Anti-Aging Medicine: Two Paths Diverge
There is no physical necessity for aging. Analogies to wearing out and to chemical corrosion are flawed and misguided.
There is no physical necessity for aging. Analogies to wearing out and to chemical corrosion are flawed and misguided.
Eight years ago, I assumed erroneously that the chute of my food processor was longer than my fingers.
BioViva, is an ambitious biotech startup that aims to cure diseases using gene therapy. It is also perhaps the first company to recognize aging as a disease and tackle it at the genetic level. And in case that wasn’t enough to get you interested, BioViva CEO Liz Parrish states that the company also want to make you “smarter, stronger, faster and more visually accurate”.
It was 1995, and Ellen Heber-Katz ran a busy lab at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, at the top of a thriving career in auto-immunity. Her lab housed many mice in common cages, labeling the mice with tiny holes punched in their ears. One day, she discovered that a litter of mice were un-labeled, and she spoke to her post-doc about it. But Lise Clark said she was sure she had punched their ears. So Heber-Katz punched their ears herself, and checked back the next day. She could hardly see the holes she had punched. Within a few days, the ears healed over, smooth skin, seamless cartilage with nary a scar. Mice aren’t supposed to be able to do this.