You cannot fix what you cannot measure
Andrea Cipriano is at Stanford Medicine, in reproductive, perinatal and stem cell biology — the same Stanford department Vittorio Sebastiano worked in, whom we also filmed at this conference — and he is part of the Biomarkers of Aging Consortium. We met him in Boston in November 2024.
Asked why ageing, he gave both halves of the answer, which not everybody does. There is the emotional one: every one of us has family, and his grandparents are getting older. And there is the one he calls selfish, and says with a laugh: he is going to get old one day himself.
Then he made the sharpest observation anybody made at that conference. If you talk about cancer, there is a definition — people know what cancer is. Neurodegeneration has definitions. Ageing does not. “Aging is this mysterious-like word that people use a lot. Also, big expert in this conference, if you ask them, what is aging, they still don’t know.” That is a scientist standing in a room full of the world’s authorities on the subject and saying, plainly, that the subject has no agreed definition.
And underneath that sits the physical difficulty, which is why he thinks biomarkers are not a specialism within the field but its ground floor. “Aging is an extremely small phenomena. It’s very close to the background.” The signal you are hunting is barely above the noise. So everything anybody wants to build — interventions, trials, clinics — sits on being able to measure the thing at all. He puts it in one sentence that could be the motto of the whole conference: if we don’t know how to measure something, we will not know how to fix it.
A note about this page. Our filmed conversation with Andrea was short — a few minutes, walking, between sessions. Everything in quotation marks here is very nearly all of it. He is worth an hour and he has not had one yet.
