Aging Isn’t Necessary, Scientist Claims. And He’s Going to Cure It in Just 3 Years.

7 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Telomeres are the protective ends on your chromosomes; they shorten as we age, leading to chromosomal degradation and cell death.Some researchers—including molecular biologist Bill Andrews—believe they can harness an enzyme called telomerase to prevent this sort of damage. Now, Andrews claims that he’s on the cusp of an anti-aging pill that, with the right funding, he could bring to consumers within the decade. At age 10, William “Bill” Andrews had a conversation with his father that changed the course of his life. “Living is the greatest thing that ever happened to us,” Andrews recalls him saying. “When you grow up, you should become a doctor and find a cure for aging. I don’t know why nobody’s done this yet.” From then on, Andrews says, he had “one mission in life.”Now, over 60 years later, Andrews, 74, is a practicing molecular biologist with a PhD—and he claims he’s on the brink of creating an anti-aging pill for the masses. He says all he needs is the funding to scale it.Andrews’s approach to anti-aging science is different from others in the field. Instead of focusing solely on environmental factors or eliminating diseases, Andrews studies what he thinks is the root cause of aging: the telomeres. Think of these tiny protectors like the aglets, or plastic shoelace ends, on your favorite pair of sneakers. After many years of wearing your kicks around town, those caps begin to wear down. The same goes for telomeres, which protect the chromosomes, or your packages of DNA. Andrews believes he’s found a way to stop this harmful degradation—and that he could bring the miracle pill to market within the decade.While in high school and college, Andrews first realized that the standing theories surrounding aging just didn’t make any sense to him.“None of them explained why humans who live on the equator and the North and South Poles all age at the same rate when they’re in different environments,” Andrews says. “None of the theories explain why dogs and cats age at different rates from humans when they're in the same environment. I decided something’s not right.”For more than a decade, aging was at the back of Andrews’s mind as he completed his higher education and entered the biotech industry. It wasn’t until 1993 when he was attending a conference that Andrews had his “aha!” moment. He had previously concluded that there must be something inside of our cells like ride tickets at an amusement park. “Every time a cell divided, it lost a ticket. And then, when you ran out of your tickets, that’s when you died,” he says.Then came his answer. At the conference, a speaker was talking about how telomeres get shorter each time a cell divides. As Andrews listened to the presenter discuss several DNA sequences, he realized that they “explain everything.”“Right away, before [the speaker] could even get off the podium, I was at the bottom of the stairs asking, ‘Has anybody figured out how to lengthen telomeres?’” Andrews recalls. The speaker said that even after years of work, they had seen zero success. “Get me on board,” Andrews said to the speaker, “and I will have this figured out in three months.”Soon after, Andrews says he joined Geron Corporation—a California-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to developing therapy drugs for cancer—and led the research team that discovered the human telomerase enzyme. When our body’s cells divide, their telomeres wear down over time, eventually causing the cells to age and stop dividing. But telomerase rebuilds the telomeres, essentially hitting a reset button on aging.In 2009, scientists Carol Greider, Elizabeth Blackburn, and Jack W. Szostak wonthe Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of telomerase in single-cell organisms roughly 25 years earlier. Their work became the foundation of modern research surrounding telomeres, such as aging research like Andrews’s and cancer studies.While the enzyme may seem like the panacea medicine has long searched for, there’s a catch: Telomerase doesn’t naturally occur in all cells. Instead, activity is only consistently found in reproductive cells, stem cells, and cancer cells. This is because most other cells are designed to age and die after a certain number of divisions to protect the body from uncontrolled growth. Reproductive cells, stem cells, and cancer cells, on the other hand, require continuous self-renewal in order to pass intact DNA to future generations, constantly repair tissues, or fuel tumor growth.To remedy this, Andrews needed to find a key—a specific gene that could switch on telomerase production in all of our cells.“I [was] searching for molecules that, when added to human cells and petri dishes, [would] turn the telomerase gene on,” Andrews says. “Because if our reproductive cells can produce telomerase, that means all the cells in our body have the gene for telomerase. The gene in all the other cells is just turned off.”But why would such an important gene be turned off to begin with? The answer to this question is the reason why we age in the first place. The most important strategy for the survival of a species in rapidly changing environments is for some of the members of the species to prevail when the others can’t, Andrews explains. Sexual reproduction evolved two billion years ago to bolster genetic diversity; however, diversity decreases when the same parent genes continue reentering the gene pool. Biology avoids this repetition and increases diversity by eliminating those who are long-lived. In other words, individuals need to age—and thus die—for the species to survive.But aging becomes unnecessary because humans—with our houses, medicine, and desk jobs—are much different from species like the horseshoe crab that has withstood the test of time. Our species isn’t at risk of collapsing if your grandmother lives to 150. Likewise, humans are “really good at adapting,” Andrews says. He believes that we’ll be able to overcome issues relating to overpopulation if we stop aging in its tracks. However, there’s another wrinkle.