Bill Andrews has been featured in Popular Science and interviewed on "The Today Show," but he can still see eyes start to roll when he starts talking about his research on a new anti-aging treatment.
"Quacks and charlatans have done a great job of discrediting the field of anti-aging for thousands of years," says Andrews, a veteran of Geron, in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal. "Nowadays, science has come a long way. But it's really hard to approach investors and have them listen to you for more than five seconds after they hear you're doing research on anti-aging."
Andrews, though, insists that his work on telomeres is completely legit. And recent work at Harvard has helped underscore the potential of his ideas. By controlling telomerase genes, investigators were able to spur new growth of the brain and testes in mice. And down that avenue, he believes, lies a potentially long life span for humans.
- here's the story from the Reno Gazette-Journal