What if aging isn’t inevitable, but a process we can slow—or even reverse? In this episode, Dr. Bill Andrews, geneticist and founder of Sierra Sciences, unpacks the science of telomeres, the protective caps on our chromosomes that shorten as cells divide. He explains how telomerase, an enzyme he helped discover, can lengthen telomeres and restore youthful cellular function, challenging long-held assumptions about aging and cancer. Dr. Andrews shares his journey from early scientific breakthroughs to today’s cutting-edge gene therapy and nutraceutical research, highlighting his belief that cures for aging could be within reach with sufficient funding. From practical lifestyle tips to his personal ultra-marathon routine, this conversation blends groundbreaking science with everyday strategies for living longer, healthier lives.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Can We Live Forever? Extending Lifespan Through Telomere Research With Dr. Bill Andrews
Unlocking Longevity: Introducing Dr. Bill Andrews
I’m excited about this conversation because we’re joined by one of the true pioneers of longevity science, Dr. Bill Andrews. He’s often called the father of telomere research. He’s a world-renowned geneticist and the Founder of a company called Sierra Sciences, which is a biotech focused on curing aging through telomere biology.
For more than 30 years, he has been on the cutting-edge of discovery, including leading the team at Geron Corporation that first identified the human telomerase gene. His work has been featured in countless publications, documentaries, and conferences around the globe. His mission is nothing short of bold, which is to extend human health span and make aging a disease that we can treat.
In this conversation, we’re going to explore the science of telomeres, what they mean for how we age, and the potential therapies that could one day allow us to live not just longer, but healthier and more vibrant lives as well. We’ll also know about Dr. Andrew’s personal perspective on where the science is heading and what we can each do to protect our telomeres and support longevity. Get ready. This is a fascinating dive into the frontier of anti-aging research with Dr. Bill Andrews.
Bill, thank you so much for being here as a guest. I’ve been looking forward to this. I’m excited to have you on the show and have our audience know about the amazing work that you’re doing, all of the things that you’ve discovered, what’s here, what’s now, and what’s coming in the future of the aging space and longevity space. You’re at the forefront, so I’m excited for this conversation. Thanks for joining us.
You’re welcome. Thank you.
Decoding Telomeres: The Key To Cellular Aging
You’ve been called the father of telomere research. You’re a world-renowned geneticist. You’ve discovered all kinds of things from human growth hormone to the telomerase enzyme. You’re doing some cutting-edge things with gene editing and things like that. I know we could go in a lot of different directions. I want to hear your story and how you got into where you are, but first of all, maybe you could explain to our readers in simple terms what telomeres are and why they are so critical to the aging process.
Let me first say I’m not the father of telomere research. There are several people who preceded me. My mentors were Dr. Calvin Harley and Dr. Michael West. I’m somebody who has stuck with it longer than others have and focused more on the anti-aging benefits of lengthening telomeres as opposed to the anti-cancer benefits of inhibiting the enzyme in cancer cells. Even though cancer is a big motivation of mine and I was the National Vendor of the Year for my cancer research, I think cancer is an aging disease. Focusing on curing aging is a way of also focusing on curing cancer.
Telomeres are one of the most important things for not just measuring our age, but also controlling how we age. There are a lot of theories about why we age, but they all come back to the telomere. Our research here in lengthening and shortening telomeres has shown that telomeres have an effect on all of them. Dr. Ronald DePinho, who used to be the Head of MD Anderson, has said that telomeres are the kingpin of age.
What are telomeres? Telomeres are like ride tickets at an amusement park that are inside our cells. They’re found at the tips of our chromosomes. This whole idea of ride tickets at an amusement park was something that me and others had been theorizing on since the 1970s as the only mechanism that human cells or any kind of animal cell could have that could have anything to do with aging. Since cells don’t have brains and things like that, and they don’t know how old they are, what is the thing that causes them to age?
We always had this idea that whenever a cell divides, it keeps track. Dr. Leonard Hayflick, in the 1960s, showed that human cells can only divide a certain number of times. If you take cells from a newborn baby, they can divide 50 times. If you take cells from a 50-year-old, they can divide 25 times. If they take cells from a 100-year-old, they can only divide 5 times before they stop dividing an interface called senescence. This seemed like the absolute best connection to aging. What makes it so that a cell from a 100-year-old only divides 5 times, whereas a cell from a newborn baby can divide 50 times? It was like a ride ticket. We couldn’t imagine any other kind of mechanism inside a cell that could keep track like that.
