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Tell Elon Musk aging is a disease.

We're not Panglossians at BioViva. Far from it. You can't do anything you want, and that's a problem. Gene therapy is here to lift limitations, giving you the freedom to live your best life.

The 10,000-hour rule, as several studies have shown, is a myth.

Nevertheless, more than one TED Talk waxes poetically about it. The truth is some people can spend several thousand hours playing the cello and make very little progress.

Will they improve? Sure.

Will they be ready for Carnegie Hall? No.

They may never be ready for the local string quartet. A recent article in The Atlantic notes:

 “In sports, a meta-analysis showed that practice accounts for only 18 percent of the difference between two peoples' performance. Some people are just better at certain things, and no amount of practice will change that.”

We added the italics. With or without them, it's a pretty stinging indictment of an old dogma that was, nevertheless, a dogma of hope - but it's pretty obviously wrong. Look at your body. Chances are you aren't built to be a jockey or an NFL lineman - chances are you fall between the two. Gross morphology is just the starting point for success in a given sport.

Gross morphology is just the starting point for success in either of these endeavors. Rest assured, constellations of genes need to be in alignment to produce a top performer. There are plenty of little people who don't have the coordination to ride horses and plenty of big dudes who can't tackle.

Whether it's chess or tennis, your genes play a huge role in determining how far you can go. It's not fair, but it's true. The aging process grinds away at our ability to regenerate - to recover from hard workouts or long workdays. A young brain in a young body is what will let you get to and stay at the top of your game.

That's why we have CMV.

BioViva doesn't think things have to be this way. What separates us from other animals is the capacity to see a future different from our present. When we surrender to irrational pessimism, we give up what makes us human.

Our patent represents a giant leap forward for the most transformative technology of the twenty-first century because it offers real hope. Pandora's Box (it was a large jar, but Erasmus somehow mistranslated pithos) is a weird story.

Along with all the evils Zeus could hurl at an unsuspecting mortal, the large jar held hope. Whether this is the result of yet another (albeit more forgivable) mistranslation is unimportant; what's clear is misplaced hope is damaging. Through a modern lens (and perhaps through an ancient one too), it's a morsel of dark humor.

Hoping an impending economic crisis like the Silver Tsunami will go away, for instance, is asinine. Hoping humans will overcome their limitations through positive thinking alone is also, obviously, harmful. This is not to disparage other methods, only to say that gene therapy has the potential to raise the many ceilings nature has put over our heads.

In the case of aging global populations, it is paramount we do so as quickly as possible. We have a new set of circumstances that need to be addressed with a new set of tools, like BioViva's CMV vector. 

References and Suggested Reading

Chang, Y. H., and David M. Lane. "It takes more than practice and experience to become a chess master: Evidence from a child prodigy and adult chess players." J. Expert 1 (2018): 6-34.

Khazan, Olga. “The Difficulty in New Hobbies in Adulthood.” The Atlantic, 19 Mar. 2022, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/adult-new-hobbies/627099.

Shermer, Michael. "The 10,000-hour rule debunked: The ports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance by David Epstein." Skeptic (Altadena, CA) 18.4 (2013): 57-59.