Michael Fossel

Sectors: Longevity Legends, Science and Academia.

Dr. Fossel is the driving force behind Telocyte and has been the leader in proposing the use of telomerase to treat human disease for the past two decades. Born in 1950, Michael Fossel grew up in New York, and lived in London, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Portland, and Denver. He graduated cum laude from Phillips Exeter Academy, received a joint BA and MA in psychology in four years from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and, after completing a PhD in neurobiology at Stanford University in 1978, went on to finish his MD at Stanford Medical School in two and a half years. Dr. Fossel was a Clinical Professor of Medicine at Michigan State University for almost three decades and taught the Biology of Aging at Grand Valley State University. He has been a member of numerous scientific organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Aging Association (he was their executive director and served on their board of directors), the American Gerontological Society, the American Society on Aging, the American Geriatrics Society, and the Alzheimer’s Association ISTAART, among others. He was founding editor of Rejuvenation Research. In 1996, Dr. Fossel published Reversing Human Aging, the first book to ever describe the medical aspects of extending human telomeres and the potential for curing age-related disease. Still the only medical textbook on the clinical potential of telomerase, it includes in depth discussions of Alzheimer’s disease, the progerias, atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, immune senescence, skin aging, and cancer, as well as the potential for fundamentally new therapies for these diseases using telomerase therapy. His most recent book, The Telomerase Revolution (BenBella Books, 2015), discusses aging, clinical disease, and the prospective FDA clinical trials of telomerase therapy.