In this episode, Dr. Aubrey de Grey joins me to talk about his work in the field of anti-aging and life extension, and his work with the Sense Research Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of life extension technologies. We talk about how he got started in life extension research, what it's like to work at the cutting edge of the field, and what it means to be a part of a community of likeminded scientists who are all working toward a common goal of extending human life. We also talk about the benefits of drinking Jack Daniels, and whether or not Jack Daniels should be consumed in moderation. And, of course, we answer the age old question: Is Jack Daniels good for colds? This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneatersound, courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is by Build Buildings. Music by PSOVOD and tyops, and additional selections from freesound.co.nz. If you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a five star rating and review us a review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your favourite podcast releases are available. Subscribe, Subscribe, Like, and Share! Subscribe, and tell a friend about what you're listening to this podcast! or share it on your social media platforms! and/or share it with a fellow podcasting platform! Timestamps: 5 stars! 5 stars is much appreciated! 6 stars is a review that helps spread the word about this podcast? 7 stars is also means a chance to win a chance at a new product? 8 stars is recommended! 9 stars is getting a discount on a new episode of the podcast next week, and a discount code 9 days of a new place to enter a new promo code? 10 stars is coming soon 10 days is a discount offer? 11 days of free shipping is also available for a new ad-free version of this podcast is also gets a discount deal? 12 days of ad-only promo code, 13 days of my podcast is available for free shipping worldwide 15 days of promo code is also helps get a better chance to buy a deal on my new book deal and I'm listening to my ad is also get 10 days of the ad discount deal, too get a discount?
00:01:36.000Yeah, I mean, basically, as soon as we were able to bring in enough funding to be able to pay me a full-time salary, it made more sense for me to not actually work doing something else to pay the bills.
00:01:51.000So, Sense Research Foundation, we're a 501c3 public charity based in Mountain View, California, and we are at a level of roughly $5 million per year in terms of our research budget.
00:02:04.000So, we're still really pretty small, but I think we spend it pretty well.
00:02:08.000And for folks who say, what's wrong with his voice?
00:02:10.000He's suffering from a bit of a cold right now, ladies and gentlemen.
00:02:16.000What's exciting right now in terms of medical research when it comes to life extension?
00:02:23.000What are the exciting areas that you're pursuing?
00:02:26.000Perhaps the most exciting thing is that there's no one exciting thing.
00:02:31.000The really important thing to understand about medical research into aging is to start out from remembering that aging is not just one phenomenon.
00:02:41.000It's a collection, a network of interacting phenomena, and the way that it's going to be effectively tackled by medicine in the fullness of time Is by a divide and conquer strategy, a panel of interventions, all of which need to work reasonably well in order for the whole edifice to actually work to an appreciable degree in terms of postponement of ill health.
00:03:03.000So, from my point of view, working at the coalface, so to speak, it's a fantastic thing that, you know, There's always something.
00:03:11.000Every week there's something that's got a new breakthrough here and there.
00:03:14.000But of course the breakthroughs are often very technical.
00:03:17.000They're often things that only specialists would understand that they actually were breakthroughs.
00:03:21.000They're not like, you know, we haven't doubled the lifespan of mice in the past week, for example.
00:03:29.000I mean, that's how pioneering technology is always developed.
00:03:33.000And the people that do need to understand, in other words, the people who are doing the research and who need to know about each other's results in order to know what experiment to do next, that community obviously is sufficiently cohesive that these pieces of information are distributed.
00:03:51.000I obviously play a large part in doing that, as well as in actually overseeing the research that the Foundation does.
00:03:58.000So, you know, coming back to my original statement, there's no one answer, but there you go.
00:04:06.000That's a very good point because is there a lot of cooperation between the various different individuals all throughout the world that are working on these life extension technologies and life extension medical science?
00:04:18.000So that's actually a subtly different question to which the answer is depressingly different.
00:04:23.000The individual fields that I think all need to be developed to a reasonable degree of efficacy in order to actually give the overall result, those individual fields are nicely cohesive and people talk to each other within those fields.
00:04:40.000But between the fields, it's a very different matter.
00:04:43.000One of the things that I've had to do ever since I started out in this area, and certainly over the past, let's say, 10 or 12 years, is I've had to actively bring these people together.
00:04:53.000There's far too much balkanization, building up of silos and unnecessary barriers between fields that somehow don't think that they're relevant to each other.
00:05:04.000And this happens, you know, not in any way, I'm not blaming the scientists for this, because it happens really as a result of the vagaries of funding.
00:05:13.000The fact that nobody's got enough money, and therefore, in order to get whatever they can, they've got to focus on the things they're already known to be good at.
00:05:23.000It works extraordinarily strongly against the possibility of cross-disciplinary work and also against high-risk, high-gain work.
00:05:34.000And it really massively slows science and technology down.
00:05:47.000So is it one of those situations where you have like various pharmaceutical companies or what have you standing on the outside looking in waiting for something to be something that they could put their chips on something where they can hedge their bets and say okay this is a this is a promising A little piece of research here.
00:06:05.000Now we'll start to gamble on this being profitable down the line, because for medication especially, to be ultimately profitable, there's a huge period of testing and research, and ultimately can cost millions and millions of dollars before you could ever even find out the efficacy of a product.
