be prescribed to patients in their 30s instead of their 60s for its incredible ability to reduce cholesterol better than diet and exercise alone.
Say your genome map shows you have the widowermaker BRCA gene that’s correlated with breast cancer. You may be assigned gene therapy to modify it to ensure its expression doesn’t pose a risk of cancer.
In this ScifIRL installment ‘Singular Panda’ story serial, our heroine’s wife is undergoing treatment and visible signs of aging, such as wrinkles, have disappeared from her face. The timeline is maybe abbreviated for creative license, but the phenomenon isn’t actually science fiction. Age-regression signs like this are theoretically possible.
Now that you’re seeing possibilities on the other side, we’ll dig in and talk about the revolutionaries charting a course to move the needle on anti-aging research—the real life Bridgettes.
|Science Fiction|: A Singular Panda Chapter 2
Previously…our protagonist Bridgette Strand—the celebrityCEO of an anti-aging company—received declassified files from Earth’s first brush with an alien. Bridgette and the alien, Hyp, had collaborated decades ago to resolve Earth’s global warming problem. Nowadays, Bridgette is hiding the fact that she isn’t taking her own company’s anti-aging treatment from her wife, Tarra. Bridgette decided to distract herself by seeking help to extract the files from an unlikely ally at the office.
Anhil looks around the empty office as if for help. As anticipated, he’s the only person at Human rEvolution's office today, and he's just the guy I need. Everyone else obeyed my directive to take the day before the holiday off.
Suppressing my satisfied smile is tough work, but I manage. "I could use your help on a unique, time-sensitive project."
Anhil's muddled expression is half smirk and half question mark. "Isn't our entire humanity-saving mission unique and time-sensitive?"
I should have fired this bag of sarcasm in vintage sneakers ten minutes into his first day, but I liked his work too much. We both know it, so we've settled for fighting regularly, and in private.
The empty office would promise many a good row, but I want his help. I'll have to try a new tack since I can't just leave this task on his desk and walk away with a snide comment per our usual operating mode.
"In the spirit of Unity Day," I gesture around the empty office,"why don't you and I try something new?"
"Why me?” he asks too bluntly. "You could have a dozen geniuses back in here at your beck and call."
"It's a chance to bury the hatchet," I say. "I know you gave up a lot to move here. And your work is--"
Anhil's expression is darkening. I've gone a tad too far making nice and he's getting suspicious. Humans are hard. Nerds are harder.
"Tell you what. You help me with this project," I say, wielding the USB drive, "and you're welcome to sit in on board meetings for a month. Get a driver's view--perspective for your next career steps here."
Anhil shakes his head. "I'll help you with this antique if you answer a few questions. Off the record." He puts his computer to sleep and makes a show of removing his ear buds and turning off his watch and phone.
I take a seat opposite him and nod, hoping my nerves don't show. Decades in the public eye taught me there’s no such thing as off the record. "You have ten minutes, open book."
He surprises me by launching right in.
"Why can't you see that rejecting your own inventions undermines the whole movement? You should be leading the age revolution! You make me--"
He catches himself. I'm still his boss.
"No one expected the inventor of the spacesuit to take the first moonwalk. The space industry survived," I say flatly.
"Please, that's your press response. Open book, remember? What's the real answer?"
I look down at the junction and calculate how much longer it would take me to rig a converter myself and make sense of the files inside. I want to fast forward through the converter and the file filtering and get straight to the reward. I need something comforting, reassuring at least, in whatever the government filed away on Hyp. Before I have to host Tarra's family over the holiday weekend.
Hyp must’ve felt so alone. Felt the pressure of solving a whole world’s problems in his short life expectancy on Earth.
He would understand.
Anhil continues, his voice softer, gently pulling me back to the present.
"You started this. This company is paving the transhumanist highway. Why aren't you on it? We have easily another decade or more of work to do. If you die due to your famously fraught medical history before we hit the Singularity, what happens to the company, to us? How many more decades before some future company manages to figure it out? Or what if anti-aging Phase 1 is flawed and you're not around or healthy enough to fix it? You'd be responsible for setting humanity back. You'd basically be killing generations of people by letting them die when you could have been around to solve aging."
I've been called a murderer before. Name a slanderous line, I've dodged it.
I'd normally just say I look forward to being like a panda in the future's zoo by not using my own products--reversing my aging, putting more RAM in my brain, fixing my nearsighted eyes.
