The Clock Logic of Plasma Exchange
We highly recommend Josh Mitteldorf’s blog and his excellent book, Cracking the Aging Code: The New Science of Growing Old - And What It Means for Staying Young.
Josh is a very bright guy who is following aging research closely, and that is why we follow Josh. He doesn’t post very often to his blog, but when he does, it’s an essay worth reading. His book is available for well under $10 through kindle and other outlets. I haven’t finished it yet, but from what I have read so far and Josh’s prior work, it’s safe to say that it is more than worth the $7 in digital credits that it costs at Amazon.
The Clock Logic of Plasma Exchange
Posted on January 16, 2023
I begin from the paradigm that aging is not a random process but an adaptation, a programmed self-destruction. This was my entree into the field 27 years ago, and has been the theme of much of my research, including two books. For a summary of the evidence, here’s a blog post from 2015, and here’s the non-technical version of my book.
Once you accept that the body is killing itself on a schedule, you have to ask how the schedule is maintained. Just as growth is programmed in early life and then puberty is initiated by turning on sex hormones, aging happens when inflammation and auto-immunity and insulin resistance are gradually switched on when the body attains a certain age. This implies a master clock, probably the same clock that governs development also controls aging.
Where is that clock and how does it work? If we had an answer to these questions, we could reset the aging clock and an 80-year-old body would act like a 30-year-old body, with all the robust repair and regenerative mechanisms fully engaged.
The aging clock that we seek must have two conflicting properties. Of course, it must keep time reliably to trigger the phenotypes of growth, development, and then senescence on schedule. It must also be homeostatic. Homeostasis is a fundamental property of life. All biological systems tend to restore their state when deranged by the environment. If the clock is perturbed, it must be able to find its way back to a remembered biological age.
[FTA:] https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2023/01/16/the-clock-logic-of-plasma-exchange/
Guys, this article is really important and will bring you up to speed on the quest to understand the exact mechanism that is our biological clock. Josh is always at the cutting edge and presents the (sometimes dense) material in an engaging way. If this is your first dive into longevity research, be sure to read the hot-linked definitions of unfamiliar terms and check out the background links, too.
Not just Siciliani but those whose heritage (like Gina’s and mine) include many parts of the Mediterranean! Sardinia has the most longevity, genetically speaking.