Digitally altered photographs like this one can rewind the clock, but new science is emerging regarding ways to shave years off your natural "biological age". Photo / 123RF
Can science unlock the secret to eternal youth? Joanna Wane looks at humanity’s race against time and reveals the final results of her own 12-month challenge to dial back her biological age.
Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has nocturnal penile erections for an average of three hours every night.
He knows that because he sleeps with a tracking device attached to his genitals. I know that because he posts about it on his website, among a raft of personal data that includes his percentage of liver fat and how much he can bench press (108kg).
Apparently, he has the penis power of an 18-year-old boy. Not bad for a man in his mid-40s, although if I were spending US$2 million a year on rejuvenation treatments and necking more than 100 pills every day, I’d expect a few erections, too.
Dubbed the “billionaire biohacker”, Johnson has reduced his biological age by five years since embarking on Project Blueprint in 2021, according to an analysis of epigenetic biomarkers on his DNA. The ultimate goal is to reverse his cellular body clock right back to his teens.
Investing in extreme anti-ageing technology - an obsession among the likes of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and OpenAI’s Sam Altman - seems a queasily egoistic pursuit when the last thing the world needs now is guys like that becoming immortal.
Johnson, however, portrays himself as a guinea pig for the greater good. “It doesn’t matter what my life expectancy is, it doesn’t matter if I die or not,” he recently told Fortune magazine. “It’s that we are thematically, objectively, functionally engineering our way to ‘don’t die’ as a species.”
Even living to 120, which is currently considered the “natural barrier” for human life expectancy, sounds exhausting. But increasing longevity isn’t really the point. Instead, the focus among serious ageing experts is extending “healthspan”, defined as the years spent generally active and free from disease. Globally, the average lifespan is nudging 80, while the average healthspan doesn’t even see you through to a Gold Card; it’s sitting at 63.
Age - and the biological deterioration that accompanies it - is the primary risk factor for everything from dementia to cancer and heart disease. And while genetics play a part, environmental and lifestyle factors have a far greater impact on the speed of our inexorable decline.
The idea that ageing itself is a disease that can be “cured”, or at least delayed, is something Auckland biotechnologist and pharmacist Greg Macpherson explored in his 2021 science-based guide, Harnessing the Nine Hallmarks of Aging.
He describes his new book, Age Less, as a short history of longevity, looking at the enormous strides that have been made already in extending life expectancy and what the next major advances might be.
Exactly how and why we age is the subject of multiple theories. Macpherson lists a dozen of them, from genetic wear and tear to hormonal changes and a weakening immune system.
Undoubtedly, multiple factors play a part, but he subscribes to the programmed theory, which suggests ageing isn’t a haphazard decline but a pre-determined process driven by our genetic and evolutionary origins.
“Once we understand the mechanisms driving our ageing clock,” he writes, “then it’s possible that we can slow the ageing process, increase our healthspan and essentially modify our biology to the point where we can escape the current limits of our lifespan.”
Research for Age Less took Macpherson to Portugal, Israel, Denmark, Singapore, Switzerland and the US, and in-depth interviews with key figures in the field can be accessed via QR codes in each chapter.
The science itself clearly fascinates him, but a more personal motivation is right there in the book’s dedication to three people in his life whose loss is still deeply felt: his father, Ross, who died at 51 after contracting hepatitis C through a contaminated blood transfusion; Betty, his late mother-in-law; and Nicola, a close friend who died of Covid.
“We can’t escape biological laws, but we’re all trying to move the needle,” he says. “Who wouldn’t want to evolve to a place where we aren’t losing our parents early and people can squeeze out an extra 20 good years of life?”
Preventative wellness and interventions to extend healthspan are explored in the book. So is the use of epigenetic clocks to measure biological ageing, which I used to track my own progress during a 12-month challenge to dial back my body clock before a recent milestone birthday - with somewhat disconcerting results (see What’s My Biological Age?, below).
“People say, ‘I’ve just been diagnosed as a diabetic’ but actually, they’ve been trending towards being a diabetic for probably five to 10 years,” says Macpherson. “And it’s the same with cardiovascular and neurological disease.
“In the future, and it’s not that far away, we’ll be able to go, ‘Okay, this is my area of weakness and this is what’s clinically shown to modulate it’. So potentially you won’t manifest that disease because you’ve got ahead of it before it becomes a problem.”
Macpherson’s part of the puzzle is a range of nutraceuticals he’s developed through his company SRW (Science Research Wellness) to target specific aspects of the cellular system. The results of an independent US study into their efficacy have yet to be officially published but show a consistent reversal of biological ageing across multiple measures.
He’s now putting together a submission for XPrize Healthspan, a global competition to develop a therapeutic programme that restores muscle, cognition and immune function by a minimum of 10 years. Finalist teams will conduct one-year clinical trials and the winner will receive US$101m in funding.
Last year, 106-year-old Apo Whang-Od, an indigenous tattoo artist from the Philippines who’s still practising her craft, became the oldest person to be featured on the cover of Vogue. In the decades to come, perhaps extraordinary centenarians like her will be the new normal. And who wouldn’t want to bottle her secret?
Nobel prize-winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan, who’s 71, is scathing of tech billionaires who view life as “just some code to be hacked”. But in his book Why We Die, he also writes poignantly about the gradual shrinking of his world. “It sometimes feels that life is being constrained to a smaller and smaller portion of a house, as doors to rooms that we would like to explore slowly close shut as we age.”
