In this week’s newsletter

✅ Medicine's last psychological coping mechanism. ✅ Partial reprogramming reaches the clinic. ✅ Healthspan vs lifespan. ✅ Humanoid robots doing lab work. ✅ Executive medicine (and some better and cheaper alternatives). ✅ Vibe coding health apps. ✅ Rapamycin for cats. ✅ Aging as a software design flaw.

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Death apologism: Medicine's last psychological coping mechanism

We’re in the 21st century and there are still death apologists roaming the earth. Take this quote from a paper published in The Lancet a few years ago:

”Death and dying must be recognized as not only normal, but valuable”. And if that wasn’t enough, the paper also served up gems like ”it is healthy to die”. That’s peak deathism for you.

There are countless ways to dismantle these absurd and deeply irrational claims, but one of the best counterarguments comes from a recent commentary in The American Journal of Medicine.

Less than 200 years ago surgery was performed without anesthesia, sometimes in public. The patient, screaming in agony, had to be restrained to endure the pain. As medical historian Michael Brown writes, ”The physicians, and especially surgeons, have always had to learn some type of detachment (or dispassion to use the Early Modern term) in order to cope with the more revolting aspects of their art”.

In the 19th century anesthetics was available and had been for some time. But, to paraphrase The Lancet paper above, the medical community recognized surgery without it as not only normal, but valuable. It was considered healthy to be awake and suffer in horror. ”Pain in surgical operations is in a majority of cases even desirable, and its prevention or annihilation is for the most part hazardous to the patient”: this was not an uncommon opinion among surgeons at the time.

You can probably tell where the authors are going with this. They write: ”Modern medicine's seemingly paradoxical stance - simultaneously declaring death ’healthy’ while working tirelessly to prevent it - parallels the cognitive dissonance of some 19th century surgeons.”

But imagine what could happen if the medical community began to view death not as normal or valuable, but as the tragic and terminal failure that it truly is.

We might finally begin allocating the appropriate level of resources toward combating aging - the single greatest cause of human suffering. As the authors put it: ”Just as the earlier rationalization of the necessity of pain outlived its usefulness, our reflexive acceptance of the inevitability of death may be evolving from a psychological coping mechanism into an active impediment to medical progress.”

We might also advance patient autonomy, by seriously considering options such as preserving the dying in the hope of future revival with restored health. ”While such procedures remain speculative, they represent a natural extension of medicine's long-standing commitment to expanding patient choice through technological innovation.”

While it’s still considered normal - even virtuous - to accept aging and death, remember this: unless we reach longevity escape velocity sooner than expected (and we certainly shouldn’t take that for granted), you will one day find yourself standing at the edge of death too. The authors cite a survey that showed that ”70% of terminally ill individuals, including those in their eighties, maintained a strong will-to-live even when death was imminent.”

”Just as patients facing amputation in 1825 would likely have jumped at the chance for pain-free surgery, surely many patients today would choose to extend their lives if offered ways to do so while maintaining their quality of life.”

News from around the longevity and health space.

Turning a blind eye to partial reprogramming

Nearly 20 years ago, Shinya Yamanaka made a groundbreaking discovery: that an adult cell could be reverted to a stem cell - more specifically, an induced pluripotent stem cell - essentially turning back the clock on the building blocks of life. For this achievement, the Japanese scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize, having demonstrated that introducing just four genes, encoding four transcription factors, was enough to trigger this transformation. These are now known as the Yamanaka factors.

Now, Life Biosciences, co-founded by David Sinclair, is preparing to launch the world’s first partial reprogramming clinical trial.

Partial reprogramming, which I often describe as the closest thing we have to a real fountain of youth, builds on the same principle - but with an important difference. Instead of fully reverting an adult cell to a stem cell, this approach preserves the cell’s identity (a skin cell remains a skin cell, for example) while restoring it to a younger, more functional state.

Life Biosciences will begin testing this approach for two eye diseases: glaucoma, the second-leading cause of blindness, and NAION (non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy), a rarer condition that has recently gained attention due to its link to the wildly popular weight-loss drugs.

To induce partial reprogramming Life Bio uses three Yamanaka factors, Oct-4, Sox-2, and Klf-4 (OSK).

Even though the number of people with glaucoma worldwide is expected to increase to 111.8 million in 2040, Life Bio is, as Chief Operating Officer, Michael Ringel puts it, ”not just an ophthalmology company”. The wild promise of partial reprogramming is that it could be a potent weapon against all sorts of diseases caused by aging.

”There are some organs that are easier to deliver to than others, and that’s part of the reason why we started with the eye, but there are other indications beyond the eye that we are pursuing. There are other organs that are also easy to deliver to”, Ringel told Longevity.Technology.

Want to learn more about partial reprogramming? I recently did a deep dive about the field. ⬇️

Healthspan vs lifespan (revisited)

With a post on X, Ageless author Andrew Steele (perhaps inadvertently) reignited the age-old (pun intended) debate on healthspan vs. lifespan. I’ve long been in the lifespan camp - for reasons I’ve discussed plenty before. I also suggested to Andrew that perhaps ”ageless” is an even better concept than both.