I like pandas. I'm okay with my fate--or I was. I like being me--the body of me, both the leader I worked so hard to be, and the woman whose mind and body has survived so much. It took a long time to get here and I shouldn’t be expected to evolve into a cyborg myself just because I'm committed to making it possible for others.
This belief provided a solid platform for me, ever since the interviews started decades ago. I've pulled from this place of self-love and appreciation of my body's aging, even while my company markets revolutionary methods of human self-editing.
But something is changing and my pithy platform looks unstable from this vantage now that the love of my life is aging in reverse. Anti-aging was always meant to be a bridge until we figured out the Singularity piece.
A decade of work still remaining.
I knew that, but I didn't let myself really process what that meant about my options. I can't allow myself to process it now. Anhil deserves my focus.
I hold Anhil's gaze for maybe the first time since his interview. His vulnerability and resentment are all so clear in his dark eyes. I'm this man's hero and I'm failing to live up to his dream of me. More than that, he's scared the immortality prospects for himself and those he loves will be jeopardized by my personal...selfish choices.
"It's all happening so fast," I say. Horror of horror my voice hitches. "My mission with this company was to give people the option. I didn't know how fast the whole world would opt in."
Anhil's face lights up, nodding along as if this was the most obvious outcome. I resist the urge to smack him for his youthful assurance in his convictions.
"What if we all jump into agelessness, hell, into a computer, and we move so fast we don't see we're losing the parts that make us human? What if by trying to save humanity from the disease that is aging, all we're doing is turning us into robots?"
Anhil smirks unselfconsciously.
--"I don't mean literal robots, man. I mean..."
I don't know what I mean. I stand up and turn to go. I shouldn't be talking to Anhil of all people like my damn therapist.
"Wait, sorry. I didn't realize," Anhil stands too. We've never stood this close and maintained eye contact.
He pulls at his rumpled t-shirt collar and forces himself to smile.
"Thank you," he says. "I've never considered you might be doubting that you're doing the right thing. It must be difficult, juggling that with your responsibilities."
My throat has gone tight but I nod.
"If I may be so bold...any chance I can get a reopener clause on our open book agreement? It would probably be helpful for you to share this with a select few of us on the team--people who can really assess your concerns and provide some additional steering in our testing. Just an idea."
I'm stunned by the suggestion and belatedly realize this is exactly what I should have been doing all along.
"Yes. Thank you," I say.
"So what am I doing with this unique project?" He reaches for the USB drive.
To be continued…
Stay tuned! This Anti-Aging Installment of ScifIRL is a biweekly publication.
Author’s Note—Meeting my Inner Gaston
Recently, I received a proverbial kick in the face from a self-care maven I’ve adored for years, Natalie Lue (click for more info on this firecracker). Her most recent book called The Joy of Saying No is designed to help people pleasers identify their maladaptive patterns and direct their energies toward things they value vs habitual obligations. I picked up the book to support my gal when it first came out, and only recently scanned the diagnostics chapters.
Like the Cosmo quizzes I was surprised to relate to as a preteen tomboy, I met a part of myself in Nat’s chapter on the “Efforter” style people pleaser. Observe, me in my comfy chair engaging in a self-care morning routine thinking myself at least a bit evolved, suddenly seeing myself in a black&white mirror of text:
“You don’t really have a sense of your limits”
You have an “attitude of earning rest and self-care and then almost paying it back with more effort”,
“You on some level believe that effort determines whether other people should and will meet your needs.”
Ouch. Also, thanks for the unplanned revelation. Weirdly I think my subconscious had some awareness that was reflected in my choice of Halloween costume this year: Disney’s most egregious ego-drive overachiever. Observe. Me in my subconscious splendor and my good friend, Kat, demonstrating the long-suffering I must have inflicted to many in my life to date.
One of the inspiring quotes my Gram used to say to me when I was little has come up for me lately: “Reach for the moon! If you miss you’ll be amongst the stars”. While this was lovely and well-meaning on her part, in light of this recent Efforter business, I’m trying to figure out how to redefine success. How deep in the stars is sufficient stars? Am I already the mayor of a full blown lunar city per my adolescent expectations? In summary, I’ll be over here learning how to let myself—and all the Belles I encounter—alone.
Stay tuned, and be well, my nerds~
Table of Contents for A Singular Panda
A Singular Panda Chapter 1 + Science IRL: You’re Invited To Join the Aging Rebellion
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J., de Grey, Aubrey D. N., and Michael Rae. “Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime”, St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 2007, pp. 41.