Andrew Steele

If we add in the chronic effects, it seems pretty likely that the case for wiping these bugs from the face of humanity is overwhelming.

Let’s do it.

The public health and economic case for vaccination is carried just by the short-term effects of these diseases—CMV in pregnancy is the largest cause of neurological defects in babies, chickenpox causes weeks off work for parents looking after sick kids, etc.

The evidence that these cause chronic as well as acute harm seems a good enough bet that we should probably just develop some vaccines for them, vaccinate the world, and remove the need for further massive studies to work out exactly what harms these stupid little balls of protein and DNA can cause.

Chronic CMV infection is bad news. One study found that people with the highest level of CMV antibodies in their blood – a measure of the body’s response to infection, and thus of how active CMV is in their system – were 40 per cent more likely to die over the following decade than those with lower levels of antibody activity. It’s not entirely clear whether this is just a correlation – perhaps CMV can flare up as a result of other underlying health problems – or whether the CMV (and the immune system’s increasingly overenthusiastic response to it) is driving ill health and, ultimately, death. How can we combat the latent threat of CMV? The first, obvious approach is that we should develop a vaccine. This would help those who haven’t yet been infected and might give the rest of us an immune boost to help keep it under control. This is actually a no-brainer even if you ignore the potentially large contribution CMV makes to ageing: CMV is the leading cause of brain damage in children.

5. CMV, we have pretty good evidence that it worsens overall ageing—see the extract from my book, below.

6. HHV-6, has connections to multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s.

7. HHV-7, one of the most common causes of fever in babies, cooperates with CMV.

8. KSHV, causes cancer in AIDS patients.

Herpesvirus number…

1 & 2. HSV-1 & 2, genital herpes/cold sores. Chronic infections—cold sores keep coming back once you’ve been infected.

3. Chickenpox, later shingles. Linked to dementia in later life—there’s growing evidence that the shingles vaccine is protective.

4. EBV (see above).

I’d bet money this affects aging in some way too—but it’s probably impossible to prove since so few people *aren’t* infected, there’s no good control group!

EBV is a member of the herpes family, and we know that some of its close relatives do indeed have effects on ageing:

Population-scale sequencing resolves determinants of persistent EBV DNA - Nature Population-scale WGS reveals genetic determinants of persistent EBV DNA, linking immune regulation—especially antigen processing and MHC class II variation—to EBV persistence and heterogeneous di...

⚠️ If you’re reading this, you’ve been infected! ⚠️

Around 90% of us have been infected by the Epstein–Barr virus…and then, it lingers in our bodies for the rest of our lives.

This fascinating paper digs into some of the long-term consequences of this infection, from cancer to multiple sclerosis.

YouTube video by Andrew Steele Will billionaires live forever? (feat. @OrdinaryThings!)

It’s World Economic Forum week in Davos, so please do check out the video I made last time I was there!

It asks whether billionaires will live forever—and explores inequality in longevity treatments more generally too.

It also features a cameo from @ordinarythings.bsky.social!

Longevity Advocacy in 2025: The Expert Roundup The last installment in our end-of-year series of expert roundups might be the least flashy, but it is arguably no less important than the previous […]

In the last installment of our end-of-year series of expert roundups, we asked six prominent figures in longevity advocacy to share their thoughts on the movement’s ups and downs in 2025 and its prospects going into 2026.
lifespan.io/news/longevi... @statto.bsky.social
By: @arkadimazin.bsky.social

A Bayesian approach to medicine might make gambling on a low-risk drug with good preclinical evidence for slowing ageing worth it—and, if we could collect data on people trying it with Bayesian methods and adaptive trials, we could discover real longevity drugs much more rapidly!

FDA Issues Guidance on Modernizing Statistical Methods for Clinical Trials The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today published draft guidance designed to facilitate the use of Bayesian methodologies in clinical trials of drugs and biologics, helping drug developers make be...

Full announcement here: www.fda.gov/news-events/...

Bayesian approaches use a different framework from traditional statistical approaches. In a Bayesian analysis, data from a study are combined with relevant prior information to form a new distribution that can be used for inference and to draw conclusions about safety and efficacy. Examples of Bayesian calculations used in various ways in clinical trials can include: Determining futility or success earlier in adaptive trials. Informing design elements like dose selection in subsequent trials. Incorporating information from other sources, such as previous clinical study data, real-world evidence, and external or nonconcurrent controls. Facilitating subgroup analyses. Supporting primary inference in a trial.

