Max Unfried

An inflection point in medicine. Medicine is moving from calendars to clocks — from counting the years you've lived to measuring how fast you're aging. —It's not linear. —It's asynchronous, as seen by organs and cells in our body A "translation" of our review paper this week in the new Ground Truths Simplified image made with ChatGPT

Academic science does not reward finding the truth. It rewards finding the next grant.

The Lindy technical paper is out, with comments on aging and immortality.

💯The worst advice I ever received as a PhD student was to specialize. Thank goodness I ignored it. The most exciting breakthroughs are when you know just enough about multiple domains to put them together in new and exciting ways that the specialists never even recognized!

Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize for gene editing and went on Bloomberg to say the chatbots everyone is betting on cannot innovate at all. Every promise Silicon Valley is making about AI curing disease just hit the one person qualified to check it. She has spent her whole career inside the actual frontier of curing disease. So when she talks about what AI can and cannot do in biology, she is not guessing. She is reporting from inside the lab. Her words were blunt. She is not seeing chatbots innovate. They summarize data. They write reports. They do not come up with a brand new idea nobody has ever had. Then the interviewer pushed. So you're saying AI can't innovate? Doudna did not flinch. She does not know if it can't. She just does not see it doing it right now. This lands harder when you remember who is making the opposite case. Sam Altman says AI will eliminate disease within five years. Larry Ellison says AI will cure cancer in a 48 hour window. An OpenAI executive even floated that the company should get a cut of sales on any drug discovered through ChatGPT. Doudna answered that in two words. Good luck. Even the cancer specialists Altman is selling to keep warning that cancer is not one disease but hundreds, each needing its own cure, and that compute does not skip the years of lab work. Her reason is simpler. Biology is hard. You cannot simulate your way to an understanding of the human body. The people promising cures are the ones selling the tool. The person who actually won a Nobel building them is telling you it has not happened yet. Source: Bloomberg Originals Watch the full video on their official channel.

Mostly, but not true for substantial parts of science. The Rockefeller Foundation helped launch modern molecular biology. The Wellcome Trust was a cornerstone of the Human Genome Project. HHMI funded scientists behind CRISPR and optogenetics. The Allen Institute created open brain atlases used by labs around the world. The existence of ineffective or poorly aligned charities doesn’t negate the extraordinary track record of philanthropic capital when it’s directed toward innovation rather than perpetual service delivery.

New research suggests that how long you live may come down to a single gene. Scientists at Leiden University identified a variant in the CGAS gene that runs consistently in families who live significantly longer than average. The CGAS gene detects DNA fragments inside your cells and triggers an inflammatory response. People in these long-lived families had only one working copy of it, which means their baseline inflammatory response was lower. They lived longer and healthier lives. I've been saying this for years: chronic low-grade inflammation is one of the primary drivers of aging. Most people have way too much. Environmental toxins (especially mycotoxins), poor sleep, chronic stress, processed food, all of it creates the kind of cellular damage that keeps this pathway switched on. The researchers are right that you wouldn't want to suppress inflammation completely. You need a little bit of inflammation for a proper immune response and for healing. There are interventions that help modulate your inflammatory response without shutting it down: NAD precursors, curcumin, omega-3s, fixing sleep, cutting out seed oils, reducing stress. It probably isn't just one gene that influences lifespan. And this is a preprint that still needs peer review. But this research points clearly at a pathway that affects aging, and that pathway is something you can actually change. Better inputs, less stress, less inflammatory load.

“You really have to work so hard. It’s so hard. And I think that’s misunderstood.” Eileen Gu, the 22-year-old Stanford student, runway model, and only action-sport athlete to win three medals apiece at two Olympic Games (Beijing 2022, Milano Cortina 2026) has long been a subject of fascination. At Cannes Lions, she opens up about what people don't understand about being "the best" at their craft.