Back in the 1980s, I had a dream. I was on the Enterprise D—because of course I was—and Geordi had figured out a way to use the transporter as a medical device. The idea was elegant: beam a person out and back in, but put a filter on the rematerialization circuits that could identify cells with damaged DNA and simply not rematerialize them. The body would then fill in the gaps naturally with new, healthy cells. Instant rejuvenation. I woke up thinking, that is the best idea I have ever had, and then spent the rest of the day slightly annoyed that I did not actually have a transporter.

Forty years later, it turns out the idea was not as outlandish as I thought.

Zombie Cells

As you age, your body accumulates what researchers call senescent cells—cells that have been damaged and have stopped dividing, but refuse to die. In a young body, the immune system clears these out efficiently. In an older body, they pile up. They sit in your tissues like squatters in an abandoned building, pumping out inflammatory chemicals called the SASP—the Senescence-Associated Secretory Phenotype, if you want the full name, and you probably do not—that damage their neighbors and recruit more cells into senescence. It is a cascade. The zombie metaphor is not mine, but it is apt: these cells are not alive in any useful sense, and they are turning the cells around them!

The concept of clearing them out is called senolysis, and the compounds that do it are called senolytics. The most-studied senolytic combination is dasatinib plus quercetin, which has been used in human trials at the Mayo Clinic with promising results. But dasatinib is a prescription chemotherapy drug, which puts it out of reach for most of us who are doing this on our own. The over-the-counter alternative that keeps showing up in the research is a flavonoid called fisetin.

What Fisetin Actually Does

Fisetin is a plant flavonoid found naturally in strawberries, apples, persimmons, and a few other fruits and vegetables—in tiny amounts. You would need to eat roughly thirty-seven pounds of strawberries to get a senolytic dose, which, while not the worst way to spend an afternoon, is not practical as a daily regimen.

What makes fisetin interesting as a senolytic is that it exploits a vulnerability specific to senescent cells. Normal, healthy cells have robust survival pathways. Senescent cells, having already shut down their normal cell cycle, are dependent on a different, more fragile set of anti-apoptotic pathways to keep themselves from self-destructing. Fisetin interferes with those pathways. The healthy cells shrug it off. The zombie cells, deprived of their last survival trick, finally do what they should have done years ago: they die.

It is, in principle, exactly what my dream transporter was doing. Identify the damaged cells. Remove them. Let the body replace them with something better. Geordi would approve.

The Burst Protocol

Here is the part that surprised me when I first read about it: you do not take fisetin every day. A small daily dose acts mostly as an antioxidant, which is fine but beside the point. To actually clear senescent cells, you need to hit a threshold—a high enough concentration in your tissues to trigger the apoptotic cascade in those zombie cells. Below that threshold, you are just eating an expensive strawberry extract.

The protocol is called a burst or a senolytic pulse: a high dose for two to three consecutive days, then nothing for the rest of the month. The burst clears the senescent cells. The rest period gives your body time to clean up the debris and grow replacements. Then you do it again next month.

The commonly cited target is about 20 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day during the burst. I weigh about 230 pounds, which is roughly 104 kilograms, giving me a target of about 2,080 milligrams per day. That sounds like a lot of capsules.

But—and this is where it gets interesting—my fisetin is liposomal.

The Liposomal Advantage

Standard fisetin has terrible bioavailability. It is hydrophobic—it does not dissolve well in water, which means your gut has trouble absorbing it, which means most of what you swallow passes right through without doing much of anything. This is the dirty secret of a lot of supplements: the dose on the label is not the dose your cells actually see.

Liposomal delivery changes that equation. The fisetin is encapsulated in tiny phospholipid spheres—essentially little bubbles made of the same material as cell membranes—which protect it through the digestive tract and dramatically improve absorption. The estimates vary, but liposomal formulations are generally considered to provide roughly three to five times better bioavailability than standard delivery.

So my 2,080 mg target, adjusted conservatively for a three-times improvement in absorption, becomes about 700 mg. My capsules are 600 mg each. Which means my burst protocol is almost comically simple:

Two capsules per day, for two consecutive days, once a month.

Take them with a meal that includes some fat—fisetin is fat-soluble, and even liposomal delivery benefits from a little dietary fat to work with. Then stop, and wait for next month.

What It Feels Like

If the burst works—if you are actually clearing senescent cells—you might expect to feel it. And some people do report a mild fatigue and brain fog a day or two after the burst, which makes biological sense: your immune system is moving in to clean up the cellular debris, and that cleanup process involves the same inflammatory signaling that makes you feel tired and foggy when you are fighting a cold. Your body is saying, I am busy right now, go sit down.

The timeline people describe is that you feel fine on the burst days themselves, then a bit flat on day three or four as the cleanup peaks. It passes. If it does not pass, or if the fatigue is significant, that is worth paying attention to.

Of course, the honest caveat is that the fatigue could also be coincidence, or placebo, or mild GI stress from a high dose of flavonoid. The human evidence is still largely anecdotal. Feeling tired might mean it is working. Feeling nothing does not mean it is not. The only real measure is long-term: the lab work, the inflammatory markers, the general trajectory of how you feel over months and years.

The Transporter Problem

My dream from the 1980s was more precise than fisetin, in at least one important way: the transporter filter implied perfect discrimination. Identify every damaged cell. Remove exactly those cells. Leave everything else untouched. That is not what fisetin does. Fisetin exploits a tendency—senescent cells are more vulnerable to it than healthy cells—but it is not perfectly selective. Some healthy cells probably take a hit too, which is part of why the burst-then-rest protocol matters. You are not hammering the system continuously. You hit it, you back off, and you let the body do what bodies are extraordinarily good at doing: repair.

Interestingly, researchers are working toward something closer to the transporter ideal. CAR-T cell therapies—where your own immune cells are engineered to hunt specific targets—are being explored as precision senolytics. Instead of a chemical that mostly targets senescent cells, you would have immune cells programmed to recognize them by their surface markers and eliminate them specifically. It is the transporter filter, built out of biology instead of tachyon beams.

We are not there yet. For now, we have fisetin: a flavonoid from strawberries that, taken in a high dose for two days a month, might—might—clear out some of the zombie cells that are making us old faster than we need to be. It is not the Enterprise. It is not even a tricorder. But it is something, and something is what you work with when the alternative is waiting for perfect knowledge that will arrive after you are dead.

I took my first burst yesterday. Two capsules, liposomal, 600 mg each, with breakfast. I will take two more today. Then I will wait, and watch, and see if I feel anything, knowing that feeling nothing proves nothing either way.

Forty years ago, I dreamed about a machine that could do this. It turns out the machine is a bottle of capsules from Amazon and a willingness to act on incomplete evidence. It is less dramatic than a transporter room. But Geordi, I think, would still approve.