
A one-man experiment in anti-aging - kolev
http://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2014/03/21/a-one-man-experiment-in-radical-anti-aging/
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Ressud
Could there possibly be two worse pictures to compare if you want to see if
someone has aged (visually) or not?

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jtheory
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..._

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lotsofcows
It says "scienceblog". It says "experiment". And yet I didn't see any science.
Did I miss it?

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XzetaU8
His profile on Longecity forums:
[http://www.longecity.org/forum/user/4099-jamesagreen/](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...](http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/52748-can-we-get-straight-
information-about-telomerase-inducers/page-2#entry582293)

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processing
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?

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XzetaU8
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.

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D_Alex
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!

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kolev
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.

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kolev
Jim's page on longevity (looks like it's from the 90s, but it's not):
[http://www.greenray4ever.com/longevity.html](http://www.greenray4ever.com/longevity.html)

Jim's biography:
[http://www.greenray4ever.com/index-88.html](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.

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DanielBMarkham
How old is he?

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joshvm
He's 65 according to the main page.

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jvdh
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.

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hliyan
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).

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kolev
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.

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gokhan
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?

