Sipping from the Firehose of Longevity News

DEEP DIVE

Sipping From the Firehose of Longevity News

By Esther Landhuis

A veteran science journalist explains why lifespan research is often sensationalized and misunderstood.

“Genes May Control Your Longevity, However Healthily You Live,” blared The New York Times. “The Secret to Long Life? It Could Be in the Genes After All, Say Scientists,” announced The Guardian. Both outlets were covering new research from the journal Science, which found that more than half of a person’s lifespan comes down to their genes — more than double the genetic contribution scientists had previously attributed to a long life.

As a veteran science and health journalist with a PhD in immunology, my attention was piqued by these headlines. Does a healthy lifestyle — good sleep, nutrition, exercise and strong relationships — really determine less than half of our lifespan, I wondered? Yet again, I saw this study was getting picked up by media outlets and social media influencers. And if I, with years of experience conducting and decoding scientific research, was perplexed by this latest longevity news, how could the average person be expected to make sense of it?

Non-scientists tend to learn about results, not process. Results are the lines on a graph, the final sentences of the abstract, the bite-sized nuggets in news headlines. That makes science appear as a series of logical steps connecting question A and answer B. But appearances can be deceiving. New findings don’t necessarily change what we know; rather, they add to what we need to understand.

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Talk to any scientist and they’ll tell you that research is a journey into the unknown, fraught with twists, turns, failures and disappointments. A researcher can spend years in that cloud of confusion — repeating an experiment again and again, troubleshooting methods, trying new reagents, reconsidering assumptions, pushing, pivoting, wondering. Eventually, with perseverance and well-timed luck, they will emerge at point C.

Whereas results are bullet points and short lines, process is the convoluted, spaghetti-like path to a fresh insight. “Once you see it, it becomes obvious,” says Uri Alon, a systems biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and senior author of the attention-grabbing heritability study, who demystified the true, messier nature of science in a TED talk.

What’s also not seen by the general public is how a scientific study becomes a news story. Here’s how it works: The most newsworthy studies in the most prestigious journals get an embargoed press release — a research summary that journalists see in advance under the strict condition that they do not publish or broadcast their story until a specified date and time. The embargo allows reporters to prepare their pieces for release coinciding with the study’s publication in the scientific or medical journal.

But the embargo system creates constraints. Since top media outlets aim for same-day publication, reporters must read the paper, identify and interview independent experts, and draft and revise their article within a short period — often a week or less — which can lead to errors, information gaps and sensational headlines that generate high readership, the bread and butter of online media organizations.

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“A slow, steady building toward some truth that we’re seeking.”

To understand the process-oriented nature of scientific research, consider the backstory of the heritability study — something I learned from Alon months after the media hoopla.

Alon heads a multidisciplinary research group that uses mathematical modeling to make sense of large biomedical datasets. When he started working on aging a decade ago, widely cited research had estimated “heritability” — lifespan that can be attributed to genetics rather than environment or other factors —  to be far lower, around 25 percent. That estimate came from a landmark 1996 study of Danish twins. More recent analyses of multigenerational data from family trees suggested that long life was only 6 to 16 percent due to genetics. 

Alon was perplexed. Long life appeared to run in families. Other research supported that hunch. When scientists crunched numbers from a half century of twin studies (a method to isolate environmental from genetic effects) — investigating body weight, immune cell counts, temperament, IQ, blood pressure and some 17,000 other human traits — the average heritability for these traits was around 50 percent. And in analyses of cross-bred wild mice, calculations of lifespan heritability converged on similar figures (38 to 55 percent). 

Still, the longstanding tenet of textbooks, news articles, podcasts and scientific talks upheld a much lower genetic contribution to human lifespan. “I believed the dogma,” Alon told me.

In the late 2010s, his lab was analyzing life-extending interventions with an aging model that estimated death based on how fast an organism accumulated and cleared damaged cells. To set parameters for their model, the team turned to the Danish twin cohort to gauge the extent to which damage production and removal rates vary among people. 

But when they looked closely at the dataset — 2,872 pairs of twins born 1870 to 1900 — something caught them by surprise: Rather than heart disease or cancer, common causes of mortality today, many in the late-19th century sample had their lives cut short by tuberculosis, pneumonia and cholera. A fair number of women didn’t make it through childbirth — and one in five infants did not survive childhood. These external circumstances turned out to be the leading causes of death in that cohort. 

If a lot of people were dying from infections and accidents, “Who cares how long your parents lived?” Alon says.

This insight raised an intriguing possibility. Since those oft-cited longevity studies had not categorized people according to how they died, only when they died, could it be that extrinsic causes of death muddied the analyses and accounted for their low estimates of lifespan heritability?

To formally address this new question, Alon and his coworkers analyzed newer data — a set of Swedish twins born 1920 to 1935. Then they reanalyzed the older data after correcting for deaths by accidents, infections and other extrinsic causes. With this mathematical adjustment, the older Danish twin data as well as the newer Swedish twin cohort and additional data from siblings of U.S. centenarians all produced lifespan heritability estimates around 50 percent.

That was the figure that dominated science news headlines on January 29, 2026, covering Alon’s journal publication. The results don’t invalidate past studies. “Heritability is a statistic that applies to a particular population in a particular environment at a particular time,” the authors wrote. But the background for how and why the scientists came to this figure was absent from the mainstream news reporting, likely leaving some health-conscious readers bewildered.

