As someone entirely outside this field, can someone with more inside knowledge give any insight into where this lies on the crank/hoax spectrum? A biorxv paper and a well-written blogpost don't really point either way.
> But Katcher has no research grants or university lab or venture capital funding, no team of grad students mining databases and screening chemicals in the back room.
> One thing Katcher has going for him is the correct theory.
I start to suspect the author’s opinion is stronger than their evidence.
> In the race to effect substantial, system-wide rejuvenation, Harold Katcher is a dark horse. He has the right academic credentials and a solid history of research. In fact, in earlier life he was part of a team that discovered the breast cancer gene, brca1. I asked Harold for a biographical sketch, and have printed it in a box at the end of this posting.
And here's the bio sketch itself:
> So, you might consider me a late bloomer. While I have thousands of citations in the literature, with publications ranging from the discovery of the human ‘breast cancer gene’, to protein structure, bacteriology, biotechnology, bioinformatics, and biochemistry, there was no center or direction to my work as I had given up my personal goal of solving/curing aging when I learned that ‘wear and tear’ was the cause of it. Yet something happened in year 1985 when I was in California working with Michael Waterman and Temple Smith (fathers of bioinformatics) that is inexplicable: I found myself in Intensive Care with a tube inserted into my trachea and the knowledge that I might not live. And then I had a dream: I dreamed that somehow in the far future (and on another world), I was being feted for ‘bringing immortality to mankind’. Clearly, I survived that incident (started with an infected tooth). I lived a wonderful life – becoming a computer programmer (which I loved), leaving that for the University of Maryland’s Asian division, becoming a full professor and then the Academic Director for the Sciences, in Tokyo, Japan. By the time I left Japan in 2004, (my daughter Sasha was a fourth-grader, (yonensei), in the Japanese school system), I was teaching for U of M online – somewhat retired, and looking forwards to writing computer programs for fun and profit. Yet I never ever forgot that dream. It was clearly impossible; I had no lab – and really, there was no way to repair all damaged cells – it’d be like sweeping back the ocean. And then, in 2009, I read an old paper from 2005, a paper written by the Conboys, (Michael and Irina), Tom Rando and others, coming from Irv Weisman’s lab, that completely changed my life; that showed me that everything I believed about aging was wrong – that aging occurred at the organismic level, not at the cellular level and could be reversed. Well, the rest of the story is about persistence and the blessed intervention of Akshay Sanghvi who too saw there was another way and provided the structural, monetary, and emotional support (and some good ideas) that had me start a new career at age 72 in Mumbai, India. I feel twenty years younger than I did three years ago, I guess that’s another hint about aging. Now the ‘mystical’ dream? It wouldn’t be the first time in history that that happened – take that as a datum.
Let's consider the universe where Katcher has discovered the secret to aging. At some point in that universe, Katcher's work is going to be relatively unknown and unsponsored, and at a later point there will be trillions poured into it. The above quote you posted aligns just fine with the earlier part of that timeline so now you're just left to decide, given your priors about major scientific discoveries, how likely it is that a major scientific discovery can come from a "dark horse".
The vast vast majority of research discoveries happen within the system as part of large collaborations.
It's always healthy to have people going against the grain, but even they can find funding if they have ideas they can express coherently and that stand up to scrutiny.
Funding comes from calls from proposals which are within existing, established research fields. Funding outside of a current research field is nearly impossible to find. If your research isn't in an established field, there isn't an NSF/DARPA/etc. call to respond to, and there is no program officer who has any interest in your work.
Similar through the whole research pipeline. New areas of research don't have established venues where you can publish, people to cite your papers, or a community to write academic reference letters for you. People who work in new fields are usually doing so as nights and weekends projects, or are independently wealthy.
And although the vast majority of independent researchers are crackpots, a few are credible and do occasionally make major breakthroughs. Importantly, the majority of breakthroughs outside of established fields are made be people unsupported by NSF, and without good venues to publish (although quite often, those individuals are academics working in their spare time, so half within the system and half outside).
2) The research in the blog post is not fully summarized. You know it's a weak blog post when they post results WITHOUT SAMPLE SIZE. This is a GLARING omission and highly unscientific. The actual paper shows n=593 rat tissues and n=850 human tissues, which is fine but the blog post should report on these details.
3) It's not that new to suggest that younger individuals' blood plasma might have a rejuvenating effect.
4) They look at certain tissue types, which wouldn't result in changes to all tissue types, like skin, hair, brain, etc.
5) This is very early stages, again, we need actual trials in humans, and then those trials probably need to be followed up for years and years, since aging is a long-run phenomenon. This is more like a cohort study where we enroll a huge number into a cohort of aging-treatments and controls who have some other placebo-treatment.
There are callouts in the article that try to calm down that viewpoint at least like: " Katcher thinks that the molecules involved will not be difficult to manufacture, so that when a product is eventually commercialized, it will not require extraction from the blood of live subjects, rodent or human. "
Perhaps for a good reason
I know of one at least one company (Spring Discovery) that is following some of this work up to find some driver molecules that could have the same effect as parabiosis. If interested in the topic I’d look at the work from the labs mentioned in the article as well as Saul Villeda (former grad student of Wyss-Coray, full disclosure I know him socially) at UCSF.
TLDR: This article is a breathless take on active research, clearly the author is excited. There’s reason to keep investigating, but the conclusions in the article are stronger than what the research can say conclusively at the moment. Very early days.