Don’t Die Yet

I started my slow aging practice in the 1990s. I did not call it a practice or really even think of it that way. The whole idea of cultivating your life by combining “practices” just wasn’t there holistically. Back then there was this rather nebulous idea that something called “the Singularity” might happen about 4 decades in the future. 2032 was the year, supposedly. This Singularity was going to arises as a combination of different technologies and disciplines co-mingled into something larger. A kind of utopia was predicted by certain fringe scientists.

Biotechnology and nanotechnology were converging into something that looked, from a distance, like it might rewrite what a human body could be. I had no evidence this would happen on any particular timeline, or at all. I was already in decent physical and mental shape in my mid-30’s. So the assumption was straightforward. Fine tune. Perpetuate.

Back then there was a large school of thought that free radicals were the main culprit behind aging. So, I began taking various antioxidants like Alpha Lipoic Acid. Supplementation, diet and exercise was a natural extension of my already existing health habits. There didn't seem to be a downside to being healthy even if The Singularity turned out to be a big dud. Worst case, I got hit by lightning in excellent cardiovascular condition.

As almost always happens, the received wisdom changed through the years. I still take a variety of antioxidants today, along with a lot of stuff I added to the list for various reasons. I wasn’t working off faith. I was merely hoping human science would eventually figure it all out. Well, that still has not quite happened. But we are closer than ever and we have, in fact, discovered a great deal.

Hope isn’t worth much without action. I trained, watched my diet, tracked my biomarkers before I knew about biomarkers, adjusted when I learned something new, and occasionally blew all of it off for a while because I was young and human and the evidence for my hope never arrived to keep me honest. Partying was still a big part of my life then. I've since cut the excess. Discipline plus indulgence plus more discipline is still over thirty years of a practice aimed at a future I could not verify but chose to prepare for anyway.

What have you got to lose by trying to be healthy?

Last October a blood panel put my biological age at 53. I'm 67. I don't treat that number as absolute. Aging clocks measure patterns in biomarkers, different clocks disagree with each other, and I’ve learned nobody should mistake an estimate for a diagnosis. But a 14 year gap in the favorable direction after three decades of exactly this kind of preparation is something. Way better than my blood telling me I’m 75, right?

Yesterday I watched Dr. Derya Unutmaz speak with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, a longevity expert I’ve locked on to recently. I learned Unutmaz, who I had never heard of until watching that YouTube video, is a giant in the field. Jackson Laboratory, three decades in immunology, over a hundred peer-reviewed papers. He told Patrick that “we will come to a point, I would say, in the next 8 to 10 years where every year you live is going to add more than a year to your life.” Further, if you can avoid dying for the next 15 to 20 years, you might get several more decades added to your life.

Unutmaz’s educated opinion is that medicine is about to start solving aging faster than aging can undo the solving. This is called Longevity Escape Velocity and he predicts that an 80 year old body will be able to walk itself back to something like half that age using what will become routine regimes and treatments.

He's also, by his own account, taking the aggressive side of an argument other serious longevity researchers are actively pushing back on. Call it one credentialed person's bet, same species of bet I made circa 1995, just backed by better instruments and worse odds of embarrassment if he's wrong out loud on a podcast.

Digging a little deeper, I find that the numbers are more on his side than one might suspect when they first hear his claim. AI-discovered drug candidates are clearing Phase 1 trials at 80 to 90 percent, against a historical rate of 40 to 65. Insilico built a longevity board this year around the idea that GLP-1 drugs might turn out to be the first true longevity drug rather than just a diabetes treatment.

In 2006 Dr. Shinya Yamanaka discovered a set of genes that can turn an adult cell back into something more youthful. Twenty years later, last month, a Boston biotech dosed the first human being with a cellular reprogramming therapy, resetting three of the four Yamanaka factors in an attempt to make aged cells forget how old they are. It's aimed at an eye disease, it's Phase 1, and the question on the table is safety, not whether it works. Still. Someone put a needle into a human eye carrying instructions to make the cells inside it younger.

