David C. Duran-Chaparro

NEW PREPRINT: Scientists may have found direct evidence that aging is driven by the loss of cellular information, not just the accumulation of damage For decades we've focused on what aging cells accumulate. This paper focuses on what they lose: Information. Using a new technology called SeqTag, researchers measured gene expression, chromatin accessibility, and histone modifications in the same aging cells. What they found was striking: the regulatory systems that tell cells who they are become increasingly out of sync with age. The authors call this "molecular asynchrony." As cells age, chromatin structure, histone marks, and gene expression begin drifting apart. Regulatory entropy rises. Repressive chromatin erodes. Cells become less certain of their identity and more likely to drift toward alternative fates. This is what the Information Theory of Aging (ITOA) states: that aging occurs when cells lose epigenetic information, the instructions that tell the genome how to maintain youthful function. DNA may remain largely unchanged, but the system that reads it gradually loses fidelity. What's remarkable is that this paper doesn't just describe this phenomenon. It quantifies it. The authors measure increasing regulatory entropy, loss of H3K27me3-mediated repression, erosion of heterochromatin, weakening lineage fidelity, and increased cell-fate drift during aging. In progenitor cells, the barriers that normally preserve cellular identity become progressively weaker with age. Mechanistically, the study argues that aging is associated with increasing molecular asynchrony between chromatin accessibility, H3K27ac/H3K27me3 remodeling, and transcriptional state. This decoupling is accompanied by increased regulatory entropy, loss of repressive chromatin architecture, and weakening of lineage constraints. Genes affected are those involved in chromatin organization, DNA damage, and Wnt signaling, consistent with ITOA. Importantly, the authors provide quantitative evidence that age-related heterochromatin erosion lowers the energetic barriers that maintain cell identity, offering a potential mechanistic link between epigenetic information loss, cell-fate drift, and late-life disease susceptibility 👏

After 25 years of brave & brilliant work by hundreds of scientists in my lab to understand then safely reverse aging for the first time, it was moving to witness the first human dose being delivered 🥹 nature.com/articles/d41586-0…

Aging is noise in the system and noise can be reduced

New! What if aging is a symptom of cells losing the ability to read their genome - and there’s a reset switch? That’s the idea behind the Information Theory of Aging (ITOA) A new paper @NatureComms by Cohen et al provides strong support for the model & its reversibility 🧵👇

Thank you for all your support! Early access to Season 2 @ lifespan.com

Interesting to see such positive media coverage of my lab & spin-out companies. We’ve seen this before: 1997 - 2009 Positive 2010 - 2014 Negative 2015 - 2021 Positive 2022 - 2024 Negative 2025 - now Positive Our science is at least consistent 🙏 nypost.com/2026/04/18/scienc…

If you’re not feeling stupid you’re not really trying

More evidence for: 1. The Information Theory of Aging (ITOA) 2. The Observer, ie backup copy of youthful gene expression 3. Age reversal by OSK being an embryonic reset

Modeling across seven nations shows that swapping meat and sweets for beans, nuts, and whole grains could add a decade to life expectancy ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S…

Statistically, you should not exist: – Life-friendly universe: 1/10⁶⁰ – Earth + moon: 1/10⁹ – Multicellular life: 1/10⁴ – Intelligence & civilization: 1/10⁹ – Your genome: 1/70 trillion You’ve already won the lottery 10 times in a row. Ignore small people & enjoy!

On October 1903, @nytimes boldly declared it would take humans 1–10 million years to invent a flying machine. The Wright brothers proved them wrong just 69 days later

A new study of 3720 people finds that low quality diets (e.g. refined grains, sodium, solid fats, added sugar & alcohol) associate with a faster pace of aging than healthy diets (e.g. whole fruits, greens, beans, dairy & whole grains) 🧵...

Time-restricted eating improves insulin sensitivity and lowers blood pressure, even without weight loss. —Cell Metabolism, 2018

Walking 8,000 steps/day cuts the risk of dying in the next decade by half