Over the next 200 years, Macpherson believes what he calls the “longevity dividend” will add decades to our life expectancy and double the amount of time we spend as adults in good health through scientific advances such as cellular reprogramming - although there may be some thorny philosophical and ethical issues to consider along the way.
“I’m quite comfortable with you rejuvenating my heart,” he says, “but what happens when you rejuvenate my brain? Does that mean my memories and collective experience go backwards? We don’t know the answer to that. So there may be a hard limit we just can’t get beyond. But I’d rather defer it if I can.”
The big reveal after a year of trying to turn back the clock
The answer is… it’s complicated. That’ll teach me to be smug after the results of my initial DNAage test looked pretty damned good. So did a follow-up six months later.
The final 12-month report, on my “significant birthday”, produced far more mixed results. I’d swept triumphantly into Ōamaru after five days on the 315km Alps 2 Ocean cycle ride feeling on top of the world. But maybe turning 60 really does take it out of you.
The challenge I had set myself was to see if I could lower my biological age - essentially how my body is holding up at a cellular level - by making small, incremental changes. A little less alcohol, a little more exercise. A regime of SRW “healthy ageing” supplements, a daily Ārepa “brain drink”. Monthly de-stress sessions with osteopath Glyn Flutey, who doubles as my therapist; a hypnotherapy session to stop grinding my teeth.
Each of my blood samples, extracted using a DIY pinprick kit, was dispatched for analysis at an epigenetics lab in the US. Targeted algorithms were then used to calculate my biological age, based on age-associated methylation patterns on my DNA.
It’s a rapidly evolving field and TruDiagnostic, the company behind the test, is constantly coming up with fresh ways of crunching the data.
A new “epigenetic clock” developed with Yale University generates information on 11 individual organ systems, including how fast they’re ageing and disease-related risks. Company founder Ryan Smith reckons this SymphonyAge model, released just last month, marks a breakthrough.
“Before, we could measure if you were ageing [more rapidly than the test population for people the same chronological age] but we couldn’t tell you how or why,” he says. “This gives more insight into the need to focus on a particular organ system or biomarker.”
The SymphonyAge of my lungs is 57 and my liver is 59 - but my kidneys are 62. Other data based on my 12-month test puts my risk of cancer, stroke, depression, type two diabetes, COPD and heart disease as slightly lower than average.
Overall, though, it seems my biological age is catching up with the candles on my birthday cake, despite the lifestyle changes I’ve made.
Drilling down into the detailed and sometimes contradictory reports is confounding and I struggle to identify any useful patterns. Admittedly, this is still nascent technology and the science isn’t settled on which ageing models offer the most useful insights, but my downward slide is a little disconcerting.
To be honest, I don’t feel any different one way or the other. The only way to see if that final test was a blip (post-ride fatigue?) or the beginning of a worrying trend would be to wait a few months and then get tested again.
Most of the 20,000 or so highly motivated and health-conscious people on the DNA database can afford to do exactly that. Monitored regularly, they have wrap-around medical support and respond proactively to any potential concerns.
Red flags for me were inflammation markers related to physiological stress (hey, it’s a tough world out there), my fasting blood glucose predictor (blame that on my sweet tooth) and early warning signs that I could be kinder to my kidneys. Here’s how some of my final results shaped up, compared to the first test 12 months earlier:
Chronological age: 60 (the one on my birth certificate)
Intrinsic epigenetic age: 57.55 (up from 55.39)
This went the wrong way while still knocking off a few years. However, “intrinsic age” reports don’t differentiate between cell types that age at a different rate, providing a less complete picture.
Extrinsic epigenetic age: 41.19 (down from 43.96)
Now, that’s more like it. A better predictor of outcomes, “extrinsic age” factors in changes associated with the functioning of the immune system. Unfortunately for me, TruDiagnostic considers these two measures outdated and has now dropped them altogether.
DunedinPace value: 0.8 (up from 0.71)
This knocks me off the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard where “longevity leaders” can upload their latest results, some retesting every three months. My initial score would have slipped me into the top 10. Developed using data from the Dunedin Study, it’s a snapshot in time of how fast a person is ageing. So, in a chronological year, my biological age is increasing by only nine and a half months. I’m pretty happy with that.
OMICm Biological Age: 59.87 (up from 49.02)
According to this model, though, I’ve aged a full decade since my first test. A detailed breakdown includes recommendations for improvement related to eight epigenetic biomarker proxies that have negatively impacted my rating.
OMICm FitAge: 61.27 (up 57.20)
This has gone in the wrong direction, too, based on markers for gait speed, grip strength, oxygen uptake and lung function. So much for all that training I did for the Alps 2 Ocean ride.
Telomere length: 6.98 kilobases (down from 7.01)
After a growth spurt in the six-month test, my predicted telomere length has shrunk back. Protective tips at the end of chromosome DNA strands, telomeres shorten with age, a process also associated with chronic preventable diseases and a higher risk of death.
Weight-loss response: Non-responder (unchanged)
Studies on 11 CpG sites on the genome show some people are more likely to lose weight by restricting calories than others. I’m not one of them.
Smoking and disease risk: Low (unchanged)
Measured by the level of methylation at the AHRR gene, which regulates the metabolism of particles from toxic cigarette smoke (among other things). I’m not a smoker and my score reflects that.
Alcohol consumption: Cutting back from five to three drinks a week still puts me at higher risk for DNA methylation (essentially cellular damage) than 74.5% of the test population. That hasn’t convinced me to go teetotal yet but I did do Dry(ish) July.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning feature writer on the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
Let’s take a look at the science.