00:06:24.000And again, it's not quite the same thing as I was saying earlier, but it's related.
00:06:27.000What I was talking about earlier was really with respect to academia per se, with respect to people who rely on government funding to get their work done.
00:06:37.000The pharmaceutical industry, or more generally the medical industry, have a different perspective, but it kind of has the same kind of problems.
00:06:45.000Medicine is tricky to do, and everyone wants to keep it as simple as possible, which means that there's an inherent bias against cross-disciplinary work, against divide and conquer strategies that involve doing more than one thing at the same time to the same person.
00:07:03.000But ultimately, we're going to have to bite that bullet.
00:07:06.000And there are smart people in the pharmaceutical and medical industry, just as there are in academia, and everyone's kind of getting used to this.
00:07:13.000It's just that it's a very difficult thing for anyone to be the first group, the first company, the first research group to actually do.
00:07:24.000It's kind of got to be a collective shift of mindset, a kind of sea change in the culture of how all of this is done.
00:07:33.000So is this something that's being actively pursued all over the world?
00:07:36.000Are there pockets of intellectuals that are working on this?
00:07:40.000All over the world, but yes, only pockets, I'm afraid.
00:07:43.000At this point, there is still an enormous tendency, an enormously seductive tendency, to retreat into doing what just makes money quickly and what gets papers published quickly, irrespective of whether it scales.
00:07:57.000In other words, whether it leads to significant progress in the longer term.
00:08:02.000So the biggest thing that I always point to is the absolutely biologically inaccurate and damaging idea that the diseases of old age are in some sense distinct from aging itself.
00:08:21.000The diseases of old age, anything that causes people who were born a long time ago to be sick, but it doesn't tend to affect people who are in early adulthood, those things are that way because they are side effects of being alive.
00:08:36.000They are side effects of having been alive and accumulating damage for a long time in the body.
00:08:42.000And that is the only thing that one can say as a definition of aging itself, too.
00:08:47.000So one should not be dividing these two things and saying these things are diseases and this other thing is not.
00:09:26.000I would say that the right thing to do is not to look at the so-called diseases of old ages diseases, because of course there is a huge distinction between things that are side effects of being alive in the first place, on the one hand, and infections.
00:09:41.000Infections are what the word disease should be restricted to.
00:09:45.000Well, infections and congenital diseases, shall we say.
00:09:49.000Infections, you know, can be actually eliminated from the body.
00:09:53.000They can be cured by bashing away at the symptoms and eliminating the infectious agents.
00:09:57.000Now, if you try to do that with something that's a side effect of being alive, you're obviously not going to succeed, unless you, like, go as far as eliminating being alive, which you'd rather defeat the object, right?
00:10:10.000So, you know, that's the conceptual thing, that people think that something like Alzheimer's or Atherosclerosis or cancer is basically just not all that different from tuberculosis.
00:10:26.000And that fundamental conceptual error causes enormous amounts of money to be spent in the wrong way against the diseases of old age, in ways that will only ever make a very minimal impact on those diseases.
00:10:39.000So is that that there's sort of a resignation that Alzheimer's is just a side effect of old age that there's nothing they can do about?
00:11:08.000I mean obviously there's a bunch of different ideas.
00:11:10.000What do you think will be the method ultimately that we move into that direction?
00:11:14.000It's been very clear to me for at least 15 years now that the way to do this is damage repair.
00:11:20.000That we must develop a panel of interventions, a panel of therapies, which go in and restore the molecular and cellular structure and composition of the body of an elderly person to how it was, more or less, in early adulthood.
00:11:37.000So that means things like putting cells back when the body is having cells dying and not being automatically replaced by cell division.
00:11:47.000It means taking cells away when cells are dividing when they're not supposed to, or when they're not dying when they are supposed to.
00:11:53.000It means cleaning out molecular waste products if they're accumulating because the cell, the body, doesn't know how to get rid of them, doesn't know how to break them down or to excrete them.
00:12:06.000But it turns out that even thinking in that sounds like a very simplistic way, it's a very robust framework for actually identifying what needs to be fixed and how to fix it.
00:12:20.000Do you think that diet at all plays a part in this?
00:12:24.000Do you recommend a specific diet to people to enhance their body's ability to repair itself?
00:12:30.000I don't really do that, for two reasons.
00:12:33.000First of all, with regard to diet, and indeed more generally, you know, lifestyle, anything that people can do today.
00:12:40.000I definitely take the view that there are plenty of other people who know more about it than me and therefore if I also became an expert in this area I really wouldn't be making as much difference as I am making by spending my time in this other way.
00:12:52.000Second thing, however, is that And this is rather depressing, but it's rather an important thing to mention, that as far as we can tell, the overwhelming evidence is that none of these things make very much difference to most people.
00:13:06.000If you're an unlucky person, if you're someone who drew a short straw or two, and you are aging unusually rapidly, then it's a bit different.
00:13:18.000Especially if you're aging unusually rapidly only in one particular way or one or two ways.
00:13:23.000Then maybe there are supplements or dietary or lifestyle regimens that will substantially normalize your rate of aging.
00:14:19.000People often around the rest of the world, you know, people laugh at the USA a lot for the fact that even though it spends a huge amount on medical care, far more per head than any other country, nevertheless, if you look at longevity,
00:15:02.000What do you think the difference is between the life expectancy of people in the USA and the life expectancy of people in Japan, the longest lived country in the world?
