I knew I’d officially become a “longevity influencer” this month when a company called Generation Lab reached out to offer me the chance to write about—and even receive—their new rejuvenation treatment, an injectable combination of two existing drugs which they call 1 Generation.

This wasn’t just any antiaging treatment, either. A company fact sheet says that it “blocks the systemic spread of aging in the bloodstream, reawakens the body’s own repair mechanism and restores health and youth to multiple tissues.”

The exclusive offer to join a “private cohort” receiving access to the treatment was being “extended to a limited number of people whose judgment on the science we trust, under close physician supervision.”

“There’s a long wait list including a lot of celebrities, well-known people, people who you have heard of,” Generation Lab’s CEO Alina Su told me in a conference call. “So we’re super excited to, like, create this drug and [are] letting you know that this first longevity therapeutic in [the] human body is here and it’s actually working.”

This was all clearly a marketing campaign and, like most other claims in the world of longevity medicine, probably too good to be true. What’s more, Generation Lab wouldn’t tell me what the two drugs are, making the proposition hard to take seriously.

Yet this pitch got my interest. The reason? I am a longtime follower of Generation Lab’s irascible scientific founder, Irina Conboy, a take-no-guff specialist in the bizarre, but scientifically fruitful, practice of joining together the circulatory systems of old and young lab animals.

The procedure, called parabiosis, or heterochronic blood exchange, is one of the few things actually proven to make an old animal act younger. 

But you can’t go through life attached by the veins to a younger person. So the quest has been to find practical ways to mimic those benefits. 

And that is something Conboy says she’s now achieved by hitting on a combination of two existing drugs that produce youthful effects—but without the need for any bodily fluid exchange. 

Over the last two months, Conboy has been taking the drug combination and feeling quite a bit better and more energetic, she says. So have a handful of other insiders, including Su, the company’s 26-year-old CEO, as well as Conboy’s husband and scientific collaborator Michael Conboy.

The company’s public relations staffer sent me a spreadsheet of the supposed benefits experienced by the participants, including improved vision in a 64-year-old female, longer landscaping sessions for a 59-year-old man, longer badminton games, improved hand grip, better erections than with Viagra, as well as “increased bowel movements.”

Obviously, any age-reversal drug that works would be the best-selling product of all time. The problem is that none have ever been shown to do that. And Generation’s approach to evidence raises several red flags. For instance, Su says the company now plans to launch a larger study, involving a hundred or more people. However, others are being offered the drug before firm evidence of a benefit is in.

In addition, the trial will be led by longevity doctors who practice alternative medicine. These include Matt Cook, founder of a network of clinics called BioReset Medical. Cook’s clinics offer what I would characterize as unproven treatments, such as stem-cell injections. A 2021 article reported he’d recommended covid-19 treatments designated as “fraudulent” by the FDA. Those included inhaling amniotic fluid from a nebulizer.

In a phone call, Cook says he initially agreed to prescribe the combination to Conboy and a few other insiders. (Everyone involved, he says, is a member of the same “happening” Silicon Valley scene around life extension.) “My confidence this was going to work was a zero. Like, I did not believe it was actually going to work,” says Cook. That is because “it’s two safe, generic drugs that are not even longevity drugs.”  

But Cook, who also took the combination, says there was an effect. “And I have to tell you, it was the most surprising thing that ever happened to me,” he says. After taking the weekly injections, he experienced a sense of mental clarity that lasted for a day, and then several days. The other subjects, he says, reported a sense of well-being, as well as old aches and pains that evaporated. 

“There was a fairly significant broad set of symptoms that doesn’t really match what either of the drugs do,” he says. “So it’s interesting. [But] I have many more questions than I have answers … I still feel like I don’t understand exactly what the mechanism is.”

Prior to joining Generation Lab full time in 2025, Irina Conboy had a long career at the University of California, Berkeley, where she made her name via a widely cited series of experiments aimed at learning   whether the characteristics of age, or youth, could be transferred between animals via the bloodstream. In 2005, for instance, she surgically connected two-month-old mice to very aged ones, finding that the old animals’ ability to heal from injury dramatically improved.

This suggested that young blood must contain specific, powerful molecular signals capable of restoring the regenerative capacity of an old animal. As researchers zeroed in on candidate signals, several startups, including Elevian, a Harvard spinout, and Alkahest, tied to Stanford University scientists, were able to raise millions to pursue treatments for stroke or Alzheimer’s. However, those efforts still have not hit commercial paydirt.

Although it’s clear that young blood is good for old mice, scientists also know the reverse is true: Even a single exchange of plasma from an aged mouse has powerful, negative effects on a younger animal. That means that in the battle of age versus youth, says Conboy, “old blood dominates.”  

Conboy next tried a new approach. Instead of giving old animals young blood, in 2020 she removed the plasma (the part of the blood without cells) of old animals and replaced it with a neutral mixture of albumin and salt water. This was like pressing the Delete key on the swarm of hormones, antibodies, and other molecules released by the aged body.

The reset had even stronger rejuvenating effects than sharing a young animal’s blood, and within two years, Conboy had tried it on human volunteers who agreed to have almost half their blood volume removed and thrown away.

Longevity clinics have been quick to follow Conboy’s research. Some began offering “therapeutic plasma exchange” as a wellness intervention, for prices of up to $10,000 a session. One doctor that offers it, Jeffrey Gladden, says that after seeing Conboy’s publications, he raced to California to meet her and to get the procedure himself.

By the end of 2025, Conboy had retired from Berkeley and joined her startup full time. Generation Lab has been selling an aging diagnostic test, but Conboy still wanted to find a drug that could mimic the benefits of plasma exchange. To do that, she started using a testing system she’d codeveloped, which allows researchers to bathe human cells kept in a microfluidic device with blood serum from old people.

