I don’t always agree with Gary Taubes, but I enjoy is writing and his though process. Reasonable people can disagree with regards to taking rapamycin. You might find his look into rapamycin of interest:
Now what about that anti-aging pill?
“Face to face with real death… I might have speculated on my chances of going to Heaven; but candidly I did not care. I could not have wept if I had tried. I had no wish to review the evils of my past. But the past did seem to have been a bit wasted. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions: the road to Heaven is paved with lost opportunities…. I wanted those years over again. What fun I would have with them: what glorious fun!” Apsley Cherry-Garrard,The Worst Journey in the World, 1922
Apsley Cherry Garrard was a member of Robert Scott’s famously ill-fated 1911 expedition to the South Pole. He wrote those words about the imminent prospect of dying after he and two colleagues lost their tent in a hurricane in temperatures far below zero. That they found the tent a few days later, just half a mile away, is why we can read about this in Cherry Garrard’s memoir. “Our lives had been taken away and given back to us,” he wrote.
When most of us come face to face with death, when we wrestle with the nature of our last regrets, we’ll do so under considerably less dramatic circumstances: Maybe at the moment we’re diagnosed with some dire and irreversible condition; perhaps toward the dismal end of whatever chronic disease is in the process of ending our lives prematurely.
“If only…,” we will wonder. But if only, what?
If this summer’s headlines and media stories are any indication, some of us are likely to think “if only I had taken the anti-aging medication, rapamycin…” or “if only I had started taking rapamycin earlier or at higher doses.” Another possibility, although harder to image, is that we go to our demise grateful that we did take the drug and focus our regrets exclusively on all the other facets of our lives and loves.
Rapamycin and its anti-aging prospects are the hot topic in the longevity movement, which itself has become a surprisingly hot topic itself in medicine. A world of researchers and influencers no longer talk about treating or preventing chronic diseases, but about extending the span of a life without these disorders – the healthspan – and so, ideally, extending our lives in the process. In this world, rapamycin has been popularized by such longevity influencers as my former colleague Peter Attia, physician-author of the mega-best seller Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity , who acknowledges taking it himself.
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This is the sort of thing that makes for a full life. Life is never so precious but when you feel like you might lose it. It is only then that you can appreciate how great a gift you have been given.
How to get more of these experiences? Make life an adventure! “Life is an adventure, or it is nothing!”
I decline to get them from illness. I’d rather get them by not being sure I could make it back to my car after a long hike. Or getting lost in the mountains and having to find my way back to the trail by my wits. We call these epics, and the key is to do something that feels dangerous but is not too dangerous. It’s a fine line.
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LaraPo
#3
It’s the best article about Rapamycin I have ever read. It totally resonates with what I think about it. Unfortunately, I don’t have a choice of taking it or not, so I will continue (with smaller doses and bigger breaks), and help me God.
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RobTuck
#4
Thanks for reviewing Taubes. I read his piece on rapamycin and found little to disagree with. For most of us, the decision to take rapa, initially at least, rests on the position we choose to take on the risk/benefit continuum and this in turn is modulated by the types and magnitudes of uncertainties about rapa’s effects on us.
Personally, I am willing to try longevity interventions with low certainty of benefit if the certainty on lack of harm is relatively high. Based on the evolution of my supplement stack over the last 50 years, it seems reasonable to think that half of my current stack is producing little or no benefit. On the other hand, I’m more certain that the supplements I’m taking are not doing harm.
Eventually, rapamycin moved into the “worth a cautious try” category for me. This decision was based in part on the several years many thoughtful pioneers in this group have been taking rapa. Unfortunately, because of what appears to have been rapa’s effects on my skin and wound healing (and possibly on connective tissue), I discontinued taking rapamycin for the time being and am focusing on other interventions for which there is more human evidence. For me this includes a rotating schedule of substances including metformin, taurine, piperine, glycine, and glycine/NAC, and others.
With this said, I think a case can be made that the most certain way to add 10 years to many lives (the “many” recognizing our differences in genetics, etc.) is decades of disciplined multiform exercise driven by exercise and longevity science. A caveat to those who are much younger: now is the time to lay down a strong fitness foundation, moving yourself into the highest percentile rank possible for you. On this, I agree with Attia in noting that, in spite of your best efforts, the physical drawdown will be so significant in your last decade or two that the only way to maintain reasonable quality of life is to enter that period with substantially excess capacity. In saying this, I am going slightly beyond the evidence but I believe it is true based on my experiences and on the observed experiences of friends and colleagues. Take your rapamycin if you choose but also hit the gym or the trails daily and push as hard as you can in a science-based way.
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And now Mark Hyman jumps in too:
Is Rapamycin the Key to a Longer, Healthier Life? Here’s What You Need to Know.
November 4, 2024
Picture Easter Island—a place known for its mysterious Moai statues, ancient stone giants silently standing guard, defying earthly explanation.
But for scientists, the island held another secret: In the 1960s, a group of researchers stumbled upon a strain of soil bacteria there, one that led to the discovery of a unique compound called rapamycin.
Originally tested as an antifungal agent, it quickly revealed more potent qualities: an ability to suppress your immune system, making it invaluable in organ transplants.
And as the researchers dug deeper, they uncovered an unexpected twist—rapamycin could also impact a critical pathway in cells that controls growth and aging (known as mTOR). By inhibiting this pathway, rapamycin helped animals live longer, healthier lives in lab studies, sparking a question:
Could it have the same effect in humans?
Emerging research suggests that it has potential. And longevity hackers swear by it.
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Genja
#6
That Taubes article was very frustrating for me to read. For all his emphasis on the difference in risk/reward calcs in tha face of terminal disease vs for “healthy” folks, and the applicability of the Hippocratic oath, there was never a direct confrontation with the central fallacy of traditional medicine: We all have a terminal diagnosis. It’s called aging. It kills 100% of people who don’t die of something else first. No one has survived this condition beyond 125 years.
The idea that there is somehow a moralistic qualitative difference between doing nothing, euphemised as “do no harm”, in the face of aging vs in the face of a shorter-horizon terminal condition is the fundamental error that keeps anti-aging science and practice marginalized outside of mainstream medicine, overlooked and ignored. The condition of aging should be treated identically with having a terminal disease, and every intervention evaluated on a risk/reward cost/benefit analysis. “Do no harm” has no place in this analysis. Doing nothing is sometimes the most harmful thing that one can do, and the mere fact that it is a non-action does not somehow exempt it from the moral responsibility that making an intervention would have.
Im so sad to see this error being made by someone like him and propagated to his readership. We still have a ways to go with this movement, from a social / cultural perspective.
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