Measure it, then move it
Jan Gruber is an aging biologist at the National University of Singapore, in the same NUS longevity group as Brian Kennedy. He works on two of the field’s hardest problems at once: how to measure aging, and how to slow it.
On the measuring side, he builds aging clocks — and he is betting they are about to get much better. As the datasets grow, he expects mortality-based, multi-omics clocks to converge, so the different clocks finally give you the same answer. On the moving side, he screens geroprotector drugs in the nematode worm C. elegans, using a clever new readout — the “transcriptional noise” that rises with age — to test hundreds of interventions and score them for synergy before the slow work of lifespan studies.
His method is deliberately staged: reduce the noise in worms first, confirm lifespan and healthspan, then step up to flies and mice. It pairs naturally with the biology of his friend and collaborator Vincenzo Sorrentino — Jan’s screening platform, Vincenzo’s mitochondria and protein-folding questions.
He is also one of the most quietly optimistic people we met. He likes to imagine his own daughter’s generation looking back in disbelief: that there was once a world when people thought aging was completely immutable — a bit, he says, like the world before antibiotics.
