For millennia, humans have tried to find ways to avoid the frailty that comes with age, and for millennia, they have failed. All this trying and failing has resulted in society generally believing that aging is inevitable, and too complex for anything to really be done about it.
But when you consider the incredible breakthroughs of the last couple of decades, like CRISPR, epigenetic reprogramming and Google’s incredible AlphaFold – and the fact that such breakthroughs seem to be accelerating – it’s hard not to wonder whether humanity may have turned a corner.
In recent times, high-profile scientists like David Sinclair, Aubrey de Grey, Nir Barzilai and George Church (to name a few) have all made headlines by sharing their views on the future of human health, and the world seems to be starting to take notice. These three all have excellent videos to watch on YouTube – there’s hours of highly-informative content if you’re interested.
Online communities like Reddit’s r/longevity are seeing impressive growth, and podcasts and YouTube channels dedicated to longevity science are proliferating. Here’s a couple of our recommendations for you to check out if you haven’t already!
The most active community for longevity enthusiasts on the web. This subreddit is moderated by a group of highly knowledgeable scientists and non-scientists, and the quality of the content and discussion is (mostly) very high.
Founded in 2014 by Keith Comito, Oliver Medvedik and Richard Kaufman, lifespan.io is a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization headquartered in New York City. Over the last 7 years, the team behind lifespan.io has published a huge amount of longevity-related content, from regular newsletter to educational videos – like this excellent one with Kurzgesagt on why we should end aging – to the fantastic Rejuvenation Roadmap. On top of this, they also host a monthly Journal Club, where they livestream a deep-dive chat about the latest scientific papers – always worth a watch.
Peter Attia’s podcast The Drive
Every week, Dr Peter Attia (a Canadian-American physician living in Austin, Texas), interviews an expert in their field, and the conversations are always super detailed, and super interesting. Peter offers a mix of free and subscriber-only content, and we can confidently say the subscription cost is well worth it.
Eleanor Sheekey is a PhD student at the Cancer Research UK – Cambridge Institute, and her bite-sized YouTube videos are unmissable. Eleanor does an amazing job of explaining highly complex topics in an easy-to-understand way, and she has just started doing longer-form interviews too. Subscribe to her YouTube channel – you won’t regret it.
A relatively new channel, Modern Healthspan is run by a British expat living in Hong Kong. The caliber of guests on the channel is very high, and the channel’s host Richard is quite prolific. Very worth subscribing too as well.
For those with money on their minds, Longevity Marketcap put out a great weekly newsletter with lots of interesting longevity content. It’s not all about investing, either. As well as discussing the finance side of things, they also look at the science with quite a high level of detail and interview big names in the longevity world.
If you haven’t heard of Sergey Young, he’s a longevity investor with a vision to extend healthy lifespans of at least one billion people. To help him achieve that goal, Sergey founded the VC Longevity Vision Fund to accelerate breakthroughs in longevity science and to make these accessible and affordable. His newsletter is excellent, and the articles and videos on his website are highly informative without being overwhelming.
Laura Deming is a true inspiration and a longevity wunderkind. At just 14 years of age in 2008, Laura matriculated at MIT to work on artificial organogenesis and bone aging. In 2011 at 17 she started Longevity Fund, the first venture capital firm dedicated to funding high-potential longevity companies. In the last 10 years, she certainly hasn’t slowed down, speaking at TEDMED in 2013 amongst many other impressive accomplishments. Laura’s website is a beautifully clean, well-researched overview of where the longevity field is at, aimed at beginners. Laura is also quite active on Twitter – a great resource to follow!
Are there other resources you recommend? Let us know in the comments!