Michael Fossel

Dr. Fossel is president of Telocyte, a biotech firm targeting Alzheimer’s and other age-relaed diseases. They plan FDA-sponsored human trials aimed at curing the underlying age-related disease process using telomerase therapy.

Author of more than 100 books, chapters, and academic articles, he was born in 1950, grew up New York, and lived in London, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Portland, Denver, and Michigan. 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. He achieved perfect 800 GRE scores and was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship, then taught neuroanatomy, experimental design, and other courses at Stanford University, where he began studying aging, emphasizing premature aging syndromes. Dr. Fossel was a Clinical Professor of Medicine at Michigan State University for almost three decades, then worked as a global healthcare consultant.

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 has lectured at NIH, the Smithsonian Institute, and Harvard Business School, as well as at universities and conferences globally. He was founding editor of the Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine (now Rejuvenation Research). His numerous articles on aging and ethics in the Journal of the American Medical Association, In Vivo, Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, and other academic journals have sparked frequent calls for him to give keynotes and to chair conferences.

Dr. Fossel published Reversing Human Aging (1996), the first book to describe how aging works, how to reverse it, and the consequences of doing so. The book was reviewed favorably in national full page newspaper articles and in Scientific American. It has been published in six languages. He has appeared on Good Morning America, ABC 20/20, NBC Extra, Fox Network, CNN, the BBC, the Discovery Channel, and regularly on NPR. This was the first book to ever describe the medical aspects of extending human telomeres, reversing aging, and curing age-related disease.

His academic textbook, Cells, Aging, and Human Disease (2004) was published by Oxford University Press. An extensive look at the field, with well over four thousand references, it reviews the entire fields of telomere biology and cell senescence as they apply to human clinical diseases and aging. 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 book, The Telomerase Revolution, discusses prospective FDA clinical trials of telomerase therapy as an effective intervention for Alzheimer’s disease. His book was lauded in both The London Times and the Wall Street Journal (as one of the five best science books of 2015). It is now out in 7 languages and 11 global editions.

He is the editor and senior author of Aging: How Aging Works, How We Can Reverse Aging, and Prospects for Curing Aging Diseases (Academic Press, 2024), with global coauthors from UCSF, Mayo Clinic (5 authors), Lunds University, Swansea University, University of Innsbruck (2 authors), Detroit Medical Center, Wayne State School of Medicine, University of Wisconsin, Harvard Medical School, Pondicherry University, and Houston Methodist.