00:15:12.000I would say the life expectancy of the United States is probably a good average is probably in your 60s, where I would say Japan is probably in your 70s.
00:15:37.000Well, of course, the last four, it's the same in Japan.
00:15:43.000The way to live a long time is to stay healthy a long time first, and then the period of decline is typically about the same, however long the period of good health was beforehand.
00:15:53.000So, and all these factors that people look to to enhance, like, you know, surround yourself with loved ones, have a good community, do something that you enjoy doing, when they're talking, they're really only talking about a very small amount of time anyway.
00:16:08.000And the reason I spend so much time emphasizing this and making sure that people understand it is because if people don't understand it, if people think, well, they can do a great deal to postpone their ill health just by doing things that they can do already, Then they're going to be correspondingly less enthusiastic,
00:16:24.000less committed to figuring out and helping and hastening the development of things that we can't do already, of course the sort of stuff that I'm working on.
00:16:32.000It's really because the impact of things that we can do today is so small that it becomes so urgent to develop new things.
00:16:40.000What do you think will be the method for repairing damage?
00:16:44.000I mean, how will that find itself in our lives?
00:16:48.000So there are many different types of damage.
00:16:50.000And the only reason why it was possible for me to come up with a really solid, robust, clear research program was because 15 years ago I was able to identify a way to classify these many types of damage into a much more manageable number of categories,
00:17:09.000Within each category, there is just one generic intervention, which may differ in detail from one example within the category to another, but only in detail.
00:17:21.000So basically we're talking about only seven different types of repair.
00:17:25.000So, for illustration, let me just talk about one or two of them.
00:17:30.000One type of damage is loss of cells, cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells.
00:17:38.000That's basically the reason why we get Parkinson's disease.
00:17:42.000That's probably the best example, the most obvious example.
00:17:45.000Now, in Parkinson's disease, what happens is there's just this one part of the brain called the substantia nigra, in which there are a special type of neuron called a dopaminergic neuron.
00:17:56.000These neurons die much more rapidly than neurons in most parts of the brain.
00:18:01.000And sure enough, eventually you don't have enough of them.
00:18:03.000Now, in most of us, you've only lost about 20% of those neurons by old age.
00:18:08.000But some people lose them a bit faster and they maybe have lost 70 or 80% in old age.
00:18:13.000And those are the people that get Parkinson's disease.
00:18:16.000So then they ask, what is the damage repair approach?
00:18:19.000The answer is actually really clear and well-known in this case, namely stem cell therapy.
00:18:28.000You put cells into the body that are prepared in advance, so to speak.
00:18:34.000They're set up so that they will have the tendency to divide and transform into replacements for the cells that the body was not replacing on its own.
00:18:43.000So you restore the number of cells in the tissue, tissue starts working again, you fix the disease.
00:18:49.000And about 20 years ago, people started trying this because people realized this.
00:18:54.000It didn't really work too well back then.
00:19:37.000A lot of the therapies that we think also need to be developed to address other parts of aging, I think, are harder than that.
00:19:44.000And I think we could be talking about 20 or 25 years.
00:19:47.000And even then, we're only talking about, let's say, a 50-50...
00:19:53.000There's a probability of getting there.
00:19:55.000For anything that's more than a few years away, it's obviously extremely speculative if we're talking about timeframes.
00:20:00.000I think we have a responsibility to give our best guess to the general public because the general public's best guess is going to be a lot worse, right?
00:20:09.000And you've got to know, you've got to have some kind of idea of how...
00:20:13.000Close something is in order to understand how much to agitate to make it happen faster.
00:20:20.000You know, if you think something's a thousand years away, it's not going to be a priority to make it only 990 years away, right?
00:20:28.000So that's a big part of why it's important to talk about these time frames.
00:20:31.000But yes, I mean, I think there's at least a 10% chance that we won't get there for 100 years.
00:20:44.000You and I met at the Global 2045 Initiative event in New York City, which is sort of a group of two different groups of people.
00:20:59.000There's people that are concerned with biological aging, which is your group, medical biological aging.
00:21:05.000And there's people that some folks classify as sci-fi dreamers that believe you're going to be able to download your consciousness into a robot and bypass the whole biological process in the first place.
00:21:16.000And that all this work about repair, it's going to be a moot point because we're going to get to a point where we're going to develop a body that's far superior to the biological body that we were born with, and we'll simply impart our consciousness into that.
00:21:31.000Do you dabble in that, or do you just concentrate on what you're doing?
00:21:34.000I tend to have a very open mind about these things.
00:21:37.000I'm not at all fond of people talking about things that are clearly impossible, but very often when something initially looks clearly impossible, the closer you look, the more you understand that it might actually only just be really difficult.
00:21:54.000Uploading is the idea of moving one's consciousness to a different hardware.
00:22:01.000You know, it's not completely clear that it can't be done.
00:22:04.000There may, in the end, be reasons why it totally can't be done.
00:22:08.000But I think all that really matters now is that we can say that it's very difficult.
00:22:13.000I think that, yeah, I would certainly say, in fact, that I bet serious money that the problem of aging will be decisively solved by a biomedical approach of the sort that we're pursuing well before it gets solved by an uploading approach.
