Michael Fossel MD PhD

Dr. Fossel is president of Telocyte, a biotech firm targeting Alzheimer’s disease, intending to begin FDA-sponsored human trials aimed at curing the underlying disease process using telomerase therapy. His latest 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).

Born in 1950, Michael Fossel grew up 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.  He was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and taught neuroanatomy 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 and currently teaches 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 has lectured at NIH and the Smithsonian Institute, and still lectures internationally. He was founding editor of the Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine (now the Rejuvenation Research). His numerous articles on aging and ethics in the Journal of the American Medical Association, In Vivo, and other academic journals have sparked frequent calls for him to speak worldwide to both medical groups and the general public.  He featured prominently at IdeaCity in Toronto in June of 2014 and been interviewed by Singularity 1-on-1 regarding Alzheimer’s therapy. 

In 1996, Dr. Fossel published Reversing Human Aging, 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 now 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, was published in 2004 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 most recent book, The Telomerase Revolution, had a laudatory, full-page article and review in The London Times and the Wall Street Journal named it as one of the year’s best science books. It gives a clear explanation of how aging and age-related diseases work, and why we believe that we can now intervene in a novel and far more effective way. www.telocyte.com