The New Science of Staying Young | Tech And Trends

2025 was the year “longevity” finally burst into the mainstream. In January, Netflix streamed the documentary, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, about the controversial 48-year-old fintech entrepreneur and “fountain of youth” aspirant Bryan Johnson, who’s working with a team of doctors to try a ream of treatments he hopes will keep him preternaturally young — including, as you might have heard, blood transfusions from his teenage son.

Then in November, 60 Minutes profiled Stanford-educated Dr. Peter Attia, the bestselling author of Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity and an increasingly popular health guru, thanks to his podcast The Drive. “At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff,” he told 60 Minutes. “What I’m thinking about [is] how do I create an escape velocity that gets somebody another 15 years?”

Meanwhile, pretty much every podcaster and health influencer has hopped on the longevity bandwagon, weaving “healthspan” and “biological age” into their patter and touting new treatments, supplements and workouts they claim are the latest trick to long life and good health.

The amount of information out there now “can be really confusing, even for people who are very knowledgeable and who stay up-to-date on this,” says Dr. Michael Fredericson, the codirector of Stanford’s Center on Longevity and founder of the university’s Lifestyle Medicine program.

What longevity means in practice depends on whom you talk to. Most often, it refers to new scientific understandings about how infirmity and age-related diseases come about, along with insights into how to interrupt those processes and hold on to one’s health.

Historically, age-related decline seemed inevitable. Now researchers have learned that the loss of physical and cognitive function and the development of diseases like cancer, heart disease, metabolic issues and dementia — what Attia refers to as the Four Horsemen — aren’t inextricably linked to the number of candles on your cake.

Rather, what we think of as the ravages of time are merely the result of the progressive degradation of individual systems within your body, which initiate chain reactions leading to disease and disability. And while we’ve tended to think of DNA as destiny, scientists are also learning how much gene expression is actually driven by lifestyle and other exogenous factors, like environmental toxins.

“How your genes express themselves changes every day according to your stress levels, your sleep, your diet,” says Alina Rui Su, cofounder of the San Francisco–based Generation Lab, which recently received Accel’s first longevity-related seed investment. So while a person’s DNA might predispose them to Alzheimer’s, for example, “they might not necessarily get it, because their genes don’t express it.”

As scientists learn more about these biological dominoes, they’re also creating technologies to screen people’s health much further upstream than do conventional blood pressure and cholesterol tests. Those latter are mostly just proxies for potential issues that might already be present. The new tests look instead for indicators that could presage future issues, the way a drop in atmospheric pressure could signify an oncoming storm.

Take Dr. Irina Conboy, for example, a University of California, Berkeley bioengineer, who spent decades studying the aging process in mice and experimenting with ways to reverse it. She’s now working with Su to commercialize one such screener.

The $499 SystemAge test looks at 460 biomarkers and determines which of 19 individual systems (such as lungs, heart, brain, muscles and liver) might either need propping up or further investigation.

“We can see trends even before disease starts being symptomatic,” Su explains.

Think of it like your car’s 30,000-mile inspection. The vehicle might seem fine to you, but in looking under the hood, your mechanic might see concerning signs of wear in your water pump. The recommendation to replace it would stem from the fact that, left unaddressed, the pump could break down at some unspecified point in the future, overheat your engine and crack the engine block.

Until now, diagnostics couldn’t see that clearly into your biology. Generation Lab provides customers with a personalized plan of next steps, which could range from specific-to-you nutrition recommendations to more extensive follow ups. (One 45-year-old customer said his doctor found a nodule in his lung after his biomarkers indicated a possible issue in his pulmonary system.)

Traditional medicine is normally reactive. Longevity is the opposite. “The health-care system is really ‘sick care,’” Su says. “We’re trying to extend health, rather than cure sickness.”

Generation Lab is one of an explosion of startups developing these kinds of tests. (Healthspan, for example, is another Bay Area–born company created by a Stanford doctor after his wife struggled to get cutting-edge follow-on care after a stem cell transplant for her lymphoma.) The efficacy and usefulness of the tests vary, given that the entire field is still in its infancy and largely unregulated. Longevity medicine itself has yet to be recognized by the American Medical Association, though assorted experts and physicians are working on that.

Still, the industry is plunging ahead. Longevity clinics, for example, are popping up across the country and around the world, layering new technologies onto what used to be called “executive physicals.”

“We’ve seen incredible integrations of AI alongside advanced diagnostics to allow for early detection of things like cardiovascular inflammation many years before any plaque builds up,” says Dr. Michael Doney, the executive medical director of Biograph, a San Mateo clinic that opened a second site in New York last year.

Every patient leaves with a detailed set of next steps, and, sometimes, a schedule of future visits. In the above case, clinic staff would discuss plans for diet and exercise adjustments, prescriptions if applicable and potentially follow-up imaging and other tests. “It’s not one-size-fits-all,” Doney says, “but reduction of coronary vascular inflammation is a key intervention to reduce the risk of disease progression and heart attack.”

