This Rare Disease Makes You Age 8x Faster
"The gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal. Because any moment might be our last. Everything's more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again."-Brad Pitt
The legendary quote from the movie Troy hits deep because it is as true today as it was in ancient Greece. Ancient Greeks believed in a pantheon of gods who resided on Mount Olympus. The irony was that even though they were deeply human, their deeds were more akin to the force of nature than to living beings. The Greeks built temples and waged wars to worship them because the gods represented the pinnacle of life. Everything holy, everything glorious, belonged to the gods.
Humans, on the other hand, were bugs in comparison. A speck of dust that doesn't have either the power or glory of the gods. The only thing we had that the gods didn't have was our mortality. The fact that our life will end brings meaning and purpose to our everyday struggles. So, we appreciate life unlike gods who live forever. Just imagine the vanity of such a life.
Every single one of us has a finite amount of time on this earth. Unlike literally everything else, time is the only resource we cannot get back. But the question remains, can we have more of it?
A world where your skin doesn't wrinkle, your bones don't crack under the pressure of time, and your heart keeps working like a Swiss clock. This is a world without aging. Along with the wish to fly or breathe fire, the desire to stop aging is one of humanity's oldest. And now, for the first time, we might be able to fulfill that desire.
"As a species, we accept our inevitable decay, decline, and death. I want to argue that the opposite should be true."-Bryan Johnson
Meet Bryan Johnson, a multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur who has turned himself into a living experiment. Johnson spends millions of dollars every single year on a project he calls "The Blueprint", a rigorous health protocol in which he himself follows a strict diet, exercise, and sleep routine, measuring every single calorie he eats, taking hundreds of supplements per day, and tracking every heartbeat, every hour of sleep, and every change in his blood. He even received plasma transfusions sometimes from his own son in an attempt to rejuvenate his body, and with the help of a team of medical specialists, he achieved the best biomarkers in the world.
Bryan Johnson is certainly the most measured man on earth and arguably the healthiest person in the world. But what does that mean? How can we even quantify someone's overall health?
When people ask you how old you are, they're really asking for your chronological age, the number of years you've been alive since birth. But here's the thing: not all bodies age at the same rate. That's where biological age comes in. Biological age tries to capture how old your cells behave based on their function and health, not just the passage of time. Someone who is 40 chronologically might have the cellular biology of a 30-year-old or of a 60-year-old.
There are three most important factors that we can measure that tell us how old we really are.
First is the epigenetic age. Our DNA doesn't change much throughout life, but the way it's regulated does. One key regulator is DNA methylation. A little chemical tags that attach to DNA and control whether certain genes are turned on or off. As we get older, these patterns drift in a predictable way. Scientists have trained algorithms called epigenetic clocks to read these methylation patterns and output a biological age. All it takes is a blood sample run on a DNA methylation array, and you get back a report saying whether your cells look younger, older, or the same age as you are chronologically.
The second factor is telomere length. At the end of your chromosomes, there are protective caps called telomeres. Every time a cell divides, your telomeres get a little shorter. Eventually, they reach a critical length, and the cell enters senescence, a state where cells stop dividing permanently but remain alive. Scientists can measure telomere length using techniques like quantitative PCR, which compares telomere repeats to a reference gene, or with fluorescent probes in a method called flow fish. The result is an average telomer length usually measured in kilobases. Shorter telomeres generally mean your cells are closer to their replication limit.
The third factor is mitochondrial function. Mitochondria are the powerhouse of our cells. They generate ATP, the molecule that powers almost every biological process. But with age, mitochondria lose efficiency and leak more reactive oxygen species, which damage cells. To test mitochondrial health, researchers often measure oxygen consumption rates, literally how much oxygen cells are burning to make energy. Devices like a seahorse analyzer can track this in real time. Scientists can also measure cellular ATP directly or count mitochondrial DNA copy numbers as a proxy for mitochondrial abundance.
Together, these metrics reveal how much energy your cells can actually produce and whether they look young and vigorous or old and sluggish. Now, let me tell you a story.
PS was born healthy after a normal pregnancy and delivery. The first year of her life was unremarkable. She smiled, crawled, and spoke her first words on time. But by age two, subtle changes emerged. She stopped growing along the normal percentile curves. Her hair began to thin, then fall out. Her skin became fragile and shiny. Her facial features shifted. A narrow beaked nose, a small jaw, and prominent eyes which are all hallmarks of Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria syndrome.
Genetic testing confirmed the diagnosis. A single point mutation in the LMNA gene, producing a defective protein called progerin. Progerin affects all three factors we discussed earlier. Progerin disrupts the nucleus, causing gene regulation to fail. The epigenetic clock of her cells raced forward, making her tissues act decades older than her years. DNA damage and cellular stress caused by progerin lead to rapid telomere attrition, pushing cells into premature senescence. Energy production faltered as progerin impaired mitochondria, leaving her organs, especially the heart and muscles, vulnerable to early failure.
By age eight, her clinical picture included fragile bones, stiff joints, arterial hardening, and severe growth retardation. Children with progeria often live only into their early teens, usually dying of heart attacks or strokes, the same diseases that claim the elderly, but decades earlier.
Her life was brief, but science learned from her. Progerin is not exclusive to progeria. It accumulates in all of us. In all humans. Studying her condition gave researchers insight into the very pathways of aging we all experience.
The ancient Greeks believed the gods envy us for our mortality. Bryan Johnson, on the other hand, believes science can one day rewrite it, and children with progeria remind us of what happens when the clock runs too fast. So today we stand at a crossroad. One path leads to a mastery of aging, a future where biology bends to our will, where our lifespans stretch for centuries. The other path reminds us that mortality, as cruel as it is, may also be the very thing that makes life beautiful.