People
Researchers, clinicians, and critics whose work shapes the longevity conversation. Positions summarized here are their views, not ours.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
Andrew Huberman
Stanford neurobiology professor who hosts the Huberman Lab podcast and is paid roughly $2 million a year by supplement brand AG1 to promote its product on air, according to Reddit-sourced sponsor disclosures corroborated by industry reporting.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
Bill Gifford
Journalist who wrote Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying) in 2015 and later co-authored Peter Attia's 2023 bestseller Outlive, translating longevity science for a general readership without running his own laboratory research.
Medium human RCTs or systematic reviews
Bryan Johnson
Founder of Project Blueprint, running the most heavily instrumented single-person aging protocol on public record.
Medium human RCTs or systematic reviews
Charles Brenner
Biochemist who discovered the vitamin activity of nicotinamide riboside in 2004 and has served as Chief Scientific Advisor to Niagen Bioscience, the company selling the NR supplement TruNiagen, while also publishing a peer-reviewed critical review of David Sinclair's book Lifespan.
Medium human RCTs or systematic reviews
Cynthia Kenyon
Vice President of Aging Research at Calico, Alphabet's longevity research subsidiary, who discovered in 1993 that a single mutated gene, daf-2, doubles the lifespan of the roundworm C. elegans and personally stopped eating high-glycemic carbohydrates after finding sugar shortened worm lifespan in her own lab.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
David Sinclair
Harvard Medical School geneticist who co-founded MetroBiotech, sits on its scientific advisory board, and has publicly taken NMN and resveratrol daily since before either compound had a completed human aging trial.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
Derek Lowe
Medicinal chemist with a PhD from Duke University who has worked at Schering-Plough, Bayer, Vertex, and Novartis, and has written the In the Pipeline blog, hosted by Science/AAAS since 2002, applying industry-chemist skepticism to longevity and peptide claims.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
George Church
Harvard geneticist who co-founded Rejuvenate Bio to test three-gene combination therapy in aging dogs and separately serves on Colossal Biosciences' advisory team working to resurrect the woolly mammoth.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
Andrew Huberman
Stanford neurobiology professor who hosts the Huberman Lab podcast and is paid roughly $2 million a year by supplement brand AG1 to promote its product on air, according to Reddit-sourced sponsor disclosures corroborated by industry reporting.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
Bill Gifford
Journalist who wrote Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying) in 2015 and later co-authored Peter Attia's 2023 bestseller Outlive, translating longevity science for a general readership without running his own laboratory research.
Medium human RCTs or systematic reviews
Bryan Johnson
Founder of Project Blueprint, running the most heavily instrumented single-person aging protocol on public record.
Medium human RCTs or systematic reviews
Charles Brenner
Biochemist who discovered the vitamin activity of nicotinamide riboside in 2004 and has served as Chief Scientific Advisor to Niagen Bioscience, the company selling the NR supplement TruNiagen, while also publishing a peer-reviewed critical review of David Sinclair's book Lifespan.
Medium human RCTs or systematic reviews
Cynthia Kenyon
Vice President of Aging Research at Calico, Alphabet's longevity research subsidiary, who discovered in 1993 that a single mutated gene, daf-2, doubles the lifespan of the roundworm C. elegans and personally stopped eating high-glycemic carbohydrates after finding sugar shortened worm lifespan in her own lab.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
David Sinclair
Harvard Medical School geneticist who co-founded MetroBiotech, sits on its scientific advisory board, and has publicly taken NMN and resveratrol daily since before either compound had a completed human aging trial.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
Derek Lowe
Medicinal chemist with a PhD from Duke University who has worked at Schering-Plough, Bayer, Vertex, and Novartis, and has written the In the Pipeline blog, hosted by Science/AAAS since 2002, applying industry-chemist skepticism to longevity and peptide claims.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
George Church
Harvard geneticist who co-founded Rejuvenate Bio to test three-gene combination therapy in aging dogs and separately serves on Colossal Biosciences' advisory team working to resurrect the woolly mammoth.