In 1993, I heard Dr. Calvin Harley speak at a conference in Lake Tahoe. He talked about telomeres getting shorter every time a cell divides. I’m going, “I got here those ride tickets.” I was right at the bottom of the podium before he got off to finish his talk and said, “Has anybody figured out how to add ride tickets back?” I didn’t use that term at the time, but I said how to re-lengthen telomeres.
He said, “No. We’ve been working on it for years. We have teams all over the world. We haven’t been able to figure it out yet.” I said, “Let me come and work with you. I’ll have it figured out in three months.” I’d already had an illustrious career in biotech, developing a lot of the big biotech breakthroughs. It was the shortest job interview ever. He jumped at the chance to get me on board.
It was him and Mike West, who was the founder of the company that Calvin was working at. That was Geron Corporation. I went to work with Calvin and Mike West at Geron Corporation. They put three-quarters of the company working for me. In 3 months and 17 days, we discovered the enzyme human telomerase. It had already been discovered previously by Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider in a pond scum organism called Tetrahymena. They hadn’t connected the dots through its association with aging, cancer, or anything.
I always say that the father of telomere biology as we know it and its role in aging falls on Dr. Calvin Harley. Mike West was probably second on board right after Calvin Harley. We discovered the enzyme, telomerase. We put it into human cells, like skin cells, grown in a Petri dish. We saw that the cells’ aging got reversed by every method of measurement imaginable in a Petri dish.
When I said, human cells can only divide a certain number of times, that didn’t happen anymore. What was important was that the cells still had growth control, which means that they only divided when they were supposed to divide. If you induce them to divide, they could divide a greater number of times. They didn’t reach the Hayflick limit. They only divided when you induced them, which means they weren’t cancer. A lot of people right away thought we’re creating cancer.
Skipping forward, let me say that we’ve since shown many times over that we’re decreasing the risk of cancer, and so have 99% of all publications coming out on the subject. There were rumors going around, mostly started by Elizabeth Blackburn, who was one of the people who found that pond scum organism telomerase. They were saying that telomerase causes cancer. There’s not a single bit of data. Every effort attempted to try to show that telomerase causes cancer showed the exact opposite. It decreases the risk of cancer. It’s not a discussion anymore, although I keep hearing every once in a while people asking, “Isn’t it true that telomeres cause cancer?”
The other thing we did, and this is probably one of the things that led people to start believing this false rumor, is that when a cell becomes a cancer and the telomeres get short in the cancer cells because they’re dividing fast, the mutation rates skyrocket and cause those cells to start getting all kinds of different changes, including turning on the telomers gene, which is already found in all cells of the body.
Telomeres didn’t cause cancer, but the cancer did cause telomeres. The cancers cured their aging by inducing telomeres. We did come up with inhibitors for that. I am an inventor of several different inhibitors that are in clinical studies that are approved by the FDA for treating cancer. I probably got way off-subject there.
The Anti-Aging Truth: Debunking Cancer Myths
I love the ride ticket example. That makes it simple for all of us to understand as well. It’s fascinating that baby cells can replicate 50 times, and then 25 when we’re 50, and then only 5 times when we’re 100. That’s super helpful to understand. This is the kingpin of aging. It’s interesting what you said that the cancer cells almost figured this out for themselves. They can turn on telomerase, and then that allows them to replicate. That’s very fascinating. You have proven and debunked the myth that the telomerase enzyme causes cancer. It doesn’t. It is the kingpin of aging. If we can add ride tickets as we go, then those cells can continue to replicate indefinitely. That is the theory. Everything else continues to function the way it would.
That’s the main focus of my company, Sierra Sciences. It is to find ways to induce the production of telomerase in all of our cells. When I was still at Geron Corporation, one thing that we realized was that every time a cell divided, the telomeres got shorter. Our children are born with shorter telomeres than we have because there’s cell division in our primordial germ cells that produce sperm in the eggs.
When a newborn baby is born or conceived, telomeres would be the length of humans, but they’re not. Newborn babies are born with very long telomeres. We knew that somehow our reproductive cells had to have a way of either re-lengthening telomeres or never letting them get short to begin with. It turned out that they never let them get short to begin with. Our primordial germ cells always have long telomeres. That’s how we discovered this enzyme, human telomerase. The fact that our germline cells have telomerase means that all of our cells have telomerase. The genes turned off.
Believe it or not, it’s evolutionary advantageous to the success of our species and every animal species to eliminate a longer-lived after you raise your young. Allowing more opportunities for the offspring to interbreed increases diversity more than if you allow the parents to re-breed. The more diversity exists in a species, the more likely there are going to be members of the species that can survive rapidly changing environments.
