A one-man experiment in anti-aging(joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com)
joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com
A one-man experiment in anti-aging
http://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2014/03/21/a-one-man-experiment-in-radical-anti-aging/
8 comments
Could there possibly be two worse pictures to compare if you want to see if someone has aged (visually) or not?
Particularly because that's the only evidence he's collecting to show that his experiments -- lots & lots of concurrent experiments that he's continually changing for murky reasons -- are working.
He just... says stuff like this:
> At first I expected to be able to set back my telomere clock by up to 8 or 9 years per year, but subsequently revised this to about 5.1 years per year.
> The astragalus extract actually finally turned out to work rather better, in fact, than TA-65.
...with no explanation at all. He's clearly learned some domain-specific vocabulary, but spending all of his money on supplements rather than any kind of testing whatsoever, or even taking the time to work out a more scientific approach.
I don't see how his "experiments" have any scientific value beyond "here's a guy who ate (or rubbed into his scalp, or whatever) X quantity of Y every day for a few months or years, and it didn't seem to do him any serious harm".
Edit: saying "whatsoever" 3 times is overkill...
He just... says stuff like this:
> At first I expected to be able to set back my telomere clock by up to 8 or 9 years per year, but subsequently revised this to about 5.1 years per year.
> The astragalus extract actually finally turned out to work rather better, in fact, than TA-65.
...with no explanation at all. He's clearly learned some domain-specific vocabulary, but spending all of his money on supplements rather than any kind of testing whatsoever, or even taking the time to work out a more scientific approach.
I don't see how his "experiments" have any scientific value beyond "here's a guy who ate (or rubbed into his scalp, or whatever) X quantity of Y every day for a few months or years, and it didn't seem to do him any serious harm".
Edit: saying "whatsoever" 3 times is overkill...
Agreed. Couple of blurry photos (especially second one, from 2013), plus angle in which second photo is taken is very misleading - people can look younger or older just by changing angle. Good, no-BS article must have 2 clear, crisp, hi-res frontal photos for fair comparison, together with EXIF info (yes, I know it can be faked but still...). Furthermore, on first photo he is frowned, on second he is smiling which is another suspicious point. All in all, to me it looks like this story has got no substance.
It says "scienceblog". It says "experiment". And yet I didn't see any science. Did I miss it?
His profile on Longecity forums: http://www.longecity.org/forum/user/4099-jamesagreen/ (You need an account to view it)
Here's one of his lasts post there: http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/52748-can-we-get-straig...
looking at his avatar - I'm not sure he's sharing the truth. If you're running all of these cutting edge anti aging experiments surely can upload a non pixelated photo?
From the horrible looking site to his blurry/pixelated photos and the hundreds of links on each of his posts (Not necessarily bad this one), there's definitely something not right with this guy.
Medicine has a long and illustrious history of self-experimentation. Barry Marshall (lives in Perth, my dad worked in the same lab!) won a Nobel prize for proving peptic ulcers are caused by bacteria (not stress etc) and can be cured with antibiotics. As part of his research he drank a culture containing bacteria from a patient's ulcer (yuk!), became horribly infected and cured himself with antibiotics.
Sometimes self-experimentation turned out to be fatal (see Carrion's disease for example).
Like the article says, I am very grateful to the guy for putting his own body on the line... and I hope he too wins a Nobel prize!
Sometimes self-experimentation turned out to be fatal (see Carrion's disease for example).
Like the article says, I am very grateful to the guy for putting his own body on the line... and I hope he too wins a Nobel prize!
Yes, self-experimentation and knowingly risking the most precious thing there is - your own life, to advance science and help others, is one of the most heroic things. I'm not sure if Jim is doing anything as heroic and with the same admirable motives, but I really hope he's and other self-experimenters contribute to medicine and science, because really the pace, cost, and the moral concerns of studies slow progress down tremendously.
Jim's page on longevity (looks like it's from the 90s, but it's not): http://www.greenray4ever.com/longevity.html
Jim's biography: http://www.greenray4ever.com/index-88.html
Although his website looks like a mess, a lot of the stuff he's doing and talking about are solid. I posted this, because he's essentially a computer engineer... or use to be.
Jim's biography: http://www.greenray4ever.com/index-88.html
Although his website looks like a mess, a lot of the stuff he's doing and talking about are solid. I posted this, because he's essentially a computer engineer... or use to be.
The bad quality of pictures don't help the story. Both his pictures and the website itself look like they were made in the 90s.
The author of the "interview" also admits that he has not physically met Jim Green.
What also does not help is that almost every hyperlink in the story goes back to Jim's page as a source. This does not seem like very high quality journalism to me.
The author of the "interview" also admits that he has not physically met Jim Green.
What also does not help is that almost every hyperlink in the story goes back to Jim's page as a source. This does not seem like very high quality journalism to me.
Slightly frightening that he takes telomerase activators one week (to reduce effects of ageing) and telomerase inhibitors the next (to reduce likelihood of cancer from telomerase activation, presumably).
I never really understood the overall hypothetical effect of this approach. What I find interesting that his regimen does not have any mitochondrial enhancers (outside of the standard Co-Q10), which is something most anti-aging programs today focus on, specifically, PQQ, which generates new mitochondria.
If he's 65-66 now, he looks way older than a man in his 60 in the photo from 2007 (strangely the only photo not blurred on his site), isn't he?