Carol

After a long hiatus, I'm back to writing - starting with a very topical piece. Why are colorectal cancer rates spiking in the young? The usual answers are true: changes in diet, exercise, environment. But there's also a much more direct player involved

My apt in SF has no heat and no AC. I go from freezing to cooking 🫠

Approved episode #2 out now: Geron They trailblazed longevity biotech in the '90s, cloned telomerase, funded early hESC work - and after 34 years got the first telomerase inhibitor approved for a rare blood cancer. Full story on the pod.

Great work!

How I know SF is back…traffic

AGI timelines are accelerating dramatically. The promise of many working in the field is the ultimate health impact to humanity including cures to cancer and significantly increasing healthy lifespan. But how? Join the first Summit on the Convergence of AI and Longevity!

@irat1onal @MartinBJensen LDL reduction trials usually have higher effect sizes in primary prevention than secondary prevention. Preventing decline is likely much easier than fixing things after they’ve gone bad.

The core challenge for geroscience remains unresolved (even for those sold on the "geroscience hypothesis"): unless aging-targeted drugs can delay multiple age-related diseases by MORE than cutting-edge disease-specific therapies extend life after diagnosis, pharma incentives will never align. Effect size + comparators matter in the real world when it comes to the care of patients - Geroscience doesn’t compete with placebo - it competes with everything else - If slowing aging delays cancer by X years while cutting-edge options add X+Y years post-dx, capital will follow the traditional path. That’s the real bar geroscience will have to clear. Sure - It can tell "holy grail-ish" stories about delaying these ailments by decades, but we're really nowhere near that era yet....

Smart biotech dude, works on cancer, little progress. Looks at aging, #1 risk factor for cancer. Concludes: "why, precisely, do we want these drugs?" Why must we preach death? Why not cheer all those who work to expand life? "Shrouded in thick melancholy, and eager for the little casualties that bring death: thus do they wait, and clench their teeth."

@sha_zng Congrats!!

as much as sf is known for being the technological nerve center of the world, the most vivid stories i’ve heard in this city have nothing to do with our technology, and everything to do with our humanity. there are people who create things and serve others: go to the produce market at 4am, grind coffee beans, knead dough to make pasta. there are people who have driven the same bus route for a decade, who have fallen in love and decided to raise kids here this moment in time calls for a different kind of cultural record. as the city is changing rapidly and every billboard on the highway is populated with AI ads, there is more value than ever in slow, human documentation. i'm really excited to share that i have the support of emergent ventures @tylercowen to create art for sf this year

If your bf isn’t getting fashion advice from Claude, what is he even doing? (Context buying a black suit)

Go Alex!

How could tiny breakthroughs in aging science change U.S. GDP and population growth? What’s the economic value of making 41 the new 40, or 65 the new 60? How many lives could we create or save if we could slow reproductive or brain aging by just 1 year? What would billions of healthier hours be worth to the economy, if we assume no change in the age of retirement? I spent the last two years obsessing over the design, research, and execution of this project. The result is a book upcoming with Harvard University Press, a preprint, and—maybe your favorite part—an interactive simulation tool that lets you input your own timelines and assumptions for specific breakthroughs in aging bio, then see the ROI in terms of US population & GDP growth. From @RickEcon and Jason DeBacker—the economists who co-developed the open-source, macro model that made this project possible—to extensive comments by @tylercowen, @sapinker, Richard Freeman, @NDHendrix, @ebudish, @elidourado, @geochurch, @jasoncrawford as well as interviews with 102 scientists (!) and countless iterations with award-winning designer Giorgia Lupi and the @pentagram team, we built something we hope will be a benchmark for how scientists, economists, designers, philosophers, entrepreneurs and storytellers can come together to paint, fund, and build different flourishing futures for our species. I couldn’t be more excited to share this. It’s the start of an open and evolving project—the labor and product of love, obsession, and unrelenting care. I hope you have fun playing with our simulation tool — and if you do, please share!

Can't wait to dive in. Such a fascinating topic without enough rigorous /pragmatic materials, so really excited @mxschons put so much work into creating this

“Biology is hard”, betting on it is harder. Launching the first piece of a 5-part series for founders & scientists trying to find “the” successful target: open.substack.com/pub/age1/p/bet… Big thanks to @age1vc crew - genuinely fun building this:)

@MartinBJensen 😂

We're going to rejuvenate the heck out of the liver...

@ArtirKel So true tho!!! 🤣

@_Carol_Mag "It's not 'its not X, it's Y', it's 'it's not just X, it's Y'" 😂

the "it's not X, it's Y" sentence structure has become a dead AI giveaway to me

@neurajohn @madiueland Congrats!! 🎉

The Beginning of Infinity @madiueland

There's all sorts of regulatory reforms that would be great, but one of the simplest things is just reducing the time to get FDA feedback. Feedback loops are way too slow. After talking to ppl who got record fast approvals during covid, the common answer wasn't clin ops or trial design, it was just that FDA turnaround happened overnight. Regulatory teams spend an absurd amount of time just guessing what the FDA will say in a 60min meeting that happens almost 3 months after it's requested. If you want to propose an "out there idea" that might take 2 hours to discuss (entirely reasonable!), you probably need 6 months just for these two interactions.

Interesting!

Who needs well controlled trials when we have magic peptides that do something in mice and rats…