My amateur understanding: they’re pretty blindly inhibiting a hormone that causes inflammation, and is released (partially) in response to cellular senescence (/deterioration). And it looks like it was successful!
Can an expert explain why such a thing is promising? Maybe it’s not, but they don’t mention it until the Results? Just to my layman brain, it seems likely that inflammation in response to senescence might, like, have a function in the first place…
I guess that’s what empiricism is! Pull some levers that seem like they shouldn’t be pulled, and write down when one of them works better than expected!
- Human spinal cord is often poorly (minimally) adapted to walking upright. It “works” just well enough but the spinal discs can only just barely support the increased gravitational load between each vertebrae so herniation occurs easily and the lumbar curvature poorly supports weight/load as well. Huge reason so many people have back pain by 40. Strengthening the materials in the spinal discs to support higher compression loads would be a massive benefit, even though it has a low chance of increasing reproductive success, so wouldn’t get naturally selected for by evolution.
- Blind spots: vertebrate eyes evolved with the optic nerve going through the retina (surface light is projected onto near back of the eye). So the area where the optic nerve passes through cant see anything. This isn’t necessary. Cephalopod eyes evolved the optic nerve connection layer to be behind the retina rather than in front of it so they have no blind spot.
So yes, a lot of things that “fix” or “improve” something may make things worse in another way, but some things could be purely beneficial with no downside for most people.
Preventing inflammation at the source is like unilateral disarmament. Great in the lab, with 0 stress and perfect food, but dangerous in the "real world"
Like I’m definitely not saying you’re wrong - there’s a good chance you’ve hit the nail on the head even. But just noting that it’s not axiomatic in today’s environment.
One note is that today humans would be better off without an appendix because we live densely enough that we no longer need a super-secure vault to store gut biome for solo gut repopulation. That was useful when we lived in small tribes where every single person might get dysentery at the same time and no one would be left with a healthy gut biome to share with others. But New Yorkers certainly share all their gut biome with eachother on a daily basis, so the appendix now only contributes appendicitis to our population.