Scientist. Father of 5. Wrote "The tumor suppression theory of aging"&"Rodent diet aids and the fallacy of caloric restriction"
Dettighofen
Joined December 2021
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2 weeks ago, I presented the tumor suppression theory of aging at a conference, "The Evolution of Ageing: Traversing the interdisciplinary divide", held from September 30 – October 2, 2025 at Wasem Monastery, Ingelheim (close to Mainz), Germany
(1/21)
Interesting discussion about whether the meritocracy of science still works, or not.
My take: sometimes they do, sometimes not. For many, it doesn't. Problem is that we can usually only tell in hindsight who most deserves to be a professor, and who should better work at subway.
"science doesn’t much matter so long as the dream flourishes. The dream can be sold."
This is an apt description of the field.
@ARDD_Meeting illustrates the trend. On stage are influencers, journalists, VCs & anyone with money or reach to spread the hype.
Little R left in ARDD.
The Longevity Delusion: Money, Myths, and Bad Science
bmj.com/content/395/bmj-2026…
Oopsie, NAD+ supplementation made early Parkinson's disease worse: "significant difference in favor of placebo".
So "Can a pill help you live longer?"
It seems it might also do the opposite.
Even having an 8 Nobel prize winner advisory board didn't help!
youtube.com/watch?v=hdJutTW8…
Alexander M. Wolf retweeted
In a 1957 study, people who had recently bought a car were more likely to read ads for their own car than for models they had considered but rejected. The purchase was already made, but the search for reassurance continued.
I think longevity science has a similar trap. A scientist chooses one mechanism of aging, builds a career around it, and gradually starts looking primarily for evidence that supports their hypothesis. Other areas of research, contradictory findings, and potential combinations fade into the background. People seem to become prisoners of their original research.
The current grant system adds fuel to the fire: most grants support work in areas where a scientist already has an extensive research record. How are we supposed to explore entirely new hypotheses?
You can spend a lifetime defending a favorite idea while overlooking more promising approaches.
We need to be as open as possible to new approaches, bold hypotheses, and ideas that seem impossible. I think one of the most valuable things we could do for the field would be to create a grant or prize to test the wildest idea in aging research. The idea might not work, but the amount of new knowledge gained per dollar could be the highest of all.
Wow, eating less mimics eating less.
🙀
Many overlook this, but this study over-achieves in the key ingredient of any successful anti-aging intervention: the short-lived control. Outstandingly short. A real breakthrough and truly a new benchmark.
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
Why not use functional markers? Why not grip strength? Why not chair rise time?
Because those are bad for business!
Your intervention would have to reverse aging, which it can't.
That's why we need complex methylation or omics biomarkers. Those can be manipulated. Much better.
Aging biomarkers might be the most important project for speeding up longevity progress.
This is why @impetusgrants has backed over a dozen researchers that produced 20+ pubs developing different ways to measure aging. From Vadim Gladyshev and Raghav Sehgal to Patrick Griffin and Vineet Raghu, their work includes epigenetic biomarkers, making methylation measurements cheaper, imaging-based measures of biological age, and building system-specific clocks.
Like we mention in our clocks essay (link below), useful clocks will come from testing many ideas and learning which ones make reliable predictions.
Read some of their work here:
doi.org/10.1038/s41591-026-0…
doi.org/10.1111/acel.70635
doi.org/10.1038/s43587-023-0…
doi.org/10.1038/s43587-025-0…
doi.org/10.1016/j.ebiom.2024…
doi.org/10.1038/s43587-024-0…
They are copying the anti-aging business model.
Tell a story, make a promise, collect $$, vanish.
Senolytics, partial reprogramming,...
Some stories are ok, some are just funny. Investors can't tell. If the hype seems real & the scammer is from Harvard, the hope will sell.
Over the past decade I've witnessed hundreds (if you include Chinese teams) "AI drug discovery" companies come into this world, tell a story, raise $20-100 million and die without leaving any drug legacies. But in the past 5 years, these rounds increased dramatically in scale, so did the valuations. On the therapeutic side - still nothing. On the public side this industry does not perform as well as on the private side. Are we in a private bubble? Are these emperors naked? Will we see a correction?
Check out my thoughts on this subject at Forever.AI - link in the comments
Most of these "Longevity Leaders" are campaigners and influencers, not scientists.
I think what they target with "Longevity" is the self-help corner at the airport bookshop.
Yamanaka is there only for his Nobel prize. He's not in "Longevity".
@CameronDiaz would fit better.
1/13
@TIME just released its 2026 Longevity Leaders—12 people shaping how we understand healthspan, aging and longer, healthier lives. Congratulations to this remarkable group. 👏
time.com/collection/longevit…
$3B is just too juicy a target to be left to science.
My guess is that some scientists are just too much of a nuisance when you need to squirrel away $3B, but dislike answering questions, being evaluated or scrutinized. Transparency becomes an obstacle for that.
"aiming for over 1 terawatt of annual compute"
Why bother with physics if youtube and reddit training data can convince a large language model. Units are for losers.
Terafab Texas is Tesla and SpaceX’s planned semiconductor fab in Grimes County near College Station. It will make, package, and test advanced AI chips for Optimus robots, Cybercabs, and SpaceX orbital data centers, aiming for over 1 terawatt of annual compute. Initial $16.8B investment for 100+ million sq ft—the largest building on Earth. The video is a design rendering. No swimming pool, bar, or restaurant; pure industrial chip manufacturing.
PDE5a inhibition is great, but the benefits still very likely come from having a girlfriend/wife, not from PDE5a inhibition itself.