That’s throughout evolution. That’s why 99% of all life forms on the planet age because it’s important. It is not a because evolution is not a force, but it’s a result. As a result, the species that eliminated the longer-lived had greater diversity and a better chance of surviving. Therefore, all the ones that didn’t do that are gone. They’re extinct. The ones that did do that still remain.
In the last few thousand years, we have learned how to control our own evolution. I don’t think that we need to depend on it. I listened to a presentation called Super Human. The speaker was Elizabeth Parrish. She explained how in the 1600s, the number 1 cause of aging or 50% of all deaths was from infectious diseases. Nowadays, only 3% of all deaths are from infectious diseases, and it’s a result of human-controlled evolution.
We have figured out how to overcome a lot of infectious diseases. We’re doing better. We don’t need to age anymore. We don’t need to eliminate the longer-lived anymore. The younger people might find it harder to get a job if the older generation or the longer-lived generation never retires, but we’ll figure something out. There are always solutions.
Humans are very adaptable. The best example of that is the World Wide Web. I remember when it first got introduced, we all thought, “We can’t possibly live with this.” Now, we can’t live without it. Humans are adaptable. We’ll figure out something. Aging is a terrible thing. Most people don’t know it because most of the downsides of aging are confined to assisted living homes, nursing homes, and hospices. Most people don’t see what true aging is like. Getting back on the subject, I was saying that we have this aging process. We can get rid of it. It was necessary for the survival of our species up until a few thousand years ago. Now, it’s not.
From Longer-Lived To Longevity Pioneer: A Personal Journey
Fascinating, for sure. I love how you’re using the term longer-lived instead of older. I like that.
Life is about living.
Longer-lived. That’s perfect. I want to come back to this, but first, I am always curious where people’s passions are born and where they come from. You shared a little bit about this when we were talking earlier. Could you share with our audience how you got involved in this? You said you’ve stuck with this longer than everybody else. Where’d that passion come from? How was it ignited?
For some reason, after I was born, I was fascinated by science and medicine. When I was ten years old, teachers from my school sent me home with a note pinned to my shirt, letting my parents know that I was interested in science and medicine, and that they should nurture that. I was on the front lawn one day, looking through an eight-inch reflector telescope, which no normal ten-year-old would ever have. It was a big telescope. I was looking at the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and things like that.
My father came and said, “Bill, you’re so interested in aging. When you grow up, you should become a doctor and find a cure for aging. I don’t know why nobody has done that.” That stuck with me. In fact, there is a documentary called The Immortalists, which I’m the star of, along with Aubrey De Grey. My father’s in it. We talk about that day.
Ever since then, my father and I have been partners in this effort to cure aging. I mentioned before that I heard Kelvin Harley talk about telomeres. My father went to that conference with me. He was a television producer. He was going to make a documentary on aging research. He got to meet all the scientists in the world I introduced him to. The documentary never got made. Unfortunately, my father passed away in 2015 from Alzheimer’s disease, so he has not had the opportunity to benefit from the research that I’m doing. Still, 150,000 people are dying of aging every day. There are still a lot of good reasons to continue this research. That’s how I got started.
In high school and college, I would get into anti-aging clubs to brainstorm on what’s going on. That’s where we came out with these ride tickets at an amusement park situation. I started choosing my courses in college and graduate school based on what I need to study aging. I decided that everybody I talked to and everybody I listened to about theories on aging didn’t make sense. All the twos and twos didn’t add up. It couldn’t explain everything. I kept coming back to this ride ticket and amusement park idea.
I started taking every class imaginable, like statistical theory, logic, probability, statistics itself, and learning common sense to be able to piece it all together. I took experimental design and data analysis. I took courses in all these things. I took artificial intelligence. People think artificial intelligence is a new field. I was taking courses in artificial intelligence at UC San Diego in the mid-1970s. It’s something where we were using computers to think like humans. All that stuff added up to being something that became very important towards piecing it all together and trying to make sense out of it all.
If you were to listen to separate YouTube videos that are online of me talking, some on why we age, some on how we age, and some on how not to, you’ll find that I’ve got it all put together. I’ve got it pretty figured out. I don’t even call it theories anymore. We don’t need a theory to explain why we age. It all makes perfect sense. How could we not age, given everything we know about biology and evolution?
It’s the same with how we age. I know exactly how we age. Both knowing why and how means I know how to stop the aging process, but I can’t snap my fingers and make it happen. It requires a lot of research. I don’t even like calling it research. I call it assembly. We have to assemble the tools to cure aging. That does require a little bit of random drug screening as well as medicinal chemistry to design drugs for screening.
