From Jellyfish to Humans: The Science of Turning Back Time

Aging has long been understood as a linear, inevitable process—like a car gradually wearing down over time. But what if that fundamental assumption is wrong? Dr. Ian White opens this paradigm-shifting session by dismantling the conventional view of aging, presenting evidence from nature and cutting-edge science that biological age can be decoupled from chronological age. The session begins with a sobering reality: over 65, you face an 80% chance of developing at least one age-related disease, with these conditions collectively costing $4.8 trillion annually. Yet despite this enormous burden, the field has been stuck in what White calls "gerontology whack-a-mole"—focusing on individual hallmarks of aging like telomeres or mitochondrial dysfunction while missing the fundamental mechanism.

White takes us on a fascinating tour through nature's most extreme examples of aging manipulation. Pacific salmon and certain spiders experience accelerated aging after reproduction, their tissues rapidly deteriorating to free resources for the next generation—suggesting we too have an evolutionary "off switch." Astronauts in space provide a human model of accelerated aging, with immune systems crashing and tissues degrading faster than on Earth. On the opposite end, Jonathan the tortoise has outlived 20 billion humans over his 200-year lifespan, while lobsters and buffalo carp simply don't age at all, remaining biologically identical whether one year or one hundred years old. Most remarkably, Turritopsis dohrnii—the immortal jellyfish—reverses its aging entirely, cycling back from sexual maturity to juvenile form for thousands of years.

The session's most provocative insight comes from what White calls the "40 plus 40 equals zero hypothesis." When a 40-year-old woman's egg meets a 40-year-old man's sperm, they create a zero-year-old baby—proof that our bodies contain mechanisms to completely reverse cellular age. This isn't theoretical: Shinya Yamanaka won the 2012 Nobel Prize for discovering that just four growth factors can reverse an old skin cell back to an embryonic-like state. White connects this to his own research on heterochronic parabiosis experiments at Harvard, where old mice sharing blood supply with young mice experienced restored grip strength, cognitive ability, and even hair color. These "rejuvenating factors"—now understood as exosomes—are found in young tissues, particularly the perinatal birth tissues that Neobiosis specializes in manufacturing and researching.

The implications are transformative: if aging isn't constant but rather a controllable biological process, then regenerative medicine offers a path to treat aging itself as a disease rather than managing its countless symptoms individually. White's work bridges fundamental research in stem cell biology with practical applications through perinatal tissue therapies, positioning regenerative medicine not just as a treatment modality but as the key to extending healthspan and potentially reversing the biological clock. The session closes by examining the regulatory challenges and possibilities for bringing age-reversal therapies from jellyfish biology and Nobel Prize-winning research into clinical reality.