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Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah and today we're talking about the

science of life extension. Are we finally just around the corner from a treatment for getting old?

In this episode, we talk about where we are in the field of geroscience, which is the study of

aging itself and aging as a major risk factor for diseases.

Sometimes the buzz makes it seem like this is about the search for immortality, but it's really

about living a longer life of being healthy, our health span. We talk about all the anti-aging

discoveries that look like they might translate into real treatment, how these therapies will be delivered to us,

and what happens to society if they do work? The first voice you'll hear is Dr. Thomas Rando from

Stanford, who directs the Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging, then A16Z general partner Vijay

joined by Kristen Fort Me, CEO of BioAage. So let's start off with a simple question. Where are we now?

There's a big discrepancy between the notion of life extension and the notion of health span extension.

And that's a big distinction in the field, right? Because life extension sounds like this issue of

moving toward immortality.

And in fact, really the field in terms of the biomedical field really focuses on taking what we learn from lifespan extension in model organisms, in worms and flies, and applying that to humans, to mammals, to make them healthier, not to make them live forever. And so it's a

dichotomy between the goal being extending life versus the goal being extending health, which

might secondarily lead people as a population to live longer. So that's an important distinction

because so much experimentation goes into lifespan extension in animals, but really the translation

is making people healthier longer. Yes, they may live a little longer, but what we really

...