Patients come to Biograph for a range of reasons, Doney says. Some are trying to avoid the struggles they saw older family members endure. Others are parents wanting to be around for their children. Some executives hope to remain at peak performance for their jobs. And other patients simply feel the piecemeal approach of the traditional medical system hasn’t served them and are looking for a more comprehensive picture of how they’re doing.

“They all want to get ahead of their health, get healthier or stay healthier, and get clear results and actionable next steps,” Doney says.

Biograph’s services aren’t cheap. Its basic and enhanced packages run $7,500 and $15,000, respectively. Nevertheless, many of its patients come from out of town. Indeed, “longevity travel” is becoming a trend of its own.

Spas and wellness destinations are incorporating the new services. The famed Canyon Ranch now offers LONGEVITY8 retreats at its Tucson facility. For $20,000, you get four days’ worth of tests, an assessment of 200 biomarkers and a personalized health plan, along with three months of follow-up consultations.

Other hotels and resorts are partnering directly with medical centers. The Four Seasons in Singapore hosts the CHI Longevity Clinic, founded by Dr. Andrea Maier, the former president of the Healthy Longevity Society, one of the organizations seeking to standardize longevity medicine. Meanwhile, the Mayo Clinic has partnered with Three Forks Ranch in Colorado to offer cancer screenings and heart-health assessments.

Even greater advances are yet to come. Researchers are exploring novel therapies, like reprogramming older cells back to their youthful vigor, modifying genes and using senolytic drugs. Such medications would remove worn-out senescent cells, whose continued presence in the body can trigger bouts of inflammation — the body’s immune response, which, when overactive, can attack healthy cells and tissues and sometimes cascade into heart and other diseases.

It’s not clear how the Trump administration’s brake on federal grants will affect this research, especially since litigation against the freezes is proving successful. In November, for example, a judge barred the federal government from withholding money from the University of California system.

Even if the taps are turned back on, however, experts say aging science still isn’t getting enough funding. Two-thirds of the National Institute on Aging’s budget, for example, goes to finding cures for dementia. Only about $400 million goes to research into the fundamentals of aging, says Dr. Andrew Steele, founder of The Longevity Initiative think tank and author of Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old. “That’s just over $1 per American, which is crazy, because aging causes 85 percent of American deaths.”

A 2021 paper estimated that increasing healthy life expectancy in the United States by just a single year would result in a $38 trillion increase in economic benefits. “There’s a huge opportunity here,” Steele says. A $100 billion investment, he says — from some combination of public, private and philanthropic sources — could produce the breakthroughs scientists believe are just over the horizon.

Steele predicts that “preventive medicines for aging” will one day become as routine as heart and diabetes medications are today. The average person may take senolytics as a matter of course. They might get stem cell infusions every few years. “Or we could inject something into you that changes a single letter of your genetic code and optimizes your body in some way to help you live longer,” he says.

For now, insurance rarely covers the new tests or services. Patients must absorb their hefty price tags on their own, which means, by definition, that most longevity advances are only available to those who can float the costs. (Attia told CBS he charges his patients in the low six-figures. And there’s a waiting list.)

Yet one thing aging science has discovered is that long-held conventional wisdom will get you most of the way. The food we eat, how much we move (or not), the quality of our sleep and personal relationships and the amount of stress (or cortisol spikes) we experience all directly influence when and how our systems begin to degrade.

Those behaviors act as signals to your internal algorithms — messages that tell your biology whether to initiate certain processes or turn on certain genes; hence, for example, the recent advice around “jump training” and “carrying heavy loads” to counter osteopenia. The physical impact of thudding your feet on the ground and the pressure on your bones from carrying heavy objects both send signals to your system telling it to build more bone. (Of course, check with your doctor before starting any new exercise program.)

Even Attia told 60 Minutes that 80 percent of his advice doesn’t require medical intervention. The fitness evaluations he gives patients as part of his workup “are even more predictive of how long you’re going to live than what I might get out of your bloodwork,” Attia said. Cardiorespiratory fitness, muscle mass and strength “have a much higher association than things like cholesterol and blood pressure.”

Which might explain why a 55-year-old single mother from Phoenix beat Johnson at his own game. Back in 2023, Johnson set up a Rejuvenation Olympics, in which 4,000 people competed, via a screening test, to see who was aging “the slowest.”

The woman, Julie Gibson Clark, who meditates, eats healthfully and exercises regularly, came in second on the leaderboard, four places ahead of Johnson. Her annual expenditure was $1,300 — for a gym membership and dietary supplements — compared to the $2 million Johnson was reportedly shelling out.

Fredericson said he set up Stanford’s Lifestyle Medicine program several years ago to encourage people to focus on these very basic, but hugely consequential, steps. Over time, he’s seen more patients in his sports medicine practice ask about longevity. “It can be really simple,” he says. “If you just move a lot, try to eat healthy foods, get decent sleep, have decent relationships and your stress is not through the roof — that’s 99 percent of it.”