Laura Carstensen, a professor of psychology and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, cautions against seeing a publicized study as a seismic shift. “It doesn’t mean now we’ve solved the puzzle. It means we have one more piece,” she says. “That’s how science works. It’s a slow, steady building toward some truth that we’re seeking.”

“It doesn’t mean now we’ve solved the puzzle. It means we have one more piece.”

“A study is just a study. It’s only able to look at what it looked at,” agrees Emily Laber-Warren, who directs health and science reporting at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. “That is something I didn’t understand before I was a health journalist.”

Making New Neurons

Another recent longevity study that got heavy media attention answered a long-standing question: Does the human brain generate new nerve cells — a process known as neurogenesis — throughout adulthood?

Previously, researchers had looked for neurogenesis by staining postmortem human brains with molecular markers that have been identified in mice. However, results have been inconsistent. Some scientists think those markers could pick up additional cells besides the newborn neurons they wanted to measure.

In the new analysis, researchers led by Orly Lazarov, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, studied cells from postmortem human brains with a fundamentally different approach. She and her colleagues let the data reveal answers without relying on predetermined markers. “The methods we used are unbiased,” she told me.

First, they used whole-genome sequencing — a procedure that reads all the chemical “letters” (A, C, T and G) in a cell’s DNA — to find which genes lit up. In the same cells, they also determined which genes were about to light up, using a different technique that measures how tightly the DNA coils at those sites. (DNA isn’t just a sequence of letters; it’s a dynamic, three-dimensional structure. Individual strands of the double helix loosen and tighten to allow certain genes to be activated or repressed.) The team then used machine learning to parse those reams of gene activity and DNA structure data to identify cells that show a “signature” of neurogenesis.

The postmortem brains came from four groups: young adults, older adults without cognitive impairment, adults with Alzheimer’s pathology, and “SuperAgers” — a term describing people 80 years or older with cognition similar to people in their fifties. Since the older cohorts were comparable in age, “that allowed us to show that the signature of neurogenesis is associated with cognitive function,” Lazarov says. Individuals who stayed remarkably sharp in old age grew more new neurons.

Unfortunately, this insight is not captured in this CNN headline about the study: “Scientists Discover a Key to Staying Mentally Sharp in Old Age.” Since headlines don’t capture context and nuance, and most people won’t read past the headline, that leaves many readers struggling to appreciate how neurogenesis relates to cognitive health for older adults.

Actual Science vs. Wellness Influencers

Longevity research published by academic scientists occupies a small corner of the longevity news market. Much of it is devoted to wellness, disease prevention and “anti-aging” products — a global market with an estimated value of billions of dollars.

News of this kind appears in a growing number of mainstream outlets — including Forbes, Business Insider, Time, Scientific American and The Economist — a trend entrenched in demographics. With an estimated 4.1 million Americans turning 65 annually, the pivot toward prevention has particular appeal for people who want to live well, free from chronic disease or disability, as long as possible — a concept known as healthspan. This group prioritizes longevity and healthspan because they have leisure time and can afford products for self-care and optimization. 

In a survey of 8,750 U.S. adults conducted last September by the Pew Research Center, attitudes about aging differed by income levels. Among older adults in the top earnings tier, 61 percent said they’re aging extremely well or very well. They also tend to be more active in civic groups, clubs, hobbies and socializing with friends. In the lower income tier, only 39 percent said they were aging well.

“Longevity research published by academic scientists occupies a small corner of the longevity news market.”

News outlets are going out of their way to engage with this crowd as they seek, but largely fail to find, a new generation of readers. At an upscale downtown hotel in late February, the San Francisco Chronicle held its first-ever, sold-out Aging & Longevity Summit, a livestreamed day of panel discussions with tips on preserving brain health with diet and lifestyle habits, interviews with Bay Area experts in aging and longevity, and a keynote address by the renowned, 71-year-old travel writer Rick Steves.

Recognizing Clickbait

As media coverage of longevity science and wellness news and products ramps up, high-income older adults are prime targets for this information, much of it delivered online.

Everything we do leaves a digital trace, says Gloria Mark, UC Irvine professor of informatics who studies the impact of digital media and wrote the book Attention Span. Algorithms are great at figuring out what information is likely to attract our attention, and fills our social media feeds with that content, she says.

“A lot of pills and products are successful because they tap into people’s desires and what they want to hear.”

Media experts advise news readers to practice heightened awareness. Tamp down your emotions, and take time to notice what’s causing you to click on a notification or headline. A lot of pills and products are successful because “they tap into people’s desires and what they want to hear,” says CUNY’s Laber-Warren.

Much of what we do online is automatic, says Mark. Clickbait tends to be short content that elicits basic emotions — such as fear, anger, surprise — and we react automatically, she says. “We can’t help but do it. That’s the way humans are designed.”

Mark recommends readers stop to recognize these automatic reactions and ask: Is this news of value for me? What am I going to learn from this? Is this a waste of my time? She also advises readers to go to quality news sources that separate science from hype and explain the difference. But Mark warns that clickbait headlines are ubiquitous.

Hasty readers may have seen another recent New York Times headline, “New Research Upends the Argument for a Popular Longevity Supplement,” without spending the time to discover the complex debate about NAD+, an anti-aging supplement with contradictory research processes and results.

“It’s very confusing, all the advice that comes at us,” Laber-Warren says.

As a journalist I tend to ease the firehose by steering clear of embargoed news and writing deeper, more nuanced pieces with longer lead time.

Esther Landhuis is an award-winning San Francisco Bay Area freelance writer with a PhD in immunology; she covers biomedicine in all dimensions.

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