00:22:35.000Like any sensible technologist, I know I might be wrong.
00:22:38.000And therefore, I'm delighted that there are people working in these other areas so that if their work turns out to be easier than I think it is and my work turns out to be harder and they get there first, then they'll be saving lives that I couldn't save.
00:23:17.000Are we already putting a tremendous burden on the natural resources of this planet that will be accentuated by thousand-year-old people just running around having babies when they're 900 years old?
00:23:27.000So I'm going to answer that question in two very separate parts.
00:23:30.000First, I'm going to talk about the so-called philosophical issue of how long one would want to live.
00:23:35.000I find it quite remarkable that people worry about this, simply because it's not the way that people actually think about anything else.
00:23:46.000Let's remember that the longevity aspect of all of this work is a side effect.
00:24:01.000I'm just interested in stopping people from getting sick when they get older.
00:24:06.000Now, if you think about it, all medicine is like that.
00:24:09.000All medicine involves stopping people from getting sick or fixing them up if they are sick.
00:24:14.000And all medicine has a side effect, that people live longer than they otherwise would have done.
00:24:19.000So the only real difference between the work that Sensory Research Foundation does and the work that everyone else in medical research does...
00:24:38.000So if we come to the question of how long one might want to live, You know, is that even a meaningful question?
00:24:46.000To me it's like saying, what time would you like to go to the toilet next Sunday?
00:24:50.000You know, we know that that's a dumb thing to have an opinion about.
00:24:54.000It's a dumb thing to have an opinion about because we know we're going to have more information on the topic nearer the time and we're going to be able to act on the information.
00:25:06.000You know, nobody makes decisions on the basis of how long ago they were born.
00:25:11.000People increasingly make decisions if they get older on the basis of how long they think they've got to live, but that's because the amount of time they think they've got to live is going down, which it won't be going down anymore.
00:25:23.000If you've got an arbitrary amount of time behind you and another arbitrary amount of time ahead of you, your decision-making is going to be based on more short-term considerations, you know, like peer pressure and so on.
00:25:34.000You know, I sometimes point out, when people ask me these things, I'll sometimes say, Okay, take yourself back to the first time you got laid.
00:26:23.000And this applies to all of the questions one might raise with regard to the problems that might hypothetically be created as a consequence of solving the problem we've got today, the problem of aging, right?
00:26:38.000Just let's look at the actual scenario closely rather than any knee-jerk reaction and say, is the problem actually likely to occur at all?
00:26:45.000Now, in the case of overpopulation, what we have to ask ourselves is, okay, how rapidly would the population actually increase in the context of eliminating death from aging?
00:27:38.000It's very likely that that kind of trajectory, and of course I'm not only talking about global warming here, I'm talking about all other types of pollution that we engage in, that kind of technology will outrun any changes that may happen in terms of demography.
00:27:59.000It applies across the board, whether it's overpopulation you're worried about, or boredom, or dictators living forever, or how will we pay the pensions, or any of these standard deject reactions.
00:28:34.000And of course most of them don't just die, they die after a long period of disease and debilitation and decrepitude and decline and dependency and general misery.
00:28:44.000So there is no question that aging is responsible for the vast majority of human suffering in the world today.
00:28:53.000We don't even have to restrict ourselves to the industrialized world.
00:28:59.000Overall, I was asking about life expectancy earlier, so I was saying there's only four years' difference between the US and Japan.
00:29:05.000Turns out there's only ten years' difference between the world as a whole and Japan.
00:29:31.000And we have to ask, you know, even supposing that we ended up in a situation where population was Going to be a problem because we hadn't invented technologies to fix that, to increase the carrying capacity of the planet quite as rapidly as we needed to.
00:29:44.000So we were faced with this, you know, rather irritating feature of having to have fewer children than we would like in order to make room for all these elderly who are still healthy and not dying.
00:29:58.000Seems to me it's hard to make a case that the right thing to do would be to let the people age and die rather than to have fewer kids.
00:30:07.000And the third level of answer is perhaps the most decisive of all.
00:30:11.000The third level of answer says, well, even if you've convinced yourself that these problems are going to happen, and even if you've also convinced yourself that these problems are going to be so bad that they might outweigh the problem that we're solving, the question is, who are you to say?
00:30:25.000Who should actually be making the decision as to whether these therapies are used?
00:30:32.000The answer clearly is humanity of the future rather than humanity of the present.
00:30:38.000If we say to ourselves, oh dear, oh dear, you know, overpopulation, whatever, let's not go there.
00:30:44.000And we thereby, you know, delay the development of these therapies, then what we would be doing is denying humanity of the future the option whether to use these therapies based on the information that it had available to it about, you know, available technologies or whatever.
00:31:00.000Whereas if we develop these things as fast as possible, then humanity of the future does get the choice.
00:31:06.000Someone who is helping to condemn a whole cohort of the future to an unnecessarily painful and unnecessarily early death, just because I thought I knew better than that.
00:31:17.000Well, innovation and advancement seems to be a fundamental part of human society and civilization.
00:31:23.000It just seems to be something that we do, no matter where you go, there's someone who's always trying to improve upon everything.
00:31:29.000When you have medical science, it only stands to reason that that, too, would try to improve and advance and life expectancy, of course, the way you describe it, the way you did, with that being the number one problem physically, health-wise, in our world.
