ah, have you ever developed a drug? bullshit antibiotic resistance waste of time ass career

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

it's insane to me that this isn't all over mainstream media right now. for the first time in human history, a drug built to reverse aging was just put into a living person a company called Life Biosciences dosed the first patient in their trial for something called ER-100 it comes from a Harvard geneticist named David Sinclair his theory is that aging comes from your cells losing track of how to read their own DNA think of it like a computer. the hardware is fine, but the software slowly gets corrupted over the years, so the machine runs slower and slower until it stops the instructions for a young, healthy cell are all still in there. your cells just lost access to them over time so this drug does one thing: it reboots the cell back to the version of itself that knew how to run properly they pull it off with three proteins that reset a cell to a younger state and they proved it works before ever touching a human first they restored vision in old mice. then they restored vision in monkeys with optic nerve damage, with no tumors and no signs of harm so now they're testing it on people going blind from glaucoma and a nerve condition called NAION they started with the eye on purpose. it's the cleanest place to test the idea, because they can inject it into one eye without it reaching the rest of the body, the cells there don't heal on their own so any improvement clearly came from the drug, and they can measure vision right down to the letters on a chart the reset happens at the level of the cell, so in theory the same approach could one day rejuvenate the liver, the kidneys, even the brain it won't be automatic though. every organ needs its own way of getting the drug into the right cells, plus its own round of safety testing. so it doesn't suddenly work everywhere the moment it works in the eye but the eye answers the one question nobody could answer before: whether you can safely turn back the age of living cells inside a person if the answer is yes, reaching the rest of the body comes down to delivery, one organ at a time. that part is hard, but it's the kind of hard you can engineer your way through to be clear, this is an early safety trial. 18 people, 5 year follow up. so nobody is gonna cure aging by next year but if it works, we'll look back at this week as the moment the clock started running backwards for the first time