Small human pilot studies or cohorts
Jan Vijg
Albert Einstein College of Medicine geneticist who developed the somatic mutation theory of aging and co-founded two companies, SingulOmics and MutagenTech, that commercialize the genome-sequencing tools his own lab uses to test that theory.
Medium human RCTs or systematic reviews
Linda Partridge
Dame Linda Partridge directed University College London's Institute of Healthy Ageing for twelve years and co-authored the 2010 Cell Metabolism paper showing rapamycin extends fruit fly lifespan through the same TOR pathway now targeted by human longevity clinics.
Medium human RCTs or systematic reviews
Luigi Fontana
Physician-scientist who led one of the first controlled human studies of a full year of sustained caloric restriction and now holds the Leonard P. Ullmann Chair in Translational Metabolic Health at the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre.
Small human pilot studies or cohorts
Mark Mattson
Former chief of the National Institute on Aging's Laboratory of Neurosciences whose research on intermittent fasting and brain health, built on mechanisms like BDNF induction and ketone-body signaling, became one of the scientific foundations for the popular intermittent-fasting movement.
Small human pilot studies or cohorts
Matt Kaeberlein
University of Washington biogerontologist who co-directs the Dog Aging Project and left academia to run Optispan, a geroscience consulting company, while co-authoring the largest published survey of off-label human rapamycin users.
Medium human RCTs or systematic reviews
Morgan Levine
Founding principal investigator at Altos Labs who created the PhenoAge epigenetic clock and publicly corrected Bryan Johnson's claim that his DunedinPACE score meant he had reversed his biological age by 31 years.
Small human pilot studies or cohorts
Nir Barzilai
Albert Einstein College of Medicine researcher who designed the TAME (Targeting Aging with Metformin) trial and also serves as a paid Chief Medical Advisor to Life Biosciences, the company co-founded by David Sinclair.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
Peter Attia
Founder of the longevity clinic Early Medical, where annual membership fees start at $150,000, and author of the 2023 bestseller Outlive, who resigned as Chief Science Officer of David protein bars and from a new CBS News contributor role in February 2026 after Epstein-related emails surfaced.
Small human pilot studies or cohorts
Rhonda Patrick
PhD biomedical scientist who trained under Bruce Ames on micronutrient deficiency and now runs FoundMyFitness, a subscription-supported media outlet that reviews the same categories of longevity supplements and sauna protocols it also promotes to paying members.
Medium human RCTs or systematic reviews
S. Jay Olshansky
University of Illinois Chicago public health professor who argues human life expectancy is approaching a biodemographic ceiling near 85 years, co-founded the commercial ventures Lapetus Solutions and Wealthspan Financial Partners, and holds a long-running public wager against fellow researcher Steven Austad over whether anyone alive today will reach age 150.
Medium human RCTs or systematic reviews
Saul Villeda
UCSF neuroscientist who co-authored the landmark 2014 Nature Medicine paper showing young blood plasma reverses age-related cognitive and synaptic impairments in mice, work that helped launch the parabiosis and young-plasma research field, without himself holding the commercial ties his co-author Tony Wyss-Coray later built around it.
Large human RCTs or meta-analyses
Steve Horvath
Former UCLA human genetics professor who published the first pan-tissue epigenetic clock in 2013, built from 8,000 samples across 82 datasets and 51 tissue types, and now leads epigenetic clock research at Altos Labs' Cambridge Institute of Science.
n=1 self-experiments or animal studies
Steven Austad
University of Alabama at Birmingham biogerontologist who has a running public wager with S. Jay Olshansky on whether anyone will live to 150 by the year 2150, with the stake growing from an initial $150 toward a trust fund that could pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to the winner's descendants.
Small human pilot studies or cohorts
Valter Longo
USC gerontology professor who founded L-Nutra, the company that manufactures and sells ProLon, the packaged five-day fasting-mimicking diet his own lab's clinical trials are used to promote.
Small human pilot studies or cohorts
Vittorio Sebastiano
Stanford stem cell biologist who co-founded Turn Biotechnologies in 2018 and led the team confirming that human cells can be reprogrammed using Turn Bio's own mRNA-based Epigenetic Reprogramming of Aging (ERA) platform, the same technology the company applies to cosmetic skin-rejuvenation products.