00:32:45.000But there's a lot of people who don't subscribe to that.
00:32:48.000Who really do get depressed when they're worried about their inevitable demise.
00:32:52.000When you come across, when you come around and say, hey, we are developing new technologies that are going to allow you to live within this lifetime.
00:32:59.000We're going to meet the first person who lives to be a thousand years.
00:33:02.000They're like, well, great, a thousand years of suffering and existential angst.
00:33:14.000Do you look at this experience like you said, the moment you get laid, go, geez, I've got to get her into bed because I only have 60 years left?
00:33:20.000Or do you look at this experience saying, while this is going on, there are a million wonderful things to enjoy about this life.
00:33:27.000And on top of that, it seems to me that as time goes on, we're getting far better at this whole civilization thing.
00:33:34.000And one of the things that I think would benefit us more than anything possible would be if we could have people that could be alive and healthy and live four or five hundred years, imagine the type of wisdom that they could impart on the rest of us.
00:33:49.000Imagine the life lessons that you would get from A few centuries of mistakes and corrections and lessons and information that you've absorbed, we could transform society and culture, world society,
00:34:06.000not national society, not local society, but world society in a radical way, just with the wisdom that we would all be able to share.
00:34:15.000I think there is a lot of truth in that.
00:34:44.000There is, however, a related point which I think it's worth bringing up at this stage with regard to the value of living a long time and the perceived value of living a long time.
00:35:01.000Which is that, at the moment, the people who feel, well, life's not worth living 500 years or whatever, are actually the same people who have a lot of trouble understanding why their life's worth living for 50 years.
00:35:17.000You know, the people that spend their time essentially living their life in front of the television.
00:35:22.000The difficulty here is simply a lack of education.
00:35:26.000The fact that most people in today's world do not have the training to be able to understand how to get the most out of life.
00:35:36.000Those of us who do, those of us who have good education, good understanding of how to get the most out of life, we always have a massive backlog.
00:35:44.000I've probably got a thousand years of backlog already of things I'd like to have done, you know, films I'd like to have seen, books I'd like to have read, places I'd like to have gone, people I'd like to have met.
00:35:53.000And by the time I'm through that, I'm certain I'm going to have at least another 10,000 years of backlog.
00:35:59.000So, you know, I mean all we need really is to educate people better.
00:36:04.000That's an interesting way to put it, educate.
00:36:07.000I tend to agree with you, but I think that for a lot of people it tends to be an issue of mental health.
00:36:15.000There's certain people that suffer from depression or struggle with depression and life itself becomes very difficult for them to endure.
00:36:24.000Well, okay, I want to stop you there for a second because I think we need to accept that there's a spectrum here.
00:36:30.000There are obviously some people who are extremely depressed.
00:36:33.000I have a friend actually in the UK who is clinically depressed right now about the problem of aging.
00:36:42.000They're older than her, obviously, and it's really going to her.
00:36:46.000And, you know, that's an extreme example.
00:36:49.000If we talk about the just malaise, you know, the ennui that I think is a much milder version of the same thing, then I would accept what you say that this is quite common.
00:37:03.000But I would also say that it's part of what I was talking about, lack of...
00:37:09.000Lack of exposure to the opportunities that life has to offer.
00:37:14.000Lack of understanding of how to actually seek out those opportunities.
00:37:19.000So I don't think it's such a hard thing to eliminate.
00:37:22.000I don't agree with you that it's education, because I know some very educated people that struggle with depression, and I think a lot of it has to do with physical health, the meat wagon that you're carrying around, that you're trudging through life with, if it's burdensome, if it's causing you issues,
00:37:37.000if you don't take care of it, if you eat poorly, if you smoke cigarettes, if you...
00:37:41.000You tend to overindulge in alcohol, and it leaves your liver in a constantly processing state, and you're just a mess.
00:37:48.000Like, those people tend to have a duller experience and perhaps a more burdensome experience.
00:37:54.000I just was saying, you know, it's like there's a tail of the curve.
00:37:58.000There are people who are badly like that, and there aren't very many such people.
00:38:02.000And if we're talking about the larger end of the population, let's say the thick end of the wedge, then we're talking about a milder phenomenon.
00:38:10.000But actually, you remind me of another thing there.
00:38:12.000You know, there is at the moment a very strong tendency in society when they're exposed to these ideas about the possibility of bringing aging under control and consequently living a lot longer.
00:38:24.000There's a very strong tendency to think, oh my God, the quality of that life will be poor.
00:38:30.000And that's because people have this sense in their heads that quality and quantity are inherently opposed to each other.
00:38:39.000That the more quantity you have, the less quality you're bound to have.
00:38:42.000And of course that makes sense in today's world in a way, because by and large today there are a lot of things we like to do that are bad for us.
00:38:50.000And so we'll shorten our lives by, you know, whether it's smoking or whatever.
00:38:55.000But that's not going to be true in a scenario, in a world in which we have therapies that can actually address these various types of damage and repair them.
00:39:05.000In those situations, these two things are going to be on the same side of the fence.
00:39:09.000Quality is going to be the thing that confers quantity.
00:39:12.000So you imagine a world where cigarettes would be inconsequential.
00:39:15.000You'd be smoking cigarettes, just popping some sort of repair pill, and BAM! No more Marlboro cancer.