“Diseases like cancer, heart disease, and dementia affect us mostly after we've raised our young, so evolution never went in the direction of getting rid of them because it was beneficial to the survival of the species,” Andrews says.Andrews’s main objective with his aging pills is to stop the suffering that comes with age-related diseases—not only the cancer, heart disease, and dementia mentioned above, but things like cirrhosis, chronic kidney disease, muscular dystrophy, and macular degeneration, too. None of these conditions would occur if telomeres didn’t get shorter, he says. The main cause of these diseases is the wear and tear on the cells, usually influenced by poor genetics or lifestyle choices that cause accelerated cell division. In terms of Andrews’s amusement park analogy, these factors cause people to quickly “run out of ride tickets.” But if scientists manage to artificially lengthen the telomeres in all cells, it’s like having a parent give you additional tickets. As long as they keep handing them over, “you could ride forever,” he explains.As soon as we begin seeing these diseases disappear, we’re not going to want to go back to that way of living, Andrews claims. Which is why he wants to market a pill to cure aging to the masses, something he’s been working on as the founder and CEO of his own biotech company, Sierra Sciences, based in Reno, Nevada.“My dream and hope [is that] it's a pill that people have to take once every 10 years. It will make us younger in every way imaginable—make us look, feel, and behave like we’re 25 again,” he says.Since reversing aging is different from reversing development, Andrews’s pill wouldn’t be turning people back into babies. The youngest anybody would ever biologically return to is 25 years old, because that’s when human development essentially ceases, he explains. So if someone is 45 years old and they take the pill, they will become biologically 35. They take the pill again 10 years later, and they become 25 again, he explains. This number refers to a person’s biological age, rather than chronological age, meaning it’s measured by how well the body is functioning on cellular and molecular levels.However, other scientists are much more skeptical of how telomeres and aging may relate. For instance, one reason for pause is that links between telomere length, telomerase production, and aging are inconsistent across species. In a 2018 study, researchers found that the long-lived Myotis bats’ telomeres do not shorten at all as they age—yet they don’t produce telomerase. Likewise, the Strongylocentrotus franciscanus (a species of sea urchin) has telomeres that actually lengthen as it gets older, and it can live up to 200 years.Broadly, researchers warn about the risk of cancer when attempting to lengthen telomeres. For instance, a 2017 study in JAMA Oncology found that longer telomeres appeared to heighten the risk for certain cancers, such as brain cancer, ovarian cancer, bladder cancer, melanoma, endometrial cancer, testicular cancer, and lung cancer.Liz Parrish, founder and CEO of BioViva USA—a Seattle-based biotechnology company focused on developing gene therapies that can stop aging and age-related disease—has worked with Andrews in a professional capacity and believes that he will be able to create a pill that will help keep the telomeres long.“Biological aging is a disease—it’s a near perfect pathology that runs nearly the same in all humans, and it’s the underlying process that drives all diseases that we die of in old age,” Parrish says. “I believe more will need to be done to cure all of aging, but [Andrews’s pill] should open the biggest bottleneck to a healthy life span, meaning humans could then live longer and healthier lives.”Andrews claims he already has the compound for his pill. The most potent molecule he’s found produces about 16 percent as much telomerase as he thinks he’d need to equal that of our reproductive cells. But his biggest obstacle is finding the funding to scale that number to 100 percent, create the pill, and get it out there. “Right now, it costs us $2 million a month to do this research, and we just never get that much funding,” Andrews says.If Andrews found an investor immediately, he says he’d be able to make the pill available in the next one to three years. At the end of the day, Andrews says he isn’t in it for himself or any potential money this pill could make him. His reasoning is simple: “I just want to see the world be happy and healthy.”Special Digital IssuesAugust/September 2026Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring:➡ A Luxury Resort Hid a Secret Government Doomsday Bunker Below It for 35 Years. The Clues Were Everywhere.➡ 7 People Have Confessed to Being D.B. 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This Weapon Can Save It.October/November 2022Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring:➡ Can America's M1 Abrams Still Compete With China's and Russia's Latest Battle Tanks?➡ Inside the Final Minutes of the Concorde Disaster—and How It Doomed Supersonic Travel for Decades➡ How the Massive Cargo Ship Felicity Ace Sank, Taking $400 Million Worth of Exotic Supercars With It➡ I Turned My Old Gas-Guzzler Into a Zippy EV for $15,000August/September 2022Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring: ➡ Cosmic Secrets of the 17 Most Powerful Mega-Telescopes on Earth—and Beyond➡ Can the Air Force's Secret, Hypersonic Jet Reclaim the Skies From Russia and China?➡ For 50 Years, the Zodiac Killer's 340 Cipher Stumped the FBI—Then Three Amateurs Cracked the Code➡ America's Most Fearsome Howitzer Has Entered the War in UkraineJune/July 2022DOWNLOAD HEREThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring:➡ Every Single Drone Fighting in the Skies Over Ukraine➡ How to Buy a New Car in 2022 Without Getting Fleeced➡ This Megastructure Could Keep Us Alive Forever➡ The Race to Revolutionize EV BatteriesDanielle Zickl is a freelance writer who has 10 years of experience covering fitness, health, and nutrition. She's a graduate of Ithaca College. You can find her work here on Women's Health, and in many other publications including PS, SELF, Well+Good, Runner’s World, Outside RUN, Peloton, Men’s Fitness, and more.