We know the targets. We know what we have to manipulate inside of ourselves to stop the aging process. That research costs us $2 million per month. That’s the obstacle. If we could have that $2 million every month, we’d have aging cured in 3 years at the max, and maybe as soon as 1 year, given extrapolating from all the stuff we’ve already done to control the aging process.
Nobody has achieved the things that we have at Sierra Sciences here. We’ve sent our tools off to other labs. We don’t work with animals here. I’m very opposed to doing any animal work that harms the animals, but we have sent our tools off to other labs that have reversed aging in mice in every way imaginable. Mice don’t age like humans. They have a very different aging process.
Dr. Ron DePinho, who used to be the Head of MD Anderson, engineered mice. He created a whole new type of mouse that ages like a human. He was able to turn the telomerase off in the mice, let the telomeres get short, turn telomerase back on, re-lengthen the telomeres, and saw that they got younger in every way imaginable.
We had already done that with human cells in the Petri dish. Dr. Walter Funk, who used to work with me at Geron Corporation, then went ahead and grew human skin on the back of a mouse and treated it with telomerase to lengthen telomeres. He also found human skin getting younger in every way imaginable. We’re not just talking about a few little tests. We’re talking about everything. That’s why I say all the twos and twos have to head up, not just a few of them. They all do in these studies.
The problem with the way that Dr. Ron DePinho and Dr. Walter Funk did that study is that they used gene therapy, which was at a primitive stage back then, as the method of delivery. The telomerase itself and lengthening telomerase weren’t a problem. The method of delivering the gene for telomerase to the cells did cause some problems. That’s why we can’t use that on humans. We can’t cure aging in 90% of the people and have 10% of them die because the delivery killed them.
What we are doing here at Sierra Sciences is that we are trying to figure out safe ways to turn the telomerase gene on and lengthen air telomeres to reverse aging in every way imaginable. One of the ways we’re doing that in collaboration with Elizabeth Parrish and her company, BioViva, is to come up with a safe and efficacious gene therapy protocol.
The Impossible Achieved: Gene Therapy For Reversing Aging
This is amazing and mind-blowing for people, too, I’m sure. Let me back up a couple of steps and say I love how your passion came about. It almost seems like your dad gave you this calling, in a way, that has ignited your passion for all these years. You’ve got to do that alongside him.
I love that you don’t think like the average person thinks. You’re not afraid to go after the impossible. You say, “We can do that.” We can get into this as well. I want to break down some of the things we talked about. You’re a Guinness Book of World Records holder for multiple different, obscure things like barefoot water skiing speed records, and the most 100-mile races run in 1 year. You have a way of thinking about things that are outside of the box. You go after the impossible and realize that it’s not impossible. Thank you for that and for continuing this amazing work that you’re doing. It’s fun.
I’ve always had the mindset that when somebody says something’s impossible, I go after it, including setting a world speed record for barefoot water skiing.
You have a size fifteen feet. That’s cheating. You almost have small water skis for feet anyway.
I have an identical twin brother who’s got the same size fifteen feet, and he could never do it.
It’s still hard. It’s still difficult.
I became a natural. I’ve done things like flown the Goodyear Blimp. I hang-glided. I’ve flown gliders. I would say, “I got to do everything.” I got into ultra-marathon running, and I, right away, broke the world record for the most 50-mile races run in a year. The next year, I ran more 100-mile races than anybody had ever done in a year.
I’m training to break the record for running 100 miles for a 70-plus-year-old. I feel like it’s easy. I want to go after that record. When I hear about how fast this time is for running 100 miles for somebody over 70, I’m like, “That’s easy.” There’s a race I’ve picked two years in a row. When I tried to do it, they had a blizzard. It’s a race in Venice, Illinois, that’s flat. I figured if I was going to go for the record, I had to break it as much as I could. I don’t want to do a race that has mountains in it. I want to do flat racing. It’s called the Tunnel Hill 100-Mile Race in Venice, Illinois.
We’ll have to follow you on that one. That sounds exciting. You’ve figured out how to turn this gene on. That gets turned off over time because we need to make room for the younger people in a species or the younger part of the population in a species. That gene gets turned off, and you’ve figured out a way to turn it on. We can reverse aging and lengthen our telomeres indefinitely. You’ve already proven that. The delivery mechanism is what we need next. That’s what you’re working on with the gene editing with BioViva.
It’s gene therapy. Some options are gene editing, but we’re not focused on the gene editing as much as the gene delivery.
Funding The Future: The Cost Of Curing Aging
That’s coming next. How close are we to figuring that out? What kinds of things need to happen for that? It’s $2 million a month. What’s your prediction?
