Dr Fossel is the driving force behind Telocyte and has been the leader in proposing the use of telomerase to treat human disease for the past two decades. Born in 1950, Michael Fossel grew up in 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 at Stanford University, where he began studying ageing, emphasizing premature ageing syndromes. Dr. Fossel was a Clinical Professor of Medicine at Michigan State University for almost three decades and taught the Biology of Aging at Grand Valley State University. He has personal experience with a number of biotech companies, both as an inside or angel investor (Geron, Sierra Sciences), an advisor (Geron, Sierra Sciences, Phoenix Biomolecular, Betterhumans, Androcyte, PhysioAge, BioViva), and an executive (Cerner, Double Helix). He is the medical advisor for the Dementia Society of America and 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 the National Institute for Health and the Smithsonian Institute and still lectures at universities, institutes, and conferences internationally. His numerous articles on ageing and ethics in the Journal of the American Medical Association, In Vivo, and other academic journals have sparked discussion and frequent calls for him to speak worldwide to both medical groups and the general public. He is frequently interviewed regarding aging by major media in the US and worldwide. He was a founding editor of Rejuvenation Research. In 1996, Dr Fossel published Reversing Human Aging, the first book to ever describe the medical aspects of extending human telomeres and the potential for curing age-related disease. The book was reviewed favourably in national full-page newspaper articles and Scientific American, as well as being 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 NPR. His magisterial 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 (BenBella Books, 2015), discusses aging, clinical disease, and the prospective FDA clinical trials of telomerase therapy. It has been praised in full page reviews in The London Times and The Australian, as well as being named as one of the best five science books of the year by the Wall Street Journal.
