Thread by @ydeigin

So the Weinstein household is “a lot skeptical of pills”. Why? Based on Bret’s grad school “discovery” that lab mice have longer telomeres than wild type mice and so he made the leap that this somehow translates into a greatly improved capacity of tolerating toxic insults.

The next giant leap for Weinsteinkind is that this greatly improved capacity of tolerating toxic insults translates into toxicity being somehow underestimated for approved pharmaceuticals. Bret, even if lab mice *were* more tolerant of toxicity, have you heard of Phase I studies?

Phase I studies are clinical trials in healthy human volunteers designed to assess the drug safety in — wait for it — humans, precisely because animal testing does cannot guarantee human safety.

Moreover, for a drug to be allowed for Phase I studies, it must be proven safe in MULTIPLE animal species. Anyone with even a hint of drug dev experience knows this. That you didn’t bother to look into it but decided to fear approved meds based on your conjecture speaks volumes.

Now, concerning your conjecture that longer telomeres somehow better protect from drug toxicity. This is just ridiculous. Toxic substances kill not because of short telomeres. Telomere length also does not determine reparative capacity.

I won’t even get into the fact that fast-dividing tissues, progenitor cell populations, and stem cells all have active telomerase expression, which can elongate telomeres on demand.

Finally, even your “discovery” that lab mice somehow have critically longer telomeres than wild type mice is wrong and irrelevant. Tlmr len is highly variable even bw individuals, and it doesn’t affect much. Moreover, bw species, those with SHORTER telomeres actually live longer.

Many animal species have much longer telomeres than humans, and both mice and rats have very long telomeres, but squirrels have even longer ones. Have they been lab bred too?

In conclusion, it is very telling to see how you’ve been clinging to one erroneous conclusion for many years, and have built a whole narrative of lack of drug safety based on it. This explains well your fear of GMOs and “non-natural” chemicals. But this is not science.

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