For the gene therapy, we could have that available within a few months if we had the appropriate amount of funding. It’s very difficult to find the amount of funding that’s needed. I want to say it’s $50 million, something like that, to get that work completed. The problem with gene therapy, even though it’d be the fastest way to cure human aging, is that it’s expensive.
I do have a clinical trial that’s on ClinicalTrials.gov for using gene therapy to treat aging. Liz Parrish and I are coming up with better gene therapy vectors than what’s in this clinical study. Still, it costs us $1 million to treat 1 person once with this gene therapy. If somebody wants to sign up for it, that’s available. We’ve talked to a lot of celebrities and things like that. Everybody wants somebody else to go first.
We have stuff that Liz Parrish and I are doing that is going to make it a lot less expensive, safer, and efficacious. Meaning, it is going to work even better. It’s still going to cost probably $100,000 for 1 treatment at the minimum. Her company and my company are making no profits, which is fine with both of us. We’re both not in it for the money, but somehow, we have to support ourselves. That could happen fast. Remember, gene therapy delivers a new gene to your cell that’s turned on, whereas we can also turn on the gene that’s already inside our cells. That’s what my main goal is. That might cost us $0.10 per patient to treat, but it’s going to cost us $2 million a month to do the research and get that.
Slowing The Clock: Introducing Telo-Vital
That’s on the horizon. It’s a matter of the assembly of those tools, but it’s well within reach and coming. Your prediction then would be in the near future. It’s not 50 years from now or 20 years from now. Probably in the next 5 to 10 years, there could be a pill that anybody could take that would deliver that gene therapy to us and allow that telomerase to reverse aging.
Let me make an important point here. We’ve been talking about the reversal of aging. What’s key is that slowing down the aging process is also critically important. We have that. Telomere lengthening and shortening is like a tug of war. We have people pulling on the tug of war to shorten your telomeres. In fact, in all of our cells except the reproductive cells, that’s all we have. We can reduce the number of people pulling to shorten our telomeres by anti-inflammatories, antioxidants, and stuff like that. There’s still this basal level called the in-replication problem that keeps our telomeres shortening at a certain rate that we can’t get below. That limits our lifespan and our health span to 125 years.
We can add people to the other side of the tug of war that would slow down the shortening. They’re not winning the tug of war. People are saying, “That’s not so good.” Decreasing their rate of aging is an important thing that nobody’s ever done before. There are a lot of pretenders that say they can do that, but they can’t. We have things that can slow down the aging process.
I don’t do any marketing. That’s why I waited so long to talk about this. A company called Touchstone Essentials has launched a product called Telo-Vital, which contains nutraceuticals that we discovered. Through our $2 million a month research, we tested not only chemicals, but also nutraceuticals, like plant extract.
Out of testing close to 20,000 different plant extracts, we found that about 40 of these different plant extracts will cause the gene that’s inside your cells to turn on. It doesn’t turn it on enough to win the tug of war, but it turns it on enough to slow down the tug of war. It turns it on more than any other product there is.
Every product that exists on the market that claims to induce telomerase doesn’t have any data showing that. I always say to people, “Go ask them for that data if you think their product is going to work. Ask them to show data that it induces the expression of telomerase.” Telo-Vital does. I’ve done some presentations at medical conferences and have shown the data and stuff. There are YouTube videos available for looking at that. This product is the number one thing that people should be taking to slow down their aging process.
I said the theoretical maximum is 125 years. We’re going to see people exceed that if they start taking Telo-Vital. I don’t know how much they’re going to exceed that. I also got to say aging isn’t the only thing that kills us. There are going to be people dying from other things, too. Not everybody’s going to live beyond 125 years. I’m taking it every day, and I’m looking forward to seeing how many people, including me, become longer-lived than 125 years and still be healthy.
That’s a nutraceutical. Anybody can get that and begin taking it. That slows down the tug of war, or at least it pulls it back. For example, instead of aging 12 months every year, maybe you age 6 months every year. That’s what you’re saying. It slows that process down.
We don’t know yet how slow it goes. We’re having people who are taking Telo-Vital keep track of things and stuff like that.
You’re running 100 miles at age 70-plus, so you must be doing something.
I’ve been taking ways of lengthening and inducing telomerase expression for fifteen years. They’ve gotten more and more potent. There have been other products that existed before Telo-Vital. Unfortunately, the companies discontinued them because the profit margin wasn’t high enough. It costs a lot to produce the product. People won’t pay $200 a month for something like that, so they would have to keep the price down to get people to buy it. They weren’t making enough profit, so they discontinued the product.