The new device, described in a paper this year, allowed her to quickly test her intuitions about what drugs might work. “This is an awesome screen or experimental system which allows us then to ask a question: If tissue becomes old in the presence of old blood, which molecule or combination of molecules will prevent that and allow tissue to remain young, even when the circulatory milieu is old?”

She says 1 Generation works by stimulating cells to regenerate and, simultaneously, neutralizing the old-age factors in a person’s bloodstream. “It allows human cells to remain young even when they are in the presence of old people’s blood serum,” says Conboy.

Without knowing what the drugs are, I can’t give my own opinion about their promise. But some doctors working with Generation Lab expressed surprise that the combination would work. “I will say right now, candidly, it’s an unknown how it will play out. But there’s certainly a lot of enthusiasm based on the quality of her work in the past,” says Gladden, the longevity doctor, who says his Texas clinic will also be involved in the study. “I am skeptical and optimistic at the same time.”

Pressed on why the names of the drugs remain confidential, Su said it’s to avoid imitators. That’s important because Generation doesn’t own the molecules. Instead, it will seek to quickly run a clinical trial, taking advantage of an FDA process that gives companies a short period of exclusivity, perhaps three years, if they can show that a combination of existing drugs has a new use.

In the meantime, the company’s effort to generate buzz is having some success. Generation is hosting an August 28 invite-only event that will feature talks by George Church, the noted Harvard University synthetic biologist, as well as researchers from Anthropic, whose CEO, Dario Amodei, has been saying AI will cure all disease within a few years. In an email, Church says he was also offered a chance to take the drug combination.

“People are clamoring for it,” Cook, from BioReset Medical, told me. He says his office has started getting calls “from high-end doctors, venture capitalists, and people in this community who are kind of biohackers.”

“It’s high-level influencer-type people,” he adds.

As for me, no, I won’t be taking the drugs any time soon. Not until I know what they are.

Correction 8/27/2026: A previous version of this story incorrectly said patients would pay to join the larger trial of a proposed longevity drug. While patients can pay to get the drug from a doctor, the larger trial will be free to patients and sponsored by Generation Lab.

EVs account for under 10% of total new-vehicle sales in the US, and the numbers are declining. From a climate perspective, that’s pretty dismal, especially because the transportation sector is the single biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the country. 

One thing that could help turn that around? Slate Auto’s new truck—a vehicle that seems to buck every convention about selling cars in the fully loaded, range-obsessed US market.  

The company is going all in on simplicity, to the point of austerity. The Slate is a tiny, two-door pickup that’s shorter than a Honda Civic. Much of the media coverage has obsessed over the fact that the base model’s windows use hand cranks, a feature straight out of the 20th century.

Slate is also breaking away from other EV manufacturers’ efforts to compete with gas-powered vehicles on range. The truck sports a small lithium iron phosphate battery, ringing in at 65 kilowatt-hours, and its quoted top range is just 205 miles. For comparison, the most basic Tesla Model 3 can go over 320 miles on a charge.

By accepting a shorter range and forgoing the frills that Americans have come to expect in vehicles, Slate is able to offer the base model of its truck for less than $25,000. Some customers will choose to upgrade their truck with optional add-ons, like a Bluetooth stereo system, vinyl wraps, or even power windows. But the price will still likely come in well below the roughly $50,000 average for a new vehicle in the US.

It might seem an odd choice to go so small and simple in a market that’s increasingly sizing up—but the status quo hasn’t exactly been working for EV makers. A few years back, the hero for US automotive electrification was supposed to be the Ford F-150 Lightning. Announced in 2021, it was an electric version of the country’s best-selling vehicle. 

But Ford discontinued the truck in December 2025, just four years after its introduction. It’s not entirely the Lightning’s fault: The second Trump administration slashed tax credits and other support designed to boost EVs. 

The Lightning was also plagued by price increases. The base model cost roughly $40,000 when shipments started in 2022; during its final year, prices topped $54,000. One factor behind the increase was its massive battery; to reach an almost 300-mile range, the truck needed a battery with a capacity roughly twice that of Slate’s truck. 

That obsession with range is largely unwarranted. While Americans have historically chased distance, the average driver puts under 35 miles a day on the odometer, and nearly 90% of trips in a personal vehicle are 20 miles or less. 

Surveys of EV drivers show a similar trend: One recent study found that people tend to use less than 20% of their EV’s range on a typical day. 

The notion that drivers need far less range than they think they do might sound a lot more persuasive these days—even for Americans who tend to buy cars for their longest road trip instead of their everyday errands. Roughly half the country is struggling to pay for basic necessities such as gas and groceries, and 95% of Americans believe we’re in an affordability crisis, according to a recent Harris poll. An inexpensive vehicle that allows you to skip the gas station sounds like an attractive prospect. 

Affordable EVs have already found willing buyers in other parts of the world—even with reduced range. China currently has over 40 million EVs and plug-in hybrids on the roads, and roughly half of new vehicles sold are electric. On average, new EVs sold in China in 2025 had a range of just 247 miles. For the US over the same period, the average was 329 miles. (Europe falls between the two, at 281 miles.)

Slate is set to start delivering on preorders in late 2026. Its factory will have a capacity of 100,000 vehicles in the first year and 150,000 soon after. Thousands of customers have already put in preorders, according to the company.

Some people obviously believe in the truck’s prospects: Investors, including Jeff Bezos, have put nearly $1.4 billion into the company over three major funding rounds. Ford is jumping (back) into this space soon too. The automaker is working on its own small electric truck, which is expected to debut in 2027 at a retail price of around $30,000.

The key question that will determine Slate’s success or failure is whether drivers can get on board with a small, short-range vehicle for the sake of its price tag. At this moment, I’d bet the answer is yes.