An engineer, reading the body
Mahdi Moqri is an Instructor in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and faculty at Harvard Medical School, and he co-directs the Biomarkers of Aging Consortium — the body trying to turn a very noisy field into something a clinic could one day use. He trained in computer science and informatics, and did his postdoctoral work at Stanford. We met him at the conference he helps run.
He does not describe himself as a biologist. “As an engineer, I look at human body as a very complex system,” he told us. “And if you want to maintain or optimize a complex system, the first step is to understand the principles.” Which for him means: measure how a body ages normally, first. Then the same measurements become the feedback that tells you whether anything you did about it worked.
What that would give an ordinary person is quite concrete. We already know exercise, sleep and diet matter — but not which of them matters most for you. A good measure would say: your sleep is not helping, you are ageing faster because of the sugar. And it would go organ by organ. He can look at a person and guess that their hair is about forty and their skin about thirty-five. What he cannot see is how old the liver is, or the heart. Down at the level of individual cells the numbers get stranger still: the egg in a woman’s body begins ageing at twenty-five, and by thirty is already treated as geriatric.
The thing that worries him most is not scientific. It is that the public already believes this problem is solved. People buy a kit online, get a number back, and assume the number means something. “They think we already have them, and they think they are already reliable and at the clinical level. But we feel that we are not there yet.” So when he presents the real state of the science, people are disappointed — because they were sold something better.
And there is a second problem, inside the field. Most of the people building these clocks, he says, do not have a mathematical understanding of their own models. “It’s just a number produced by an algorithm.” A lot of biologists are not mathematicians or statisticians, and that gap is one of the things the consortium exists to close.
He is unusually consistent about all of this in his own life. He takes nothing — no medications, no supplements — because on his own cost-benefit reading they are more likely to harm him than help him. He mentions Bryan Johnson as the other end of the spectrum, without malice. His own definition of ageing is the loss of regenerative capacity, and his own protocol is the fight against it: more movement, better rest, better food, and medical interventions when he is old enough to need them.
