Looks like Mr. Joseph Epstein, BA is suffering from an inferiority complex. As a Dr, I think I’m qualified to make that diagnosis.
Morgan Levine
1,824 posts
Morgan Levine
@DrMorganLevine
VP of Computation at Altos Labs | Former Professor at Yale | Thoughts and opinions are my own
San Diego, CA
Joined February 2020
- I am so excited to finally be able to publicly announce that I’m joining @altos_labs San Diego as one of the founding PIs I’ll be hiring a number of computational and molecular biologist. Please reach out if interested.
- This got a ton of attention and some of the focus was on epigenetic age. Lots of people weighing in (mostly those with no actual experience). Here is my take on current standing of epigenetic age. Feel free to AMA. I promise I’m not trying to sell anything 1/Bryan Johnson sold his company to PayPal for $800 million in 2013. Since then, he's been investing millions to reduce aging. In 2021, he reduced his epigenetic age by 5.1 years in 7 months (World Record) Here’s a breakdown of his “Blueprint” and my own experience with it: 🧵
- I’m going to say it—longevity/aging influencers are killing the science. Yes, they bring attention, but it makes the field look like pseudoscience & snake oil sales We need to attract scientific talent not groupies and when posts like this are rampant, it’s a losing battle.We all want to live longer but how? An experiment was done that reduced the biological age of 6 women by an average of 5 years in only 8 weeks. Here's how they did it:
- This was my last week at Yale. On Monday I start my transition to @altos_labs. I really appreciate all my amazing colleagues, mentors, and collaborators at Yale. Moving is hard, but I’m excited to expand my research and see what can discovered in this new incredible environment.
- The whole 🐍oil (not scientifically based) side of longevity/aging research is making me want to distance myself from the field. I love the science. ‘Why we age?’ is entwined with ‘What is life?’ But lately it's felt co-opted. Wonder how many scientists shy away because of this?
- biorxiv.org/content/10.110… This paper is finally in preprint. It's a project I started thinking about/planning 4 years ago and I am excited to put out the first iteration. The published version will provide more mechanistic insight, but for now we find...
- Scientists studying aging r often too unidimensional in thinking—is aging damage, programmed, reversible, caused by (insert fav hallmark)? These questions all assume aging is just 1 thing, which it clearly isn’t. It’s a complex multifactorial phenom that we’ve happened to label.
- Rather than saying I study “aging”, I think I’ll start saying I study “system integrity” of the organism/cell. In my mind, it’s what aging undermines. It also makes more sense to talk about restoring system integrity vs. reversing aging.
- In other news, a @Nature news article was just published by Liam Drew discussing epigenetic clocks. It features work by our lab, Steve Horvath, @davidasinclair and quotes from @mkaeberlein and others. media.nature.com/original/magaz…
- Clickbait journalism is counterproductive to scientific progress!
- FT article clarifying Altos Labs' mission. The goal was never to unlock immortality (or even increase lifespan). I joined Altos because of their amazing mission to restore/maintain health and enable people to have better quality of life, free from disease