That said, I found Karl Pfleger’s take on the discussion (below) particularly insightful. I also appreciated Anar Isman’s post (also below) - though it wasn’t part of the main thread. Isman’s point is a good reminder that while solving aging is complex, dismantling the many myths and irrational arguments around lifespan extension and death is surprisingly easy.

Insilico’s newest employee is a humanoid robot

Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time covering humanoid robots as a tech reporter for Ny Teknik. And make no mistake - they are set to become a huge deal. At the GTC 2025 developer conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang even stated that humanoid robots ”could very likely be the largest industry of all”.

So while the recent big headline about Insilico Medicine is that the company has raised $110 million and begun dosing patients with yet another AI-generated molecule - this time targeting mesothelioma and other solid tumors, rather than idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (which I wrote about a few weeks ago) - what excites me most is their new foray into humanoid robotics.

Insilico already operates a fully automated lab in Suzhou, China, and now humanoid robots are set to join its existing robotic workforce. These humanoids will take on tasks such as cell culture, high-throughput screening, next-generation sequencing, cell imaging, and genomics analysis. As they generate data, it will integrate into Insilico’s Pandaomics platform.

One might call this the future, but for Insilico, it’s already the present. AI is designing the drugs, and AI-powered humanoid robots are conducting the lab work. And because this system is inherently scalable, it’s not hard to see where science is headed.

The timeline is accelerating.

The rise of longevity executive medicine

A recent post from the Longevity Docs newsletter (created by David Luu, whom we’ve had on the podcast) posed an interesting question: Is longevity medicine too expensive?

Yes and no.

Many people believe the myth that only billionaires want to live forever. One reason behind misconception comes from the rise of what I call ”executive medicine” - luxury health services accessible only to the wealthy. A prime example is Biograph, Peter Attia’s latest venture, a super-expensive longevity clinic. Billionaires aren’t exactly lining up to fund the science that could truly solve aging, but they’re more than happy to pay $15,000 a year for Biograph’s ”Black Membership” to be part of the club.

Then again, there’s no such thing as ”longevity medicine” - at least not yet. The best thing you can do to extend your lifespan in 2025 is still exercise. And while regular health monitoring really is valuable, there’s often no need to spend the exorbitant amounts charged by Biograph and similar services.

The Swedish company Neko Health offers a more affordable alternative. It’s not as flashy, it doesn’t have all the fancy machines, but it delivers most of the same benefits. Another alternative? Superpower, that provides 100+ lab tests, track results over time, and access to a private medical team. All for 499 bucks/month.*
* I’m a Neko Health client, but I don’t get paid to promote either Neko or Superpower here. If I was, I’d tell you.

In his newsletter, David Luu points to biomarker tests, advanced imaging (MRI and CT), and cutting-edge treatments as key drivers of high costs. Another reason? It’s just incredibly lucrative for Peter Attia and his peers.

Luu is optimistic, though. He believes that AI-powered diagnostics, virtual longevity care, and better research and insurance coverage will help democratize longevity medicine - eliminating the need for costly, brick-and-mortar clinics and making preventive care more accessible to everyone.

Here’s some pawsome rapamycin news!

As Matt Kaeberlein wrote on X: exciting rapamycin news! The FDA has granted conditional approval to Felycin-CA1 (sirolimus/rapamycin), the world’s first drug for treating hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) in cats.

HCM affects around 15% of cats, causing the heart muscle to thicken, which can lead to heart failure or sudden death. But research from NC State College of Veterinary Medicine and TriviumVet has shown that rapamycin can slow - or even reverse - heart thickening by inhibiting the mTOR pathway.

With conditional approval, veterinarians can now prescribe the drug while final clinical trials continue - offering a long-awaited breakthrough for feline heart disease. This also adds to rapamycin’s growing reputation as a powerful tool against age-related diseases.

Worth your time.

What’s your idea for a longevity app?

Swedish company Lovable has been wildly successful (who said Europe can’t compete in AI), offering a ”superhuman full stack engineer” which turns your idea into an app with minimal fuss. I’ve tried and it really is simple to use even for someone who can’t write a line of code.

While I’ve not published anything (yet) Johan Hedevåg used Lovable to create vibe code Dexadoktorn, which makes it easier for people in Sweden to book a dexascan online. Cool idea!

Aging as a software design flaw

I've always appreciated the elegance of the antagonistic pleiotropy theory - the idea that genetic traits beneficial early in life become harmful as we age. Originally proposed by George Williams in the 1950s, it offered an evolutionary reason for aging: nature prioritizes reproduction, not indefinite maintenance.

Now this theory has received a 21st-century update through João Pedro de Magalhães' ”software design flaw” hypothesis. This modern twist sees aging not as random bodily decay but as an unintended outcome of developmental genetic programs (our biological ”software”) that continue running beyond their optimal timeframe.

While it shares some ground with the ”information theory of aging” (advocated by researchers like David Sinclair), there is a key difference. The information theory sees aging as random damage corrupting epigenetic information, whereas Magalhães proposes that aging arises predictably from built-in developmental instructions continuing too long.

Both perspectives converge on the idea that aging could be reversed by reprogramming the epigenome. But where Sinclair sees reprogramming as a way to fix damage and restore lost information, Magalhães sees it as a way to pause or rewind a program that was never meant to keep running this long.

It’s a great open access paper well worth reading.

Hey, you’ve made it all the way here! Thank you so much for reading! 🫶🏼