And in one of the last interviews he talks that they have a pretty solid funding already, so...
Yeah, that's what you say when PR'ing to invite the small fry to jump in.
Yeah, I think if the guy is in the process of starting human trials, then that means somebody with academic authority had to deem his work worth something at least.
Sure he is a respected figure in Russian academia. This does not change my impression that he got bought into the lifestyle that lately he cannot support, which forced him to seek the media attention in order to attract investors. At the moment, the situation in the Russian academia is such that I'd not be surprised by any impropriety. Sorry.
I too was under the impresion that the progammed theory of aging was being put to rest, seems logical given that the natural paradigm is to do things with the least possible effort so to speak, so just let body wane instead of actively pushing it, but then again was the theory totally dead ? I'm not sure.
I read most of his rather long article in support of programmed aging following one of the links above and... IMO it does not hold water. He brings up apoptosis as his main argument for
genetically programmed aging of multicellular organisms (!)
For semelparous animals, IMO the cause and effect are skewed: in case of salmon death simply comes as a natural consequence of exhaustion of having to run upstream entirely on adrenaline, not a
pre-programmed death by hormones. In support he says that if adrenals are removed after spawning, the salmon lives for another year. Yes, but it could be that sudden drop of adrenaline forces the fish to relax, look around and start feeding at last
He claims that progeria and Werner syndrome are examples of
accelerated program of aging, while it is well-known that mutated, misplaced or misfolded proteins implicated in these diseases are at fault. Then he goes into discussion of various proteins involved in regulation of telomeres length or mitochondrial production of ROS, etc., claiming that they are directly involved in
genetic program of aging, while admitting that at the moment it's not clear how exactly they fit into the picture.
Finally, wasn't it you who was surprised that cells that are known for their lack of mitochondria could benefit the most from the compound that minimizes the
damage induced by mitochondria produced ROS? VidX posted the link to an article that was supposed to explain this strangeness, and I read it too, but was not convinced. To me it smelled like Skulachev wrote it just to pacify this sort of questions. And the long list of illustrious co-authors only made me more suspicious.
In any rate, we'll wait and see if this substance X indeed slows down or reverses some signs of aging. If it works in practice, who cares about the theory. It is his insistence on tyeing the two together that I find suspicious. He keeps on beating on the programmed theory of aging, because in Russia --I recently found out-- they largely have not heard of the later developments in the field, so it sounds reasonable and "scientific" to them.