00:39:29.000I mean, we don't know how long these therapies are going to take to come along.
00:39:33.000And the best bet in order to maintain your chances of, and to maximize your chances of actually being around in time to benefit, From these therapies is to actually live as healthy a lifestyle as you can at the moment.
00:39:47.000I mean, I was talking earlier about maybe you'll only gain a year or two, but that might be the key year or two.
00:39:52.000It might be the key year or two that brings you to the next thousand.
00:39:57.000You said that stem cells within a decade, you believe, there's a large possibility that it could cure Parkinson's.
00:40:06.000These other things that may be 50-50 in 25 years, what are they?
00:40:10.000What are the big ones that you're excited about?
00:40:13.000Well, so most of what we work on at Sens Research Foundation is these hard things.
00:40:18.000We actually do basically no stem cell therapy work, and that's simply because so many other people are doing it.
00:40:23.000It's understood as a very plausible and very exciting approach to treating a number of different disease conditions, not restricted, of course, to age-related ones.
00:40:35.000And, you know, it would be a poor use of our limited funds to add a drop to that bucket.
00:40:43.000But most of the other things that we feel need to be done are far more neglected.
00:40:48.000So let me think where I would even start.
00:40:51.000Well, okay, one great example that we've been working on is heart disease.
00:40:55.000So atherosclerosis is of course the number one killer in the Western world.
00:41:00.000It's the cause of heart attacks and strokes and it's age-related because it's caused by the lifelong accumulation of a particular type of damage.
00:41:10.000In this case the type of damage is the accumulation of waste products in the artery wall.
00:41:14.000The waste that matters here the most is oxidized cholesterol.
00:41:19.000Cholesterol itself is not a bad molecule.
00:41:21.000People get this wrong a lot, but cholesterol is a vital molecule.
00:41:24.000You don't want to remove your cholesterol.
00:41:27.000You do want to, however, remove the contaminated cholesterol that accumulates at low but significant levels in the body, oxidized cholesterol in particular.
00:41:37.000This is what poisons white blood cells that are in the artery wall and makes them into what are called foam cells, which are the first step in the creation of an atherosclerotic plaque.
00:41:48.000And we'd like to stop that happening, and we'd like to prevent atherosclerosis from emerging.
00:41:55.000The way we've done this is we've identified bacteria in the soil, actually, that had genes and enzymes that allow them to break down oxidized cholesterol.
00:42:08.000And we've identified these bacteria and the genes and enzymes, and we've introduced those genes into human cells in cell culture.
00:43:59.000So we've got to intervene in this process one step down the chain of events to get rid of the toxic products of breathing rather than to get rid of breathing itself.
00:44:44.000So if you're really low on, for example, vitamin C or vitamin E, then you are depleting your own body's ability to limit the toxicity of breathing.
00:44:57.000And therefore, breathing will be even more bad for you than it otherwise would be.
00:45:02.000So antioxidants are crucial if you're going to bother breathing.
00:45:06.000But it turns out that, because breathing has been around a long time, breathing was invented about two billion years ago, evolution has done what evolution tends to do.
00:45:19.000And therefore, at this point, some of the toxic byproducts of breathing, free radicals, are actually not just bad molecules, they're also good.
00:45:29.000They're used by the body as signaling molecules.
00:45:32.000So if we were to have some magic wand that we could wave and just get rid of all the free radicals in the body, that would be extremely bad.
00:45:41.000We have, therefore, a rather interesting balance that the body takes.
00:45:45.000If you have too few antioxidants, then that's bad news.
00:45:49.000But if you have an abundance of antioxidants, if you take mega doses of vitamin C or vitamin E, for example, it doesn't really do much.
00:45:57.000The reason it doesn't is because the body wants a certain amount of free radicals around, so it dials down the inbuilt antioxidant machinery, and you end up basically where you started.
00:46:11.000So, this bacteria that you're introducing to skin cultures...
00:46:14.000We're not introducing the bacteria themselves, we're introducing one gene from the bacteria.
00:47:00.000Within my lifetime, I'm going to see some huge changes.
00:47:02.000Talking to you, though, it's not that I get less optimistic, but I get more aware of the actual landscape itself.
00:47:10.000And I start realizing, well, this thing that we have, that we're carrying around, this body, has an indescribable number of operations that are going on simultaneously.
00:47:24.000There's reactions and counter-reactions, and all of these are not completely, totally understood.
00:47:30.000So when you're talking about anti-aging or life extension or any of these things, you're talking about just a stupendous number of different processes that are going on in the body that we're going to have to figure out, and that is going to take a very,
00:47:47.000very long time, and not one person is going to ever understand all of the processes.
00:47:52.000It perfectly articulated why people who studied the biology of ageing had, by about the mid-1980s, got to the point of absolute rejection of the idea that what they even were working on was doing anything about ageing.
00:48:09.000Basically, it had become very frowned upon even to talk about intervention in a grant application, for example.
00:48:16.000Essentially because everyone understood, oh my god, the body is so complicated, we understand it so poorly, it's never going to happen.
00:49:32.000Because the damage that the body does to itself throughout life as a side effect of its normal operation is only harmful late in life.
00:49:43.000The body is set up to tolerate a certain amount of that damage and the problem only starts when the amount of damage exceeds the amount that it's set up to tolerate.
