In August 2020 I was admitted to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) as a master’s degree student for biochemistry and neurobiology. The plan is to have a project that will lead straight into a PhD, because what I really want is a PhD.
This will be my 4th degree from UAF. The other degrees:
* 1983 BS in Biology
* 1999 BS in Geology
* 2018 Masters in Business Administration
Through all these other degrees my main passion has been aging. In 2004 I started attending aging conferences on a regular basis (list of all of the conference I have attended).
For my PhD project I was thinking about testing plasma replacement therapy in dogs to see if dogs have the same incredible reaction as mice and rats do. This idea was based on 2 papers that came out in the summer of 2020:
Reversing age: dual species measurement of epigenetic age with a single clock
Rejuvenation of three germ layers tissues by exchanging old blood plasma with saline-albumin
In these papers a number of measurements of blood proteins, epigenetics and other factors went from late middle age (the equivalent to early 60s in a human) to the human equivalent of 30. I spent the entire winter doing a lot of research to determine the parameters of doing this experiment. Update spring 2021: My advisor says I will not be able to get approval to do an experiment in dogs, so I will do one in mice instead.
My basic plan is to end up with a well-rounded education when I finish my degrees (Masters & PhD). To facilitate this I plan to continue going to 1-3 conferences a year, try to spread my knowledge to others (via this blog, posting on other websites, teaching classes, holding a monthly aging discussion group, and anything else I can do to promote the idea that science is now capable of slowing aging.
As I update this in February 2022, it has been a year since I started writing my Daily Thesis Notes. I started these last year because I was hoping writing these would encourage me to work a little more on my PhD. I found this to be successful enough to be worth doing.
Now I am going to publish these to this blog with the same general idea: if I get a little encouragement from a few readers it will encourage me to greater efforts and perhaps a better quality of writing.
Defeating Aging 