STANDARD LONGEVITY

For everyone · 16 min · Worth watching

What that viral TEDx talk on exosomes and ageing actually claims

Dr. Tunc Tiryaki — Plastic and reconstructive surgeon; TEDxAthens speaker

Made by Dr. Tunc Tiryaki · TEDx Talks · December 14, 2023. Their work, their channel, their words — we are only the signpost. Plays from YouTube; nothing is requested from them until you press play.

This is the talk. Not a talk — for most people arriving at this subject, it is the one they have already seen, and it has been watched well over a million times. If you want to know what the general public believes about exosomes and ageing, this is where a good share of that belief came from.

We are not going to summarise it, and not only because the licence forbids it. A sixteen-minute talk compressed into four paragraphs by the company that sells the material is not a service to anybody. Watch it whole or not at all.

Read TED's note before you read ours

TED attached a notice to this video themselves. It is quoted above, unedited. Two things in it are worth slowing down for: personal views, and emerging field of study. A talk on that stage carries an authority the stage lends it, and TED is telling you not to mistake the lighting for the evidence.

What to watch for

  • Where the talk moves from mechanism to outcome. Mechanism in a dish is well-evidenced and interesting; what it means for a person is a separate claim needing separate evidence.
  • Whether a population is ever named — how many people, over what period, measured against what.
  • The difference between what he has observed in his own practice and what has been established in trials. Both are worth hearing; they are not the same kind of thing.

Source licence: CC BY-NC-ND (TEDx standard terms). Embedded and credited; not reproduced, not summarised, not adapted.

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