What did I write about?

Aging besets all of us whether Cristiano Ronaldo, President Biden, you or me. Of course the consequences of aging depend on your age whether you are 80, 60, 40, or 20. As people live longer thanks to modern medicine, the incidence of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease (which are fundamentally aging diseases in which older cells are dying off) will increase dramatically despite improvements in prevention and care.

Yesterday I was inspired by an excellent blog post I read to write my own. I vaguely remembered (my memory is not what it used to be) that I had just opened an account on Ghost to try something new and different from Blogger. But when I clicked on the bookmark, I was confronted with this:

So off went an angry email to the Ghost customer service, and this morning the representative replied and helpfully reminded me that I was on a three month free trial and that it had expired (i.e. I needed to upgrade to the paid "Pro" account). The site and its content had been deleted (with no warning). I completely understand and so I have returned to Blogger whose free trial lasts forever. 

Then I pondered the existential question of what content had been deleted? I had no idea. My best guess was that it was about President Claudine Gay and her unjust ouster from Harvard by reactionary conservative forces who mounted a campaign based on racist/sexist allegations of "plagiarism". One prominent example of her "plagiarism" was using the verbatim wording from another paper to describe a specific technique as if scientists don't cut and paste their methods section.

I had the insight to go through my Mastodon posts, where I don't post as much as Twitter or Threads, to see if I had tweeted out the blog post, and found the following:

So best I can reconstruct is that the post was on an article by Dana Smith about "Why Do We Age?". The explainer describes the hallmarks of aging listing some key factors. My response was that all of the factors likely contribute in a significant fashion to aging. Further I am a big proponent of the free radical theory of aging which posits that "organisms age because cells accumulate free radical damage over time." This damage can be direct or indirect and affects all biological macromolecules, not just DNA although DNA is probably the most important target.