One day, I got a call from Eddie Stone, who’s the President and CEO of Touchstone Essentials. He says, “I don’t care about profit margin. I want to have something out there that’s going to benefit people.” That recreated the whole business of getting a nutraceutical on the market. I like that. I’m not in it for the money, and it sounds like Eddie Stone isn’t either.
I’m not a marketer, but I have to say I’ve done due diligence. I have my own podcast. It’s called Up One. I do critical meta-analysis on any subject. If somebody’s claiming that some product or something like that will provide some benefit to you, I do a critical meta-analysis and verify whether that’s true or not. I’ve done this critical meta-analysis or due diligence on a lot of Touchstone’s products. They’re all great products. I take them all.
They have things I’ve never heard of in any other company. There’s something called Gluco-Control, which converts sugar into fiber. Fiber is good for you. Sugar is bad for you. You can eat the sugar, take Gluco-Control, and it converts sugar into fiber. They have zeolites, which get rid of toxins and heavy metals, which is great.
I don’t know why more companies don’t sell these kinds of products, but I assume it’s because the profit margin is not high. They’re all about profits, whereas Touchstone is all about making people happier and healthier. Fulvic acid is the active ingredient and Shilajit. It’s a great product, but it has a lot of side effects. They’ve gone up and purified fulvic acid from Shilajit.
It also tastes nasty, too. It doesn’t taste so good.
I take fulvic acid every day. I don’t observe any taste problems.
I mean Shilajit. Those are amazing things to check out. You take all of those yourself personally?
Yes, and I pay for them. I don’t get paid by Touchstone.
That’s great. We’ll have to check out your podcast, too, which is called Up One. Thank you for sharing that. Telo-Vital is the most potent telomerase-inducing product out there.
You can take it orally. There are skincare products out there that have pharmaceuticals, but they’re not approved for oral use. They can only affect your skin.
Predictions & Progress: The Horizon Of Longevity Science
I’m curious about your predictions then. You did it in 3 months and 17 days, and there were some other factors in there. You’re pretty close. Right on that one, you said it would take you three years to deliver this gene therapy, which you could certainly pull off with the right funding. You have a very unique perspective. I’m curious. As you look out 4 to 10 years from now, what do you see in the field of longevity, aging, and wellness?
I’ve always been historically recognized for being good at estimating timeframes, costs, and stuff like that for getting things done. I invented a lot of big biotech breakthroughs, including human growth hormone, tissue plasminogen activator, beta-seron, and on and on. I was always good at predicting exactly how much time it would take and how much it would cost.
That’s always when I had funding. I was working with companies that had the funding to let me do whatever I needed to do. All of a sudden, now that I’ve started my own company, I learned that I’m very impressed with those people who are running those previous companies for being able to keep the funding coming in, because that’s the obstacle.
When I was at Geron, I said I would have it done in three months. I blamed the extra seventeen days on Geron Corporation for interfering with my work because they constantly wanted me to do other things to try to bring in more funding and stuff. If we had all the funding that we need, we would have a cure for aging through gene therapy within 6 months to 1 year, and something that will be a pill that you can take within 1 to 3 years. We’re sitting on our hands, waiting for the funding to come in to do all the work. We’ve got funding coming in, but we’re restricted by how much we can get done with the funding we have at the moment.
That makes sense.
The big problem is that when we do talk to traditional investors, they want us to do something else to bring a quicker return on investment for them. Now that I’m in my 70s, I’ve learned I don’t have time for this. I don’t want to go out and create products so somebody can make a lot of money. I want to get products that are going to cure everybody’s aging, including my own. Three years max if we had the funding, but to predict how long it will take us to get the funding, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get it now.
Let’s hope so. I love that. I was going to ask you what you would like your legacy to be. It sounds like you answered that. You would be someone who cures aging.
I don’t care about legacy. Historically, I’ve always been the person who did not want to be an author in publications. There’s no point in publishing. I’ve always wanted to move on to the next project instead. Publishing takes lots of time. I am getting myself in the news, but it’s only because of efforts to try to raise funding to do the research. If I had all the funding, believe me, I would be wholly absent from the news. After I cure aging, I’d be happy if nobody knew it was me. That’s why I promote so many other people in the field. Let it be them, not me. I do the science. I don’t do the marketing. Let them do all the promotional stuff.
It’s very evident and clear that this is a calling for you. You’re offering this gift to humanity through your passion, your research, your dedication, and your efforts. Thank you for the amazing work that you’re doing. I can’t wait to see what’s on the horizon here as you continue to make these breakthroughs and discover the pieces that you need to put this assembly together and provide a pill at $0.10. I love that your goal is to make it so that it’s accessible to every single person, not only people who can afford to pay $1 million per person.
