Tell me what you know! The tips on the ends of shoelaces are called "aglets"; their true purpose is sinister

A useful list of misspelled words:

So if chromosomes are shoelaces -- perhaps the scrunchy kind that the Doktorling Sonja liked a decade or so ago -- then the aiglets at the tips to stop them unravelling are telomeres. I don't know where velcro straps fit into this analogy. Anyway, just as telomeres get shorter during each generation of stem-cell replication in an animal's lifetime, so the aiglets abrade away while shoelaces reproduce and bootstraps lift themselves, which is the only thing stopping shoelaces from overpopulating their ecological niche.

Leading to the conclusion that since aging happens, and telomere-shortening happens, then the latter must be causing the former.* It follows through a process of geometric logic that crocheting telomere extensions onto the ends of chromosomes would bring rejuvenation, just as cleaning up bear scat in the woods prevents bear attacks.**

Our attempt to test this theory in the Riddled Research Laboratory by inserting a tiny French-knitting spool into the nucleus of every cell was not an entire success, as the nanotech was not up to the challenge of turning the heel, let alone of closing the toe, and the spool continued until every nucleus filled up with an endless muffler of nucleotides. Still, the true mad scientist knows better than to obsess about "What could go wrong" and "Ordained limits to human knowledge."

Bonus nucleotide muffler

"J'ai glet rien", Another Kiwi agreed.

Naturally we are not well-pleased with the discovery that other people are selling herbal extracts to stimulate the telomerase enzyme complex and lengthen the telomeres naturally (not to mention the herbal supplements that inhibit telomerase and cure cancer). In the case of Tony MacKenzie of Advantage Import-Export, the extract is Cycloastragenol a.k.a. HTA98 a.k.a. TA-65 a.k.a. TAT2, from Astragalus membranaceus roots. Do not buy Chinese-sourced cycloastragenol capsules, they are the work of frauds and unscrupulous hucksters. The genuine product is expensive because the plant is rare and hard work to obtain, providing us with opportunities to joke about "Per Ardua ad Astragalus".

Tony is also instigator of The Mackenzie Protocol™ [motto: "Anti-aging research on a budget!"]. As such, he offers

• a telomere-length testing service, FREE to consumers of his TA-65 (so they can tell whether they need it);

• Trust-building Oxytocin Spray for inducing gullibility;
• Vegetarian Carnosine [a bipeptide obtained only from flesh];
• Own-brand longevity formulas for resellers [details of the formulation left for the reseller to devise]; and
• Ajna Third-eye-opening transdermal spray.

Tony seriously needs to contact the coherent biophoton brain-laser crowd, because what is the use of opening it if your Third Eye does not shoot out feckin' laser beams?

Tony's qualifications are not weighted heavily towards academic recognition, but he does boast of receiving "a certificate of recognition of lifetime achievement from Donald Trump"; also "a course completion certficate for Advanced Cellular Health" from German HIV-denying grifter Rath. That brought him to the attention of people who monitor HIV-denialism. A few years ago he was issuing bumptious, censorious legal threats against skeptical bloggers, but they do not seem to have progressed.

Tony's chief competitor, and the main person pimping Cycloastragenol, would be William Andrews, whose self-penned and surprisingly untrue Whackyweedia entry emphasises puffery in Popular Science in preference to citing more academic journals. Having somewhere acquired the title of "Discoverer of Telomerase" (and taken the credit for the Karolinska Institute's decision to award the 2009 Nobel Prize to Blackburn, Greider and Szostak), Andrews passed through New Zealand earlier this year -- as the guest of local Chase Life Extension Foundation -- to spread the gospel about telomerase activation.

Oddly enough, Cycloastragenol is no longer in the picture, with a "TAM-818 product" taking its place, the additional characters perhaps making it more effective than mere TA-65 or TAT2. Evidently this is because new pharmaceutical products may show efficacy, but they must pass regulatory tests; whereas established botanicals might be worthless but have compensatory advantages.

In their initial conversation John suggested that Bill could bypass the prohibitive FDA cost/delay and regulation of a drug rollout by creating a nutraceutical formulation sourcing chemical compounds from natural botanicals of Chinese, Ayurvedic and European origin. These botanical ingredients are labeled by the FDA as GRAS – generally regarded as safe.

The shift in emphasis gave us "Product B" from Andrews' company -- "a proprietary blend of some 30 herbal products such as thistle, horny goat weed, ginseng, and green tea" -- which may or may not be related to TAM-818.

In a parallel development, Tony MacKenzie has also moved on from the telomerase side of the street and is now aboard the GcMAF scamwagon!

Synthetic peptide GcMAF to be made available worldwide by The Longevity Revolution™

This is good news, not just for us, but also for all those customers concerned about the human-plasma origins of the chromatography fraction sold as GcMAF in some circles; or about the magic yogurt in which a proprietary ecosystem of bacteria and yeast have turned bovine proteins into the human immune-boosting molecule WITH INEVITABLE RESULTS.

It it had been me who finally characterised this nebulous and ill-defined molecule by reverse-engineering its amino-acid sequence, I would have published it for the fame and the fortune, but fortunately not everyone is as mercenary.***

H/t to Dora, Harriet Hall, James Coyne

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Bonus eye-lasers:

Bonus alternative title:

Come, Mr Telomere, Telomere Bananas

* Telomere-truncation has become a hot topic for churnalism, with enhanced interrogation of data -- justified with an invocation of the Ticking-Biological-Clock scenario -- to create headlinable studies... which is how we learned that high-fructose beverages accelerate aging (as long as one examines a sufficiently restricted subset of data).

** Some would opt for "lesses" rather than "scat", as specific to the bear and the boar as beasts of raven and prey, but at Riddled we are not quite that pedantic.

*** Whoops! Full sequence is known.