×

Lifespan News – WIRED and Rejuvenation

WIRED has joined the long list of tech enthusiasts supporting rejuvenation.

Share







LSN Morgan LevineLSN Morgan Levine

For this episode of Lifespan News, Ryan O’Shea focuses on Morgan Levine’s promotion of rejuvenation biotechnology on WIRED.

Script

WIRED, a media company historically associated with their coverage of the digital revolution, has released a video on the science of slowing down aging with Dr. Morgan Levine. This video has amassed around half a million views in two weeks, performing better than many of the other videos on their channel, and it followed on the heels of a series of videos on The Future of Ageing that were released by Wired UK. Is this a sign of a growing interest in the science of longevity, and can we expect more content like this to come? We’ll explore the possibilities in this episode of Lifespan News!

Dr. Morgan Levine just recently announced that she would be leaving her post at Yale, where she served as an Assistant Professor in the Yale School of Medicine and founder of the Laboratory for Aging in Living Systems, to take a position as founding principal investigator of Altos Labs, the cellular reprogramming-focused startup that just exited stealth mode with $3 billion in funding, reportedly from investors including Jeff Bezos.

WIRED actually released two videos featuring Dr. Levine within a small window. In the first video, an episode of their ongoing series Tech Support, she spent 17 minutes answering aging-related questions from Twitter. In the second video, she provided a general overview of concepts that are often discussed within the longevity community, but might be unknown to those outside of it, such as the difference between chronological age and biological age, senescent cells and senolytics, the hallmarks of aging, aging clocks, and Blue Zones. If you want more in-depth explanations of these topics, we’ve linked to some our videos on them in the video description.

The reaction to these Dr. Levine videos was largely positive, which isn’t always the case when proponents of longevity are featured in media that predominantly reaches an audience outside of the core community.

ADVERTISEMENT

Eterna is a clothing company with a focus on longevity.

Reaction was also positive to WIRED UK’s series on longevity, which has been viewed far fewer times than the Morgan Levine videos, but still have had a warm reception.

It seems clear that there are audiences that are interested in and will support this type of content – even if they don’t necessarily know it yet. And it’s a great sign to see an outlet such as Wired getting into this.

Wired was created in the early 1990’s when co-founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe decided to make a consumer magazine version of Electric Word, a technology magazine that they were involved with that was popular among academics and industry insiders. Wired sought to be the Rolling Stone of cutting-edge technology, and they were on the forefront of covering the digital revolution.

Ownership has changed since then and the company has certainly branched out to featuring more celebrities and pop-culture stories in addition to it’s original tech-heavy focus. But the fact that a publication that was built on identifying and capitalizing on emerging trends and industries is now creating content on life extension – and receiving positive feedback – is a great sign.

And that original WIRED co-founder, Jane Metcalfe, is following a similar path. She has started another publication, NEO.LIFE, which seeks to do for the neobiological revolution what WIRED did for the digital revolution. I had the opportunity to speak with Jane on an episode of the Future Grind podcast, and here’s how she explained it to me.

ADVERTISEMENT

An advertisement banner for PartiQular supplements.

So it seems that one of the original founders of WIRED, as well as it’s current leadership – which built their success on the digital revolution – are now turning at least some of their attention to the biological revolution. I don’t blame them, because this IS going to be the next big thing. Expect to see more life extension content in larger, more pop-culture and mainstream outlets. That’s a sign of the success that we as a community are having, and the growing interest in this topic.

If you want more of this content, and perhaps deeper dives than you’re likely to get from some of the outlets that are branching out into these spaces, make sure to subscribe here. I’m Ryan O’Shea and we’ll see you next time on Lifespan News!

To do this, we need your support. Your charitable contribution tranforms into rejuvenation research, news, shows, and more. Will you help?
CategoryLifespan News, News