The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #638 - Aubrey de Grey

00:00:01.000 Alright, we're live.

00:00:02.000 First of all, thank you very much for coming here.

00:00:04.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:05.000 Well, thank you for having me.

00:00:06.000 I've been looking forward to it for a long time.

00:00:08.000 I am as well.

00:00:09.000 I enjoyed our conversation in New York City.

00:00:11.000 It was like two years ago now, right?

00:00:13.000 It was a fun time.

00:00:14.000 And I've been a big fan of your work for a long time before that, and I find you a fascinating character.

00:00:22.000 And I'm glad you...

00:00:23.000 I mean, you got up early this morning, English time.

00:00:26.000 It's 8 o'clock here in Los Angeles, so this is like...

00:00:30.000 What are you, like eight hours ahead of us here?

00:00:31.000 Yeah, so we're talking 22 hours.

00:00:33.000 Yeah, you've been up for a while, fella.

00:00:34.000 This is not good for life expectancy, right?

00:00:37.000 This is certainly true.

00:00:38.000 People have pointed this out.

00:00:39.000 I think, you know, out of all the things I do that are probably not good for me, that's the one.

00:00:44.000 You don't get enough sleep.

00:00:45.000 Don't get enough sleep, and you like the booze, fella. 0.96

00:00:48.000 Well, that may be good for me.

00:00:49.000 You never know.

00:00:50.000 Really?

00:00:50.000 Well, at least, you know, in moderation.

00:00:53.000 In moderation, yeah.

00:00:55.000 Well, we're drinking it right now.

00:00:56.000 Got a little Jack Daniels.

00:00:57.000 Is that supposed to be good for colds?

00:00:59.000 Is that a myth?

00:01:00.000 It's working for me.

00:01:01.000 Okay.

00:01:01.000 It does work for you?

00:01:02.000 Really?

00:01:02.000 It helps you?

00:01:03.000 It certainly does.

00:01:04.000 Whatever makes you feel better.

00:01:06.000 You're involved, for folks who don't know, Aubrey de Grey.

00:01:09.000 You're a researcher at Cambridge.

00:01:11.000 You're involved very much so in the forefront of anti-aging life extension as far as medical science is concerned.

00:01:22.000 You're at the forefront of this.

00:01:24.000 So, first of all, correct one thing.

00:01:26.000 I haven't been affiliated with the University of Cambridge for a very long time now.

00:01:29.000 How long has it been?

00:01:30.000 Since 2006. Fucking Wikipedia. 0.99

00:01:32.000 Those assholes. 1.00

00:01:34.000 2006, that's quite a while. 0.99

00:01:36.000 Yeah, 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.

00:01:48.000 So, what is your organization now?

00:01:50.000 Right.

00:01:51.000 So, 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.

00:02:04.000 So, we're still really pretty small, but I think we spend it pretty well.

00:02:08.000 And for folks who say, what's wrong with his voice?

00:02:10.000 He's suffering from a bit of a cold right now, ladies and gentlemen.

00:02:13.000 That's why he's drinking the whiskey.

00:02:14.000 I don't know how it works that way.

00:02:16.000 What's exciting right now in terms of medical research when it comes to life extension?

00:02:23.000 What are the exciting areas that you're pursuing?

00:02:26.000 Perhaps the most exciting thing is that there's no one exciting thing.

00:02:31.000 The really important thing to understand about medical research into aging is to start out from remembering that aging is not just one phenomenon.

00:02:41.000 It'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.

00:03:03.000 So, from my point of view, working at the coalface, so to speak, it's a fantastic thing that, you know, There's always something.

00:03:11.000 Every week there's something that's got a new breakthrough here and there.

00:03:14.000 But of course the breakthroughs are often very technical.

00:03:17.000 They're often things that only specialists would understand that they actually were breakthroughs.

00:03:21.000 They're not like, you know, we haven't doubled the lifespan of mice in the past week, for example.

00:03:27.000 Nevertheless, that's fine.

00:03:29.000 I mean, that's how pioneering technology is always developed.

00:03:33.000 And 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.

00:03:51.000 I obviously play a large part in doing that, as well as in actually overseeing the research that the Foundation does.

00:03:58.000 So, you know, coming back to my original statement, there's no one answer, but there you go.

00:04:06.000 That'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?

00:04:18.000 So that's actually a subtly different question to which the answer is depressingly different.

00:04:23.000 The 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.

00:04:40.000 But between the fields, it's a very different matter.

00:04:43.000 One 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.

00:04:53.000 There'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.

00:05:04.000 And 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.

00:05:13.000 The 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.

00:05:23.000 It works extraordinarily strongly against the possibility of cross-disciplinary work and also against high-risk, high-gain work.

00:05:34.000 And it really massively slows science and technology down.

00:05:37.000 So it's a tragedy.

00:05:38.000 And everyone kind of knows it, but nobody really knows what to do about it.

00:05:42.000 It's not in any one person's interest to do anything about it.

00:05:45.000 So the whole system is perpetuated.

00:05:47.000 So 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.

00:06:05.000 Now 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.

