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posted by martyb on Friday August 26 2016, @01:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the Ponce's-Pursuit-in-a-Pill? dept.

Elysium Health is selling an anti-aging pill for roughly $60/month:

Basis and the other pills that will likely follow it in the next five to ten years are the fruits of a scientific backwater that has been working toward this moment for a quarter-century. These drugs and supplements are aimed to be a hack of the heretofore most intractable condition of human existence, the invisible countdown clock with which evolution has equipped our bodies. They just might postpone the onset of the most common afflictions of our dotage, from cancer to heart disease to diabetes to Alzheimer's. We won't necessarily enjoy longer maximum life spans (though that's a possibility), but we very well might enjoy longer health spans, meaning the vital, productive chunk of our lives before degeneration kicks in.

[...] [Any] qualms I might have had about whether this was simply next-generation snake oil faded in the halo of the six Nobel Prize winners who sit on Elysium's scientific advisory board. Most impressively, the company's co-founder is Leonard Guarente, who heads MIT's aging center and is one of the pioneers of aging science, a contender for the Nobel Prize should geroscience ever get a nod from the Swedish academy.

[...] The theory behind Basis is in part an evolution of the theory behind drinking red wine: One of its main ingredients, pterostilbene, is considered a more powerful version of resveratrol, with a more convincing track record in the lab. As for NR [nicotinamide riboside], by increasing NAD [nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide] levels in our cells, it in turn appears to reverse mitochondrial decay. In a 2013 scientific paper, Sinclair announced that a single week of injections of an NAD precursor into elderly mice had made their muscles look young again, though without restoring their strength. Both compounds aim to activate sirtuins, and the hope is that together they might amplify what each does individually.

Here's an older article about the NAD booster approach, as well as the 2013 study (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2013.11.037) (DX) by David Sinclair and colleagues published in Cell. Pterostilbene at Wikipedia.


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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday August 26 2016, @06:15PM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Friday August 26 2016, @06:15PM (#393613) Journal

    to get rid of people you disagree with or people that have power over you.

    Not quite what I was going for! Just an observation that those most interested in life-extension, or immortality, are often not the best candidates, just as anyone who wants to be president of the United States should by that very fact be disqualified from running for the office. And even if they got what they wanted, it would not be what they thought. Law of unintended consequences, and all that.

    Fear of death is one of those things I have never understood. You might be saying too yourself, "Yea, Aristarchus, but that is because you have lived for almost two and a half millennium!" Point taken, but I must say that I never put that much extra effort in trying not to die. It is almost as if those who live long do it by accident, because they are concerned with more important things than just not dying.

    It is something like Douglas Adams description of how to fly in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: you throw yourself at the ground, and miss.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 26 2016, @06:36PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday August 26 2016, @06:36PM (#393627) Journal

    I'll tell you what. We'll make a compromise and give every life extension customer a little baggy of suicide pills. We'll even print a little smiley face emoji on the bag.

    --
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