My argument is that if it doesn’t even help those little cancer factories in a lab and positive studies in humans are non-existent (the study by Professor Kennedy got shelved), how can we expect to get any benefit from it? The supplement is way too expensive to be justified.
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the study by Professor Kennedy got shelved
If you’re talking about the study at Indiana University, if that one has been “shelved”, it’s likely not due to Kennedy but Ponce de Leon Health who funded the study (I think).
I would guess a scientist like Kennedy would want to publish a negative result of this sort. The only reason that I can see for him not to want to publish would be if there were gross errors in running the experiment. Kennedy has grad students and postdocs that need papers published, and even a negative result would help satisfy that need. (Also, it’s my understanding that in that experiment they discovered, post hoc, that the test subjects had unusually low epigenetic age, and were extra-healthy; so AKG had less of an effect than they were hoping to see, but Kennedy has said that within the group of people with average or above-average epigenetic age, they found AKG lowered their epigenetic age substantially).
I believe there is another study that is finishing up at the National University of Singapore, funded by the Singapore government.
My guess would be that both studies will be published eventually. It just takes time to write it all up. By comparison: as I recall, the big taurine study that came out a few years ago (on its deficiency being a driver of aging) took many years to complete. I had remembered it took 10 years, in fact, but couldn’t find any references for this (my memory could be in error). It might have been mentioned in an interview with some of the study authors.
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They could have released the study for anyone to analyze the subgroups.
My understanding is that if something actually lowers your epigenetic age (which is still vodoo science atm) it should delay cancer formation which has not been seen in mice trials.
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I asked this question to OpenAI’s o3 model:
Is it customary for university biomedical researchers to share research data before even issuing a preprint about the work, and if not then why not?
The short answer is:
No —outside of a few high-profile consortia and public-health emergencies, most university biomedical groups do not make their raw research data public before they have at least posted a preprint (and usually not until the accompanying paper is accepted or published). Funders and journals encourage openness, but their formal policies generally set the deadline for data release at or just after manuscript acceptance, so there is little structural incentive—and several disincentives—to post datasets earlier.
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I forgot to answer the original question about “immortality”. I personally don’t expect to be “immortal”, but am interested in finding ways of slowing aging and improving health.
I am a bit ambivalent about whether keeping up with the scientific literature will help much. Each little study one reads might help a little, and then if you add it up it might help a lot. The trouble is finding which ones to pay attention to, and then also the fact that what works for one person may not work for another. (This site already has so many articles people have posted that if there were a supplement that gave a big life-extension, the supplement and mechanism would already be mentioned here. Just the other day I thought about mentioning a paper on gorillas and heart disease, and then was astonished to find someone already posted a scientific paper about it! – though, the one I had planned to mention was a update on it, connecting the heart disease with the ape microbiome.)
I think in some number of years (maybe 5, maybe 10, 20…) we will have robots that can perform surgeries and even build much smaller robots to put into the body to do things like recognize and clean-out cancerous and pre-cancerous cells, remove cellular debris, remove toxins, remove arterial plaques (slowly, so as not to cause problems), stimulate stem cells in specific areas, strengthen the extracellular matrix, and lots more. These would not be nanobots, but maybe more like bacteria-sized bots. Building these may be 10x harder than building modern computer chip factories, requiring millions of components. No single person – or even a team of 100 people – could put it together in a reasonable amount of time by themselves; but with the help of AI and advanced robotics, it might just be possible.
Survive until then and you might get a few extra decades…
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