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… “nearly half” suffered no ill effects 
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Thereby confounding any interpretation of what actually works
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[The Verve - The Drugs Don’t Work (youtube.com)]
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There is a massive difference between extending lifespan in mice and in humans. First off, are these laboratory mice being bred and raised for longevity? Likely not specifically. Is the control group being fed a highly nutritious diet in a stimulating environment - that isn’t mentioned, but I have my doubts. In that context, extending a mouse’s lifespan should be relatively easy without rapamycin - i e. There are any number of things you could do to extend mouse lifespans by 14%.
Sure, take your average human from the dawn of the agricultural revolution and give them rapamycin, you might see their lifespan increase. But a wealthy white male from the modern US? They already have so much going for them that rapamycin probably isn’t going to have a detectable effect. And it should be pointed out that feeling younger and actually living longer are two different things (and that for a large majority the response to using rapamycin is “meh”)
ETA - stories like this are particularly galling when there is a massive disparity in life expectancy by income and race. We could easily address that inequity right now with interventions that are known to work, but capitalism doesn’t allow it.
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My father at one point was taking upwards of 60 pills a day, in dire terror of getting Alzheimer’s like his father and in denial about his aging body’s limitations. He started subscribing to “magazines” (really catalogs) full of “secrets doctors don’t want you to know!” and unneeded testosterone shots turned him from a kind, gentle, intelligent man into a paranoid lunatic afraid of the medical establishment and completely gullible of any form of alternative medicine.
At his worst point, he was having delusions about the neighbors trying to see him naked, suggesting that my mother dying of cancer try urine therapy while screaming at her nurses that they were killing her, refusing to get dental implants or dentures while his teeth crumbled away, and fabricating a non-existent titanium allergy that resulted in his hip replacement having to be an outdated steel model (when we finally convinced him to get one at all). The pills were mostly unregulated and untested supplements that may or may not have even contained what they claimed, along with various stimulants and laxatives that wrecked his digestive tract, sleep habits and brain for years even after we all banded together as a family and begged him to stop, succeeding only after dozens of screaming matches against a man who could no longer be reasoned with.
Getting him off the testosterone was the key to making him back into a decent person, and after that he was much easier to talk to and went almost entirely back to the kind and loving father we remembered from years before, eventually trusting us to take care of him in his old age and letting us ditch his supplements and reduce his pills to a handful of vitamins and prescriptions to help with his Alzheimer’s (all his efforts didn’t prevent it in the end).
This guy’s pseudo-expertise in immortality panaceas, the endless sciency-sounding jargon, the pointing to questionable studies involving mice and the use of phrasing like “king of anti-aging meds” all sound like they’re straight out of one of my Dad’s old supplement catalogs. I can’t prove whether or not any of his supplements helped him or hurt him in the long run, but the sales tactics were absolutely toxic and brain-rotting, and turned the last couple good decades of his life into a wasted morass of woo, paranoia and false hope.
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Funny, I just read a recent interview with Ray “I’m definitely not going to die” Kurzweil and this bit stuck out:
You’re 76. Do you think you’re going to live to see escape velocity?
Yeah. I’m in good shape. I actually measure where I am. If something is down, I take various prescriptions or medications to get back to being on the positive side of longevity. I’m up to about 80 pills a day. [That’s actually down from around 200, circa 2008.]
I mean, it’s your body I guess. But people have been trying to defeat Death since at least Gilgamesh’s time and so far the global mortality rate is holding steady at 100% so I’m a little skeptical that some fancy version of ChatGPT is just a few years away from cracking the problem or that the right combination of vitamins is enough to reverse entropy.
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Something, something, expensive urine…
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That’s why you need to drink it.
All I know is the steak tastes better when I take my steak-tastes-better pill.
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