00:06:22.000 That's exactly right.

00:06:24.000 And again, it's not quite the same thing as I was saying earlier, but it's related.

00:06:27.000 What 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.

00:06:37.000 The pharmaceutical industry, or more generally the medical industry, have a different perspective, but it kind of has the same kind of problems.

00:06:45.000 Medicine 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.

00:07:03.000 But ultimately, we're going to have to bite that bullet.

00:07:06.000 And 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.

00:07:13.000 It'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.

00:07:24.000 It'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.

00:07:33.000 So is this something that's being actively pursued all over the world?

00:07:36.000 Are there pockets of intellectuals that are working on this?

00:07:40.000 All over the world, but yes, only pockets, I'm afraid.

00:07:43.000 At 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.

00:07:57.000 In other words, whether it leads to significant progress in the longer term.

00:08:02.000 So 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.

00:08:19.000 It's complete nonsense.

00:08:21.000 The 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.

00:08:36.000 They are side effects of having been alive and accumulating damage for a long time in the body.

00:08:42.000 And that is the only thing that one can say as a definition of aging itself, too.

00:08:47.000 So one should not be dividing these two things and saying these things are diseases and this other thing is not.

00:08:53.000 We shouldn't be doing that.

00:08:54.000 And if we stop doing that, then we've got a chance of actually understanding how to attack We're good to go.

00:09:19.000 So you're looking at aging itself as a type of a disease?

00:09:24.000 I would actually go the other way.

00:09:26.000 I 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.

00:09:41.000 Infections are what the word disease should be restricted to.

00:09:45.000 Well, infections and congenital diseases, shall we say.

00:09:49.000 Infections, you know, can be actually eliminated from the body.

00:09:53.000 They can be cured by bashing away at the symptoms and eliminating the infectious agents.

00:09:57.000 Now, 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?

00:10:10.000 So, 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. 0.98

00:10:24.000 Complete bullshit.

00:10:26.000 And 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. 0.98

00:10:39.000 So 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?

00:10:46.000 Well, no.

00:10:47.000 My point is there's not a resignation.

00:10:49.000 People say it's a disease, therefore we should cure it.

00:10:52.000 Not on your part, but I mean, okay.

00:10:54.000 And that's the problem.

00:10:55.000 People think they can cure it in isolation.

00:10:58.000 They think, oh, people get old, but let's cure Alzheimer's.

00:11:00.000 So what you're saying is what we have to cure is the getting old part?

00:11:04.000 That's right.

00:11:04.000 Okay.

00:11:06.000 What do you think will be the method?

00:11:08.000 I mean obviously there's a bunch of different ideas.

00:11:10.000 What do you think will be the method ultimately that we move into that direction?

00:11:14.000 It's been very clear to me for at least 15 years now that the way to do this is damage repair.

00:11:20.000 That 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.

00:11:37.000 So that means things like putting cells back when the body is having cells dying and not being automatically replaced by cell division.

00:11:47.000 It 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.

00:11:53.000 It 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.

00:12:04.000 Pretty basic things, really.

00:12:06.000 But 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.

00:12:20.000 Do you think that diet at all plays a part in this?

00:12:24.000 Do you recommend a specific diet to people to enhance their body's ability to repair itself?

00:12:30.000 I don't really do that, for two reasons.

00:12:33.000 First of all, with regard to diet, and indeed more generally, you know, lifestyle, anything that people can do today.

00:12:40.000 I 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.

00:12:52.000 Second 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.

00:13:06.000 If 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.

00:13:18.000 Especially if you're aging unusually rapidly only in one particular way or one or two ways.

00:13:23.000 Then maybe there are supplements or dietary or lifestyle regimens that will substantially normalize your rate of aging.

00:13:32.000 And that's obviously a good thing.

00:13:34.000 But for those of us who are already average, especially for those of us who are already doing better than average, that's not the case.

00:13:40.000 The evidence seems to be that these interventions simply don't give you any more.

00:13:45.000 The body is already as well-tuned as it can be.

00:13:49.000 Subject only to the development of much more sophisticated interventions of the sort that Sam's Research Foundation is working on.

00:13:55.000 So the things like getting good sleep, getting good diet, they're really essentially only going to go so far?

00:14:01.000 They're only going to go a very small amount, that's right.

00:14:03.000 So you'll have a, we'll live an extra ten years or something like that.

00:14:07.000 Even ten is, I think, an overstatement.

00:14:09.000 I think we're talking more like one or two, if you're lucky.

00:14:11.000 Well, one or two.

00:14:13.000 So you booze it up, folks.

00:14:15.000 Here's a good illustration of this.

00:14:19.000 People 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,

00:14:35.000 the USA is way down the league table.

00:14:39.000 It's like number 45 or something like that.

00:14:41.000 It's crazy. 0.80

00:14:41.000 Ridiculously low. 0.80

00:14:42.000 People say, well, this just shows that money doesn't buy health or something.

00:14:50.000 But actually, a much more important message comes if you look at the real numbers, not just the league table.

00:14:58.000 Here's something I'd like to ask you guys, see if you know this.

