Jesse
Poganik

Jesse Poganik runs the Poganik Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, working on the biology of ageing, on biomarkers, and on how fast biological age can actually move. When we filmed him in Boston he was in Vadim Gladyshev’s lab, and he is one of the organisers of the Biomarkers of Aging Conference.

He did not set out to work on ageing at all. His PhD was in redox signalling — how free radicals carry signals inside cells — and that field has run alongside ageing research for historical reasons, because of the free radical theory of ageing, “which is not that highly regarded now, but has been in the past”. He met Gladyshev through redox, before Gladyshev moved heavily into ageing. At the end of his PhD he wanted to do something different, and, in his own phrase, ageing seemed like the type of thing to take a chance on.

What he wants out of it is unusually specific, and it is not more years at any cost. He is careful to say that ageing brings things worth having: experience, wisdom, time to do the things you cannot do when time is short. The win, as he sees it, is to keep all of that and lose the part at the end where health goes.

The goal he calls the holy grail is to use these tools while a person is still healthy — to see a future decline coming and intervene before it arrives. He is equally clear that the field is not there. The tools have not advanced that far. What biomarkers already do is more practical and no less important: they tell you who would benefit most from an intervention, and whether an intervention is working — without waiting the decades a conventional trial would take. “The biomarkers give you almost a shortcut.”

And when we asked what he is most afraid of, he did not say ageing. He said failure — of the whole field. The trajectory is strong, the community is growing, the science is good, “but at some point we need something to show for it.” That is a scientist worrying, out loud, that his subject will spend its credibility before it delivers.