Investors don’t like it when I say I want to drop it from an airplane. Getting back to Touchstone Essentials, we are getting a royalty from the product, and every penny of that royalty goes towards the research. That’s one of the reasons why I find it a benefit to license some of our discoveries to other companies to market. We have a whole bunch of things that are available for licensing and stuff, as long as companies are willing to provide us a royalty to fund our research. It’s going after traditional investors that want us to do something else instead.
You can stay focused on your mission. That’s great. I’m excited about that as well. I need to check out Telo-Vital and Gluco-Control. That sounds interesting. Zeolites for ridding ourselves of toxins and fulvic acid are all practical things that any of us can start taking. Thank you for that as well.
The other product I take from theirs, which I love, is green juice. I take a scoop of their green juice. It tastes good, and it has a lot of health benefits. I take it every day.
Great. Is that like AG1?
Yeah. Nattokinase is another product. I forget what they call it, but the active ingredient in the product is called nattokinase. It’s not a kinase, which is an enzyme that phosphorylates proteins and things. It’s a protease that benefits heart issues and things like that. It improves your heart condition. They have those kinds of products.
I’m going to check those things out. You’re running probably 6 or 7 days a week and a lot of miles.
I’m running seven days a week. I’m trying to do as long a streak as possible. I haven’t missed a day of running in over five years. My minimum is two miles a day, but on weekends, I’m typically doing 25 or 30-mile runs. I’m up to over five years. September 26th, 2025, would be my 2000th consecutive day of running 2 miles or more.
Is there a record for that?
I wouldn’t break the world record for that unless I cured aging. I’m in something like the 3300th place ever for a running streak. There are people who have run every day for over 50 years. The world record is about to be broken. I forgot the guy’s name. At the same time when I get to 2,000, he’s going to be 55 years or so.
You have 45 more years to go. With a little gene therapy, that shouldn’t be a problem.
The problem is I’m going to have to prevent them from getting it so that I can get them to stop running, and I can catch up.
That’s amazing. Congratulations on that. Your rest day is 2 or 3 miles?
Yeah. My rest day is two miles running slowly. There’s this whole philosophy that people should run every other day. Doing my critical meta-analysis, I have never been able to find any support that says that 48 hours is enough to relax, but 24 is. If I run 1 hour a day, that gives me 23 hours of rest. That feels enough for me. The thing that people can find is that if they start running every day, and not just running, but also kayaking or anything, they can start doing it. It’s easy.
This is going to start a whole new subject, but I should talk a little bit about how people can stop what’s called accelerated telomere shortening. I said we’re limited to 125 years, but that’s only if you have perfect genetics and lead the perfect lifestyle. Every one of us does things that accelerate telomere shortening by oxidative stress and inflammation, mostly. You want to do things that decrease oxidative stress and inflammation. Telo-Vital includes ingredients that provide anti-inflammatories and antioxidants in addition to inducing telomerase.
Don’t smoke. Don’t be obese. Both those things cause tremendous amounts of oxidative stress and inflammation that shorten your lifespan. Take your antioxidants. Take your anti-inflammatories. I recommend a test called the ALCAT Test. People can Google it to find out where they can get it. It’s a test that tests foods, supplements, and things like that that cause inflammation. Since everybody’s different, when you find that something does cause you inflammation, quit taking it.
One of my guests has talked about the ALCAT Test before.
I get it every year.
It is updated each year.
It changes. If you find that a certain food is inflammatory to you and you stop taking it, a year later, it won’t be inflammatory to you. You find out that something you have been eating all year is inflammatory. It’s important to take it every year.
You were saying yoga, meditation, and mindfulness.
Exercise. A lot of people say exercise causes inflammation and oxidation. If you do it consistently, keep it fun, and quit when it stops being fun, you’d be surprised that you can get to a point where you can be exercising all the time and never induce inflammation or oxidation. I have physically gotten a phlebotomist to go with me to races. We’ll measure many runners before, during, and after. We take blood draws, measure their inflammatory markers, and check for oxidative stress and things like that.
We find that there’s a big correlation to the front-runners who only run occasionally, like once every two weeks, and then enter marathons and stuff like that. They finish doing well, but they’re on their hands and knees, throwing up. We find they have terrible inflammation. They’re stiff for a week. Inflammation fills their whole body, and they’re stiff as a board for a week or two after. That’s bad.
