Alex Colville is the longevity investor we call when someone claims to have found the fountain of youth. He helped found age1, earned a PhD in genetics from Stanford, and has spent much of his career deciding which attempts to slow or reverse aging are plausible enough to fund. This makes him a strange sort of power broker in a field better known for billionaires, influencers, and heroic quantities of supplements. Colville's own regimen is not much of a regimen. He eats reasonably well, exercises, sometimes drinks, sleeps too little, and takes none of the drugs popular with the longevity crowd. He is waiting for evidence.
The evidence may finally be catching up with the money. Colville and Ashlee sort through GLP-1 drugs, calorie restriction, rapamycin, CRISPR, hibernating squirrels, whales that live for centuries, dog longevity trials, young cells grown from old ones, and the billions of dollars poured into Altos Labs and Calico. They ask whether partial reprogramming could give an old liver the function of a young one, why China may beat the United States at turning biology into medicine, and whether the virtual cell is much less virtual than advertised. Then Colville gets to the properly strange future: organs held in suspended animation, brains kept alive outside the body, and a terminally ill person's head touring the country in a Waymo. Longevity is still full of hype. It is also, Colville argues, getting very close to its first undeniable win.
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IN THIS EPISODE
age1: https://age1.com/
Alex Colville on X: https://x.com/AlexJColville
Loyal, longevity drugs for dogs: https://loyal.com/
NewLimit, epigenetic reprogramming: https://www.newlimit.com/
Fauna Bio, drug discovery through extreme animal biology: https://www.faunabio.com/
Aerska, RNA medicines for the brain: https://aerska.com/
Until, reversible cryopreservation: https://www.untillabs.com/
Bexorg, brain perfusion technology: https://bexorg.com/
Core Memory inside Bexorg: https://www.corememory.com/p/theyve-revived-dead-brains-bexorg
Altos Labs: https://www.altoslabs.com/
Calico Life Sciences: https://www.calicolabs.com/
ABOUT THE HOST
Ashlee Vance is a best selling author, filmmaker, and journalist who has spent more than twenty years chronicling science and technology for The Economist, The New York Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He wrote the best selling biography of Elon Musk and created the Emmy nominated series Hello World. On Core Memory he travels the world to drop into labs, garages, factories, and hangars and spend time with the scientists, inventors, oddballs, and startups pushing the future forward.
Every week we invite scientists, engineers and crazy tech people to show us what they are building. Follow the conversations👇🏼
https://www.youtube.com/@CoreMemoryPodcast?sub_confirmation=1
Original films:
https://www.youtube.com/@CoreMemoryVideos/videos
Find Ashlee Vance at
www.corememory.com
https://www.instagram.com/ashlee.vance/
https://x.com/ashleevance
Find Kylie Robison at
https://x.com/kyliebytes
https://www.instagram.com/kylie.robison
CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
2:41 Meet the Switzerland of Aging
8:01 Why Did Aging Become the Enemy?
10:28 What Can an Axolotl Teach Us?
26:23 What Works in Worms, but Not Yet in Humans?
30:16 The Longevity Expert Who Takes Nothing
34:37 Are GLP-1s Already Anti-Aging Drugs?
44:14 Can We Make Old Cells Young Again?
58:48 What Do Hibernating Squirrels Know?
1:05:02 When Does Medicine Become an Upgrade?
1:09:57 Has CRISPR Lived Up to the Hype?
1:12:43 What Are Altos and Calico Really Doing?
1:20:24 The Breakthrough That Could Change Everything
1:25:14 Will China Win the Biology Race?
1:28:24 Why a Virtual Cell Is Not a Cell
1:30:28 A Head in a Waymo?