If you don't have a girlfriend/wife, but think PDE5a inhibition will help you, go for it as well, because the placebo effect is also powerful.
A good and encouraging development.
Secrecy is a concern though.
Will approved treatment be kept confidential?
If things go wrong, can developers keep the results private?
Will averse effects, complications or deaths be hidden from the public? Can scientific evaluation occur?
Announcing Montana ETRB
Montana opens up for biotech acceleration.
Infinita has formed the first-ever ETRB (experimental treatment review board) under Montana law.
The review board’s role is oversight for access to treatments before FDA approval.
For a $12.5k fee, you can submit a post-phase-1 therapy to our review board (submission link below).
What is a Montana ETRB?
Montana’s model is a major regulatory innovation. National regulators typically review treatments one by one, which causes years-long bottlenecks.
In Montana, registered ETRBs do treatment reviews, licensed specialized clinics (ETCs) provide treatments. The state receives reporting and can take away licenses.
That’s smart regulation. Competitive, efficient, with oversight. That’s what American biotech needs.
First Montana ETRB Members
We are honored to welcome highly esteemed scientists, physicians and bioethicists on the first Montana ETRB:
- Matt Kaeberlein, PhD (@mkaeberlein) - a biologist internationally recognized for research on the basic mechanisms of aging and translational interventions to extend healthspan
- Felipe Sierra, PhD - a biochemist that served as Director of the Division of Aging Biology, NIA/NIH, where he developed the concept of Geroscience.
- Jessica Flanigan, PhD - a bioethicist who is is the Richard L. Morrill Chair in Ethics and Democratic Values at the University of Richmond, where she teaches leadership and healthcare ethics
- Jamie Justice, PhD (@j_n_justice) - is Executive Vice President of the Health Domain at XPRIZE and Executive Director of the XPRIZE Healthspan Prize
- James M. Burke, MD - is a hematologist and oncologist with more than three decades of experience in cancer drug development and patient care
Each review submitted will have to pass their judgement on adequate safety characterization.
What will the ETRB look for?
An ETRB’s legal mandate is safety-only.
Risks need to be disclosed to patients for informed consent properly, and treatments need to have a safety profile equivalent to a successful phase-1 trial.
After that it’s up to the doctor and patient to decide.
ETRB will compete for reputation.
They are free to approve or not approve according to their assessment. If they wanted, they could even ask for efficacy data as a basis for approval.
Our Montana ETRB has a set of governance principles that guide its decisions beyond the legally required minimum floor, as a guide for its decisionsmaking.
Congratulations to Montana
Thanks to the leadership of Sen. Kenneth Bogner (@KennethBogner), Montana now has the most forward looking medical access law in the country in SB 535.
Montana’s department of health and human services (DPHHS) provided a tight and comprehensive set of rules for clinic licenses and review boards.
Montana is becoming a biotech frontier.
Towards Clinical Trial Abundance
The FDA has led the world for decades, gating the largest and most innovative biopharma market in the world. But the US’ competitive advantage is evaporating. Regulators in Australia and China have made clinical trials far more cost- and time-competitive. Patients are going to offshore clinics in Mexico and the Caribbean. High-agency patients like Sid Sijbrandij (@sytses) take matters into their own hands, and use multiple available jurisdictions.
The FDA needs to modernize, and lots of federal efforts to this end are underway. We support federal reforms, however these efforts often fall short or are slow.
Let US states innovate. The states can be as a source of regulatory innovation. In states important learnings can take place, and inform better federal policy.
Montana is leading the charge in biotech. New Hampshire is following suit. Utah, Texas and Florida have opened up to stem cells and many states are improving conditions for individualized treatments.
FDA / HHS should give explicit safe harbor to such responsible state medical access programs, to encourage a regulated market forming vs. gray markets.
How to Get Involved
We’re looking for state and federal policymakers to advance this regulatory innovation, clinicians to be the patient-facing stewards for responsible access, scientific reviewers to partake in ETRB oversight, biotechs to provide their novel treatments to these programs to collect valuable data, and ultimately for patients to benefit from potentially life-saving access.
Get in touch! Mine and @righttotryguys DMs are open
Calorie restriction is just the prevention of obesity.
Calorie restriction only works relative to overfed control groups.
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
Nice new paper by @FdAdF66 in @NatureAging showing that not DNA damage, but the response to it drives aging.
A telomeric DNA damage response drives stem cell exhaustion, & the response evolved to limit cancer risks.
That's what most interconnected hallmarks of aging do!
1/ What if some of the consequences of #aging are not caused by damage itself, but by the alarm signals our cells generate in response to that #damage?
Today, we publish a study in @NatureAging addressing this question.
nature.com/articles/s43587-0…
Some mysterious damage, the production rate of which spans seven orders of magnitude, causes aging.
But somehow, this damage can never be seen, identified, or its production or removal observed in the real world.
Pointless data fitting explaining nothing.
nature.com/articles/s43587-0…
Hair dye reverses a marker of aging, but doesn't turn back time.
This is the first time the reversal of a non-causal marker of aging is equated with the reversion of aging in the title of a scientific paper.
Let's see if there's any pushback from the aging science community.
Pleased to share a new paper on medicines, supplements & other factors associated with decreased epigenetic age with Dr Adiv Johnson @JoinLifespan:
1. Exercise
2. Plant-rich diets
3. Semaglutide
4. CR
5. Ketamine
6. Omega-3s
7. Plasma
8. Pitavastatin 💪
frontiersin.org/journals/gen…