Those runners, exercisers, kayakers, and whatever who do this every day and keep it fun, they can go out and run marathons and stuff like that, and then the next day, run another marathon. They hadn’t even done a marathon the day before. People don’t realize that. I’ve learned that firsthand all my life. I’ve run 100-mile races and then, the next day, run another. I don’t understand why most people aren’t aware of that.
Lifestyle For Longevity: Practical Tips To Protect Telomeres
You stay at a pace that is slow enough that you’re still enjoying it.
I’m not out to win. I end up winning my age group all the time, not because I’m trying to, but because most of the people that are my age push too hard and drop out before the race finishes. They went too hard. I ended up finishing slowly, but I was still the first person in my age group. I started winning my age group all the time when I got into my 50s. I’ve been doing it ever since.
Keep it fun. We can decrease that telomerase shortening by avoiding antioxidants, figuring out what’s causing inflammation, what we’re allergic to, or what we’re sensitive to in terms of foods, staying healthy and fit, exercising daily, or doing something that you enjoy that’s exercise-oriented.
Especially endurance. That gets your heart rate up.
As we’re wrapping up here, I’m sure our readers might be curious. What is the world record for barefoot water skiing? You told me, but I would love for our readers to know about that story.
I went 74.93 miles per hour through the quarter-mile track behind a powerful-looking boat that would scare most people. I ended up hearing that the world record was only 69 miles per hour. I’d been over 100 on a ski by that time. Lots of people had been over 100 miles per hour on a ski. I thought, “I could break that record.”
When I tried to break my own world record, my rope broke. I was going 80 miles per hour. The boat clocked at eight miles per hour, and my rope broke before I crossed the finish line. I have these pictures of the fall. I’m surprised I survived it. I have them hanging in my other room as frames and a camera of the fall. I never tried after that again.
What happened was that I also had very bad damage to the bottoms of my feet when I tried that run because the water was causing a lot of pain and injuries to my feet. After the American Water Ski Association saw the bottoms of my feet, they changed the rules. They forbid people to be barefoot at those speeds anymore.
After that, they had to wear wetsuit booties or some other kind of shoe, and they broke the record. Almost overnight, it was over 100 miles per hour because that made it a lot easier, having a flat surface on the bottom of your feet. It was more like a water ski than a shape at the bottom. I might still be the world record holder for doing it barefoot.
Connecting With Dr. Andrews: A Resource For Humanity
That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing all of your amazing work with us and for going after the impossible in every area of your life. I do believe that you’re doing something that’s going to impact all of humanity here soon, so keep going. Where can people connect with you? Your podcast is called Up One?
Yeah. I’d love to have you give out my email address. I love answering questions like that. Whenever I give a presentation, Q&A is always my favorite part because I know all the answers. Whereas when I hear other people speak in my field, I feel like they don’t understand aging. It’s so simple as far as I’m concerned. I love answering questions, so feel free to give out my email address on this thing. It is BAndrews@SierraSci.com.
That’s BAndrews@SierraSci.com. Hopefully, our readers will reach out to you with some questions and continue to pick your brain. This has been fascinating. We’ll have to do this again sometime. Maybe a year from now, we can see how much further along we are.
I would love to do that. There are some great things happening.
That sounds good. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. I’m excited for our readers to continue to hear from you and learn from you. Thanks for the amazing work you’re doing.
Thank you.
Thanks.
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I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. I know we went a little bit longer than we normally do, but that was such an amazing and fascinating topic to dive into. I love how Dr. Andrews has always gone after the impossible all of his life. He’s working on this amazing challenge, and it sounds like he’s the person to do it. He has figured out how to solve this problem, the kingpin of aging, and he is able to do it. All it needs is a little bit of funding. Pretty soon, we’re going to be there.
I love that he’s making it in such a way that he wants it to be accessible for every person in the world. This is not about profits. It’s about solving this problem for humanity. It’s also encouraging and inspiring to meet someone who’s over the age of 70 who runs every single day, 2,000 days in a row, 5 years straight. He is about to do his next 100-mile race here pretty soon as a 70-plus-year-old. Let’s cheer him on. You can find him at Sierra Sciences. He also recommended sending him an email. He would love to interact with you that way. That’s BAndrews@SierraSci.com.
Some of the things that we mentioned that I’m going to check out myself are the Telo-Vital nutraceuticals and the other Touchstone Essentials supplements that he mentioned. Gluco-Control sounds fascinating. You can eat sugar and then have it turned into fiber. That sounds pretty good to me. He talked about fulvic acid, green juice, and zeolites. There are a lot of fascinating things that we can do to slow down the aging process and then, eventually, reverse it with the work that he is doing. Thanks so much for tuning in. I hope that you were as fascinated as I was. I look forward to seeing you next time.
