NAD, Rapamycin & the Stories We Tell About Longevity (with Matt Kaeberlein)

A 27 year old woman went to a longevity clinic in the Bronx for an NAD IV drip. Minutes later she was in cardiac arrest. She died a few hours after that. The person who ran the clinic held a medical license from the Dominican Republic, not the United States.

Dr. Kevin White talks with Dr. Matt Kaeberlein, a researcher who studies why and how we age, about what that story actually tells us. His answer isn't really about NAD. It's about certainty. Kaeberlein has never seen evidence that NAD infusions help anyone, and the field's founding claim, that NAD declines with age and needs replacing, is now being questioned by the same scientists who study it. Clinics keep selling it with total confidence anyway.

That same pattern shows up everywhere they go in this conversation. Kaeberlein now chairs Montana's expanded Right To Try review board, which lets biotech companies test experimental therapies on real patients once they clear a phase one safety bar, outside the usual FDA process. He explains why that could produce safety data the field has never had, and why he'd reject any therapy pitched without a real scientific rationale behind it, no matter how confidently it's sold.

"You don't want to listen to the people who are telling you with a hundred percent certainty, do this. And by the way, you know, buy my longevity latte."
                                                    — Matt Kaeberlein

They also compare LinAge2, a biological age calculator built from standard bloodwork with decades of mortality data behind it, to the consumer epigenetic age tests sold directly to the public. Kaeberlein's problem with the popular tests has nothing to do with the underlying science. It's that nobody selling them will publish the error bars, so a 20 year gap on your result could mean everything or nothing. You can't run statistics on a number you're not allowed to check.

Along the way they cover why rapamycin, the drug most associated with Kaeberlein's name, might not even be his top pick anymore. A company spun out of his lab, Aura Biomedical, has found longevity molecules that also protect against radiation damage. And a new epigenetic instability test from Irena Conboy's company, Generation Lab, measures something closer to biological chaos than biological age.

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