I always believed in rejuvenation. So, I shuddered at a recent Stanford University medical paper about the human timetable for aging. It concluded that people grow older not gradually but in two clumps, approximately when we turn 44 and 60 years old. The researchers reached this conclusion after tracking the blood samples of 108 individuals and compiling profiles of their “-omics” — shorthand for biological data based on microbiomes, proteomes, lipidomes, transcriptomes, etc. That would be the microbes at work in our guts and organs, as well as the proteins and lipids at the cellular level, plus the genes transcribed into RNA molecules.

This so-called multiomic approach sounded terribly authoritative and terrifying for someone already headed toward his 66th birthday. Was it too late to be healthy and vigorous? In January 2025, I resolved to defy the study.

That’s just the beginning of Howard Chua-Eoan’s journey that led to an epiphany about the parts of life that make physical decline bearable.

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