The Race To Find A Cure For Aging

Learn about three pioneers working to turn back the clock

We want to look & feel young again, and every year we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on beauty serums, cosmetic surgery, and exotic supplements in the hopes of appearing more vibrant, healthy, and desirable.

All of those products, procedures & pills only cover up the symptoms of aging — they do nothing to address the cause. While medicine does help us to live longer, at best it has only slowed the ravages of time, and an aging population is driving demand for alternatives to the gradual decline into senescence.

Aging, once thought to be inevitable, is being challenged. For the first time in history, biomedical innovators are starting to view it in a disease model, and not as an inevitability of life — and medical science is working to find a cure.

Here are three stories of people from different walks of life who share a singular goal — they’re actively working to extend their own lifespans, and sharing what they’ve learned on how to achieve it:

David Sinclair & NAD+

Dr. David Sinclair says the solution is to get your NAD+ levels up — and he’s offering detailed, practical advice on how to do it. In lengthy interviews with Joe Rogan & Rich Roll, as well as his recent book, he discusses the health benefits of intermittent fasting, limiting sugar & red meat, and eating plenty of vegetables — but for Sinclair, that’s only the beginning.

Sinclair is an award-winning Australian biologist, professor of genetics, and Founding Director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratory for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard University.

His team of 30+ scientists is deeply engaged in studying the mechanisms involved with aging & senescence, and treatments to potentially reverse them. One of the promising life-extension supplements they’ve identified is Metformin — an inexpensive blood sugar medication that may extend the human lifespan by as much as 10%.

In addition to Metformin, Sinclair is bullish on the prospects of NMN (nicotinamide monomucleotide) for life extension. This vitamin B-3 derivative converts easily into NAD+ inside your cells, which is claimed to improve cellular function and offer rejuvenating effects seen in human clinical trials.

Sinclair claims to have reversed aging in lab mice, and also claims to have “knocked more than two decades off his biological age”, as well as boasting online that he has the lung capacity, cholesterol and blood pressure of a “young adult” and the “heart rate of an athlete.”

If he’s right, aging can reversed with NAD+ boosting supplements — and that’s a big step in a cure for aging and the diseases that come with it.

Elizabeth Parrish & Telomeres

Others, like Elizabeth Parrish, the CEO of BioViva Sciences, have taken a different route: she underwent experimental gene therapy to lengthen her telomeres & reduce muscle wasting back in 2016, and claims her health has improved since the treatment.

According to Wikipedia, “independent testing by SpectraCell Laboratories had revealed Elizabeth Parrish’s leukocyte telomere length had been extended from 6.71kb to 7.33kb” — but in 2018, she reported further lengthening in her telomeres up to 8.12kb, along with an overall growth in muscle mass.

A telomere is a region of repetitive nucleotide sequences at the end of each chromosome that protects it from damage — and telomeres get shorter as we age, leading to a variety of aging-related diseases. The initial 10% increase of Parrish’s telomeres has been roughly compared to her cells becoming 20 years younger.

However, critics such as Dr. Bradley Johnson at the University of Pennsylvania have questioned her results, stating, “Telomere length measurements typically have low precision with variation in measurements of around 10 percent, which is in the range of the reported telomere lengthening apparently experienced by Elizabeth Parrish.”

Jim Green in 2007 (on left) and in 2019 (on right)

Jim Green & TA-65

Meet Jim Green, patient zero in a “one man experiment in radical anti-aging”. He lacks the Sinclair team’s funding and can’t bioengineer retroviral delivery systems like the Parrish team, but what he lacks in budget he makes up for in courage, innovation & perseverance.

A few years back, Jim decided to tackle aging head-on, and started doing intense research into published scientific papers on aging, cellular senescence, and supplements that led him to a rigorous health regime that he claims has literally reversed his aging.

Jim’s published a collection of links and notes to all of his papers online, and from talking with him personally several times I can tell you that he’s been more than diligent about his research. Josh Mitteldorf also interviewed him recently, and in that interview Jim talked at length about his use of first a nutraceutical called TA-65 and later Astragalus Root Extract as a telomerase activator to “give new life” to old cells.

Jim has taken the hard road: consuming copious amounts of Astragalus extract along with countless other supplements and a daily exercise routine that’s visibly reversed most signs of his aging — including his seeing his gray hair regain it’s youthful color (no, he doesn’t dye it, that’s natural).

Conclusion

Rather than trying to hide the signs of aging with makeup or plastic surgery, innovators like Sinclair, Parrish & Green have taken action to turn back the clock in the hopes of not only living longer — but also living better.

Sinclair has spoken numerous times about aging leading to a “tragic loss of human capital & potential that up until now we’ve taken for granted”, but if the research that these innovators are pursuing bears fruit, then it may no longer be our inevitable fate.

Whatever the results of their experiments may ultimately be, their research alone is a testament to our shared desire to stop the sands of time from passing & make the most of every moment that we have.