Very interesting to see @fda.gov coming out in favour of increased use of Bayesian methods in clinical trials.

This could be very beneficial—in general, I think medicine could benefit from being less binary and more Bayesian—but of course a lot depends on the priors used…

The FDA Commissioner advocating for Bayesian design and analysis is a thrill to see. www.fda.gov/news-events/... #StatsSky #Statistics #bayes #clinicaltrial #pharma #rct @fda.gov

Another reason to dislike WhatsApp, which at least for once isn’t security- or privacy-related: Meta’s *own instructions* on transferring your chats to a new phone *are wrong*!

They omit the crucial step of going to Settings > Chat > Transfer chats on your old phone before you start!

How’s about we try to reduce non-age-adjusted cancer death rates by developing treatments for ageing?

First leukaemia patient to get pioneering drug on NHS says it is 'very sci-fi' Oscar Murphy has an aggressive form of the blood cancer and is the first to get CAR-T therapy in the UK.

The first leukemia patient has received CAR-T cell therapy on the NHS!

Oscar’s haematologist said ‘Usually, this type of leukaemia is very aggressive and adult patients don’t live beyond six to eight months. With this therapy, we are able to offer them years and potentially a cure.’

Part 4 of our round-up is on the last year in longevity medicine:

Netflix and immortal dictators: Longevity’s biggest year yet From Bryan Johnson's viral biohacking to Putin and Xi discussing living to 150, 2025's biggest longevity stories—and whether hype is helping or hurting science.

Why does the word ‘longevity’ seem to be everywhere at the moment?

The final piece in our round-up of the last year in longevity looks at how ageing, wellness and biohacking cropped up in the media, pop culture and…in discussions between Putin and Xi?

Please enjoy this Friday read:

Polaris is not always the North Star. Due to Earth's precession, over the course of 26,000 years, Polaris, Alderamin, Vega, and Thuban take turns as the closest prominent star to the celestial pole.

I’m not sure there’s any evidence that weight loss using GLP-1s causes more loss of muscle mass than any other approach? Calorie restriction will also cause loss of muscle mass if not accompanied by exercise.

Very cool! It’s such a fascinating topic.

I’m not sure if I’m happy or disappointed to have found that my book seems not to have been memorised by the models/jailbreaking them with best-of-not-that-big-an-N in the web UI didn’t work :)

Does Ozempic slow ageing? Plus longevity clinics, peptides Longevity clinics take off while biohackers at RAADFest are hospitalised after unregulated peptide injections: we review 2025 in longevity medicine.

Longevity clinics grow in popularity while biohackers are hospitalised by peptide injections—and does Ozempic slow the ageing process?

We take a look at the last year in longevity medicine:

Or is it just the case that these things are so frickin’ big that there’s space for lots of literature in there?

• The less technical and philosophical point, but also a very important one: jailbreaking these models continues to be super-straightforward…indeed, sometimes not even needed…

Apparently they do indeed store whole passages of text—and what exactly that means is really interesting to contemplate. How big are the LLM weights in gigabytes vs their training corpus? Is it easy to compress whole books if you have a very detailed model of the structure of language generally?

Remarkable result: LLMs memorise huge chunks of books verbatim, and trivial prompt engineering can encourage them to spit out the text.

This is interesting because:
• I wouldn’t necessarily have expected them to ‘store’ this much word-for-word in their structure—more pick up the ‘ideas’ from texts.

The real question here is long-term benefits and risks of GLP-1s, which I’ve not seen any great analysis of. There’s obviously a degree of uncertainty—no-one has been taking these for weight loss for fifty years yet—but more column-inches on that would be more useful than the scolding.

‘The fact that people with obesity rebound more slowly on some other program nobody is offering you and which doesn’t scale is irrelevant and highlighting it is basically a sort of moral judgement on the failure of one billion people.’

Great piece.

Thanks man! We will do our best :)

Excited to see this develop 🙌🏻 Super initiative, punchy and engaging pieces, and big vision. Wouldn't expect anything else from @statto.bsky.social! 👏🏼

Go strong!

This is an important one: part 3 covers, amongst other things, US government funding for longevity science… 🧪