00:49:53.000So that means that until that point, the damage is not participating in this massively complex network of processes that we call metabolism.
00:50:03.000It's just accumulating as an inert by-product.
00:50:08.000It's only by mass action after it becomes so enormously abundant in late life that it becomes part of metabolism again.
00:50:17.000It means that if we go in and target this damage while it is not participating in metabolism, we have a much better chance of doing so without appreciable side effects than we would if we were going in and trying to manipulate metabolism itself.
00:50:34.000Metabolism itself, yeah, it's a crazy, insane network of spaghetti code that's not got any comments, so to speak.
00:50:41.000You try to do anything to it to stop it doing the thing you don't want it to do, the creation of damage, you're going to have unintended consequences that do more harm than good.
00:50:50.000But if you don't do that, if you instead attack the damage itself while it is outside of that network of metabolism, then you don't have that problem in the same way.
00:51:01.000Is there any focus on concentrating on the potential of...
00:51:05.000You were saying that the body has a very good ability to deal with all this damage at a young age.
00:51:12.000And as you get older, it becomes less and less able to.
00:51:16.000Would the real solution be catching it early, finding people that are very young and implementing these strategies on them?
00:51:25.000Not really, because the only reason why an older person is less able to cope with the damage is because the older person has more damage.
00:51:57.000Because there's going to be at least another 20 or 30 years before they're going to suffer any actual serious functional decline as a result of this damage.
00:52:07.000And during that time, the therapies are going to get better, both safer and more convenient and more comprehensive and so on.
00:52:15.000So the trade-off is better to wait for the therapies to be improved.
00:52:19.000That's not necessarily what I was getting at.
00:52:22.000What I was getting at, you were saying that over time the damage accumulates to the point where your body can no longer process the damage anymore.
00:52:28.000Would it be more advantageous to catch it before it accumulates?
00:52:32.000To deal with the issues before they become substantial?
00:52:51.000If you take someone who's, let's say, 50, then all they're going to need is the sense therapies, the damage repair therapies that reduce their level of damage to how it was back when they were 20 or 30 again.
00:53:01.000And, of course, one does it periodically.
00:53:04.000Now, if the damage has already got to the point where it's caused disease and disability to emerge, let's say someone who's typically 80, they've gone downhill quite a lot, then these therapies are still going to be very useful, but they're going to be useful in a slightly different way.
00:53:18.000They're going to be useful when used in combination with traditional geriatric therapies, the kind that currently we have today.
00:53:27.000Remember what I said earlier that the geriatric therapies today don't work, and they never will work, basically because they're attacking the symptoms.
00:53:35.000They are kind of laboring under the misapprehension that the diseases of old age are like infections.
00:53:41.000What that means is that basically they're hacking away at something that is becoming harder and harder to hack away at because its cause, namely the damage throughout life, is continuing to accumulate.
00:53:55.000So if you think about what that means, if we were able to go in and actually repair the damage, then we would be in, if you like, potentiating the geriatric therapies.
00:54:06.000We would allow the geriatric therapies to actually work.
00:54:09.000And it may end up being that we need to do that.
00:54:12.000That if someone's in their 80s, they're going downhill, and we only fix the damage that got them that way, that won't be enough because the diseases, the pathologies will have a life of their own at that point.
00:54:22.000We may need to go in at two levels at the same time.
00:54:25.000What are these geriatric therapies that are...
00:54:47.000You become more and more resistant to dopamine.
00:54:50.000It's being supplied in the wrong schedule, anywhere at the wrong times, because you can only...
00:54:56.000Because of the nature of delivery, you can only deliver it in a bolus.
00:55:00.000You know, these things are all ways in which such therapies cannot be perfect.
00:55:06.000Whereas if we were to put the cells back to repair the originating damage, then any other things downstream that had gone wrong in the rest of the brain would be treatable by other therapies, by more traditional therapies, in a much more effective way than they can now.
00:55:23.000What other methods are you looking into for repairing damage other than introducing this bacteria to...
00:55:28.000Okay, so that's the second one I mentioned.
00:55:30.000The first one I remember was just stem cell therapy, right?
00:55:38.000The immune system is a classic example of the problem of what I call death-resistant cells.
00:55:44.000That means cells that rather than having too few of them, as in Parkinson's disease, you have too many of them.
00:55:50.000And in particular, you have too many because they're not dying when they're supposed to.
00:55:55.000People don't often think in terms of the idea that there could be any cells that should die.
00:56:00.000But the immune system is a great example of that.
00:56:03.000Where when you get an infection, very much as I have now in fact, you have a very small population of white blood cells that divide like crazy to get to a big enough population to attack and eliminate the infection.
00:56:17.000And after that's happened, then almost all of them die again.
00:56:21.000To leave room, basically, for a completely different subset to divide like crazy next time you get a different infection.
00:56:27.000Turns out that in old age, that whole cycle of division and death basically goes wrong.
00:56:36.000And you end up with a lot of cells that divide like crazy to attack an infection, and when the infection's gone away, they don't die again.
00:57:41.000What we would like to do is to make it well for humans.
00:57:44.000And the problem there is you've got to make it safe, of course.
00:57:48.000Now, gene therapy in general is a very tricky concept to make safe, and it's had some ups and downs over the past 20 years at least.
