The “Klothos Hormone” Is Real: the Science in The Old Guard Film
Okay, so I did recently go off in a post because my first reaction to science in a film is skepticism. They always screw up the evil scientists by not making them have real science. But the Old Guard is different! They’re the best film ever. They used real science.
I decided to search scientific articles for the term “klothos hormone” to see if it was a real thing, and SciFinder did not disappoint. Take this quote from an abstract of this paper:
Klotho is a transmembrane protein, which can be shed and act as a circulating hormone and is involved in regulating cellular calcium levels and inhibition of the PI3K/AKT pathway. As a longevity hormone, it protects normal cells from oxidative stress, and as a tumor suppressor it inhibits growth of cancer cells.
So it turns out that it is a real hormone that is shown to affect aging in mice.
The other scientific aging area mentioned in the movie is telomere extension. Telomeres, the repeating end caps of our chromosomes that help prevent cancer, are considered important to aging. This is why lobsters are essentially immortal: they regenerate their telomeres and cannot die from aging. An example of research on this topic can be found in this article discussing the role of a specific protein in preserving telomere length.
This begs the question: could Dr. Kozack be looking into the intersection of klothos and telomeres? We can answer by asking a related question: is this an area of research? When I search for both “telomere extension” and “klothos” on one of the best scientific databases, there are no results. (the fact that I am head-over-heels for SciFinder and dread loosing it if I ever leave academia is a tale for another time...)
When I broadened my search for any overlap between “telomere” and “klothos”, we did get somewhere. However, there were only 96 results which either means this is a new area for the field of aging research or these are going to be review articles. I started looking at the most recent publications for the answer.
The most recent article (link may be broken, let me know if it is) discusses kidney disease and does not deal with these two as connected research topics. There was another recent article about kidney disease that cited both as distinct concepts. As far as I can tell from my skimming, there is no research where people are looking at the effects of the klothos protein/hormone on telomeres. Does this mean it is an unpromising avenue? Not necessarily, but probably.
This does NOT mean that Kozack is going about the research the right way. There are things called ethics that every scientist in the lab, even undergraduate interns, need to be trained in before they even look at a pipette. Obviously when she asks Nicky whether he thinks she is unethical, she knows this. She knows that she is breaking at least ten rules, spoken and unspoken, by doing what she is doing. This leads me to believe that she is perhaps not as trained as a scientist as she thinks she is, so maybe she is just researching an endless rabbit hole. It brings me great joy to image her throwing away Merrick’s money on a dumb idea she doesn’t know better than to drop. Even when you know your research is promising, having no results after a while can drive any sane scientist mad.
In conclusion, The Old Guard went out there and found real research, gave their evil scientist an (unpromising) research direction, and let her go insane. We can headcannon Dr. Kozack as immoral and unethical, but that lady has a PhD and the writing reflects that. I love this movie.