By happy coincidence a new, more detailed, interview with Harvard geneticist Dr. David Sinclair, also dropped yesterday. Sinclair co-developed the cellular reprogramming technology referenced by Unutmaz. Among the many thing he addresses in that video, Sinclair addressed an obvious objection: if you reset the age of a cell, why doesn't it just turn into cancer. His answer is a specific mechanism, not a reassurance. The therapy uses three of the four Yamanaka factors and deliberately withholds the fourth, and cells reset to roughly 80 percent of youth before hitting a floor nobody fully understands but is glad exists.

Before that needle ever went into a human eye, the same approach restored measurable electrical function in the optic nerves of African green monkeys within 28 days, whose eyes sit much closer to ours structurally than a mouse's do. And in mice already 25 months old, treated well into old age rather than early, the same reprogramming extended remaining lifespan by 109 percent. None of that proves it will work in people. It proves the people who built the tool tried hard to break it before they gave it to one patient in Boston.

There is no coordinated effort here. This is a dynamic situation with different scientists and institutions approaching different problems in remarkably similar ways. The GLP-1 researchers aren't writing grant proposals with the reprogramming people. The AI-discovery platforms weren't built to talk to the senescence labs. Cellular regeneration is being chased right now by at least a dozen disconnected groups globally, each with different aims.

The genetic route, resetting the original Yamanaka factors, has already been run independently across a striking range of organs: the dentate gyrus, the optic nerve, the liver, skeletal muscle, skin, an intervertebral disc, the heart. A separate line of work skips the genetics entirely and tries to do the same thing with chemical cocktails instead, and as of last November researchers were building aging models specifically to pit the two methods against each other, which only happens once enough competing approaches exist to need comparing.

Each of these groups is chasing its own narrow purpose and nothing else. Most of what they try will fail outright. Some will come back mixed and half-useful. One or two might succeed cleanly, or trip over something nobody was even looking for. None of it stays contained to the project that produced it. A failed delivery method in one lab becomes someone else's working method the following year. A side effect noticed in an eye trial gets tested in a liver by a team that never met the original one. Run enough disconnected attempts at the same underlying problem long enough, and the odds of them cross-pollinating each other, bleeding into fields that never intended to talk to one another, go up every year it continues.

For me, this is a classic example of how harmogenics works in the real world. Put enough diverse practices together (personal or scientific) and things naturally emerge. No one convened these people. No one is conducting them. I don't know yet what it adds up to. Neither do they. But I've watched these kinds of scattered, undirected practices compound into something over the past thirty years, and I recognize the shape.

Miracles are not what we need. We need connections...and emergence. A cancer that kills you this decade gets intercepted the next one. Cardiovascular medicine buys three years, metabolic control buys three more, something for muscle wasting buys a few after that. None of these are The Singularity. But when stacked, they start to resemble what I was betting on before I understood biomarkers and life practices.

The acceleration underneath the biology got my attention more than the biology itself, and how little anyone appears to be steering it. Nobody voted for an AI-accelerated biomedical arms race. No institution sat down and decided humanity would build a civilization where computation, capital, and desire kept amplifying each other on a schedule nobody set.

A pharma company adopts AI because a competitor adopted AI first. A government funds biotech because a rival government is funding biotech. Every actor in the chain is behaving rationally in its own local environment, and the aggregate behaves like something with intentions it doesn't have. This is harmogenics running at civilizational scale. Nobody's driving. Everybody's still responsible for what they do inside the vehicle.

And the same curve that might hand me a repaired immune system when I am 87 is simultaneously rewriting labor, information, cognition, and everything else I'd want to still recognize when I get there. Getting your body back is one bargain. Getting it back into a world you no longer understand is a different bargain entirely, and Unutmaz doesn't mention that one.

In the 1990s I was practicing readiness for a future I couldn't specify, built on nothing sturdier than hope, sustained for three decades without any confirmation that it was working. I didn't have a name for that at the time. I didn’t even realize it might merit naming. I have one now. In Harmogenics: A Practical Guide to Constant Becoming, I call it “prescient readiness” (Chapter 34). That is precisely how I have been living in terms of slow aging since cellular regeneration and all the rest was only science fiction.

Now it’s not. And here I am about 15 years younger than my birth certificate can verify.

So today I have an actual cultivation practice instead of a vague hope, and for the first time the odds might finally catch up with the hope. My goal has always been to become a centenarian, or die trying. Oddly, I like my chances more at 67 than I did at 37. Something is emerging out of pieces nobody designed to fit together. You probably want to stick around for this.