00:57:55.000But the concept of suicide gene therapy has additional difficulties.
00:58:00.000You really don't want this gene that produces a toxic protein just killing cells randomly when it shouldn't be.
00:58:09.000So, we're working on new, more elaborate ways to put multiple lines of defense against that problem.
00:58:17.000How many different people do you guys employ that you have working on all these various methods?
00:58:23.000It kind of depends what you mean by employ, because we have some people that we fund through university labs, but taking the broader definition of everyone who relied on us for their salary, I think it's around 30 at this point.
00:58:35.000And do you personally oversee all these various projects?
00:58:39.000I'm the Chief Summance Officer, so I oversee the projects in the sense of, yes, I oversee the decision-making process of prioritizing projects, deciding which new projects to do, deciding how a project is going.
00:58:53.000I talk regularly with the professors and other lab heads that are responsible for the project.
00:59:20.000Many years ago, my wife campaigned after we met for a long time.
00:59:24.000We met 25-odd years ago now, and it took her five years to persuade me to grow this, but eventually I decided to give it a go, and I was as surprised as anybody when it came out like this.
00:59:33.000That's interesting because that's kind of your calling card.
00:59:41.000Is this something that you're truly enjoying, this process?
00:59:44.000Well, I always have an ambivalence there.
00:59:47.000On the one hand, yes, I'm extremely gratified that it's going so well.
00:59:51.000From a personal perspective, obviously, I'm proud that I've been able to make a significant difference.
00:59:55.000But at the same time, all of that is always enormously tinged by the knowledge that there's still a lot of people dying out there, that this is not going as fast as it could.
01:00:30.000I mean, even if we just had one more zero to that budget, if we had like $50 million or $100 million a year to spend, we'd probably be going three times faster.
01:01:32.000I try to meet as many of those as I can and generally get them to understand what's going on.
01:01:37.000The fact that we're a 501c3, a public charity, obviously does help.
01:01:41.000It means that anyone can give us money in a tax-efficient manner.
01:01:44.000But still, we've just got to get more of that money in the door.
01:01:47.000Do you have Kickstarter, GoFundMe, any of those accounts?
01:01:51.000We have done a certain amount of crowdfunding, but ultimately, pretty much all of the crowdfunding approaches that can be taken are really difficult to reconcile with what we do.
01:02:03.000Essentially because if you're looking for small amounts, fine, but we're looking for relatively large amounts, you know, six, seven-digit projects, For those things, it's really got to appeal to the imagination what the specific achievement is going to be.
01:02:18.000And with early stage research, it's really hard to explain that in terms that really grip people.
01:02:23.000So it's not really worked all that well for us.
01:02:25.000Well, we were describing before that pharmaceutical companies sort of hedging their bets, waiting on the sidelines for something to be worth betting on.
01:02:32.000Boy, I'd like to change that if we can.
01:02:35.000Whatever impact we can have on it, and this podcast gets millions and millions of downloads, and I'm sure we'll have some effect on it, but I would like to, you know, whatever you need.
01:02:45.000Do you need things tweeted for you and posted on...
01:02:53.000Obviously, because I have zero research background, no medical science background.
01:02:57.000So, to me, it's like when I get a chance to talk to someone like you, it's like a window into this world that I only ordinarily get through articles and, you know, papers.
01:03:14.000Discussed before as I said before I think it's a fundamental part of human nature We want to improve everything and your health and your your ability to Enjoy this time is huge and if you could extend that you You have the potential to be a better person.
01:03:29.000I think I'm a better person now than I was ten years ago I think I'd be even better if I could get another hundred in you know, I think we could do some real change and I think a lot of that real change could There's that issue like, why worry about this?
01:03:42.000Our fundamental problems are the intoxication of the environment, blah, blah.
01:03:45.000I think we could put more emphasis on that if we could have some of the brilliant people that we have alive today live longer.
01:03:55.000Back in 2006 when I spoke at TED, actually I made that whole concept the centerpiece of my talk.
01:04:01.000I said basically, you know, you guys, you're all visionaries, you like aiming high.
01:04:05.000This could be the critical feature of this.
01:04:10.000Even independently of the inherent humanitarian value of defeating aging, aging is the thing that has ground us down over the history of civilization, the thing that has made us know that we are at the mercy of nature.
01:04:27.000If we can bring that truly under control, then this will empower us.
01:04:32.000It will make us feel really much more confident that we can address the other really hard problems, whether it's climate change, you know, world peace, whatever it might be.
01:04:42.000The guys who run the Global 2045 Initiative, the idea that there'll be some sort of technological answer to this question, are they supportive of the biological ideas as well?
01:04:53.000Is there a cooperation between these two groups?
01:05:38.000It has all the information about what we do, about what we'd like to do, about what we have done.
01:05:42.000It's got all the information you can imagine about why this is important.
01:05:47.000It's got, obviously, a nice way to contact us and send us any messages you'd like.
01:05:51.000And, of course, there's a nice, big, friendly donate button.
01:05:55.000Anytime you're in town, please, I'd be more than happy to promote anything you've got going on, any speeches you're doing, anything you're promoting.
01:06:09.000I'm absolutely sure that being on the show will make a difference in and of itself, and the more that you can do to help, the better it'll be, and the more lives you will save.