00:15:01.000 Okay.

00:15:02.000 What 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?

00:15:12.000 I 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.

00:15:21.000 So give me a number.

00:15:22.000 What's the difference?

00:15:23.000 64, 78. How about that?

00:15:25.000 You say you're going to say 14 years?

00:15:27.000 Yes.

00:15:27.000 The answer is four years.

00:15:29.000 Four.

00:15:30.000 That's it?

00:15:30.000 Four.

00:15:31.000 It's not much.

00:15:32.000 That's right.

00:15:33.000 That's my point.

00:15:34.000 And the last four?

00:15:35.000 Really, you can have them.

00:15:37.000 Well, of course, the last four, it's the same in Japan.

00:15:43.000 The 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.

00:15:53.000 So, 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.

00:16:07.000 I'm afraid so.

00:16:08.000 And 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,

00:16:24.000 less 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.

00:16:32.000 It's really because the impact of things that we can do today is so small that it becomes so urgent to develop new things.

00:16:40.000 What do you think will be the method for repairing damage?

00:16:44.000 I mean, how will that find itself in our lives?

00:16:48.000 So there are many different types of damage.

00:16:50.000 And 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,

00:17:07.000 just seven categories.

00:17:09.000 Within 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.

00:17:21.000 So basically we're talking about only seven different types of repair.

00:17:25.000 So, for illustration, let me just talk about one or two of them.

00:17:30.000 One type of damage is loss of cells, cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells.

00:17:38.000 That's basically the reason why we get Parkinson's disease.

00:17:42.000 That's probably the best example, the most obvious example.

00:17:45.000 Now, 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.

00:17:56.000 These neurons die much more rapidly than neurons in most parts of the brain.

00:18:01.000 And sure enough, eventually you don't have enough of them.

00:18:03.000 Now, in most of us, you've only lost about 20% of those neurons by old age.

00:18:08.000 But some people lose them a bit faster and they maybe have lost 70 or 80% in old age.

00:18:13.000 And those are the people that get Parkinson's disease.

00:18:16.000 So then they ask, what is the damage repair approach?

00:18:19.000 The answer is actually really clear and well-known in this case, namely stem cell therapy.

00:18:24.000 That's what stem cell therapy is.

00:18:28.000 You put cells into the body that are prepared in advance, so to speak.

00:18:34.000 They'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.

00:18:43.000 So you restore the number of cells in the tissue, tissue starts working again, you fix the disease.

00:18:49.000 And about 20 years ago, people started trying this because people realized this.

00:18:54.000 It didn't really work too well back then.

00:18:55.000 It worked occasionally.

00:19:01.000 Thank you.

00:19:24.000 Wow, that is very promising.

00:19:26.000 That's incredible.

00:19:27.000 Ten years.

00:19:28.000 That's a relatively short amount of time.

00:19:31.000 It is.

00:19:31.000 Unless you're 64. Right?

00:19:35.000 It is a short amount of time.

00:19:37.000 A lot of the therapies that we think also need to be developed to address other parts of aging, I think, are harder than that.

00:19:44.000 And I think we could be talking about 20 or 25 years.

00:19:47.000 And even then, we're only talking about, let's say, a 50-50...

00:19:53.000 There's a probability of getting there.

00:19:55.000 For anything that's more than a few years away, it's obviously extremely speculative if we're talking about timeframes.

00:20:00.000 I 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?

00:20:09.000 And you've got to know, you've got to have some kind of idea of how...

00:20:13.000 Close something is in order to understand how much to agitate to make it happen faster.

00:20:20.000 You 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?

00:20:28.000 So that's a big part of why it's important to talk about these time frames.

00:20:31.000 But yes, I mean, I think there's at least a 10% chance that we won't get there for 100 years.

00:20:36.000 Wow.

00:20:38.000 No big deal, right?

00:20:39.000 Because a 50% chance is quite enough to be worth fighting for.

00:20:42.000 Most certainly.

00:20:44.000 You 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.

00:20:59.000 There's people that are concerned with biological aging, which is your group, medical biological aging.

00:21:05.000 And 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.

00:21:16.000 And 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.

00:21:29.000 Do you give any credence to that?

00:21:31.000 Do you dabble in that, or do you just concentrate on what you're doing?

00:21:34.000 I tend to have a very open mind about these things.

00:21:37.000 I'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.

00:21:53.000 And this could be an example.

00:21:54.000 Uploading is the idea of moving one's consciousness to a different hardware.

00:22:01.000 You know, it's not completely clear that it can't be done.

00:22:04.000 There may, in the end, be reasons why it totally can't be done.

00:22:08.000 But I think all that really matters now is that we can say that it's very difficult.

00:22:13.000 I 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.

00:22:33.000 But here's the thing.

00:22:35.000 Like any sensible technologist, I know I might be wrong.

00:22:38.000 And 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.

00:22:52.000 That works for me.

00:22:53.000 Now, there's a philosophical debate here, a philosophical conversation.

00:22:57.000 That conversation is, why would you want to continue?

00:23:02.000 How long do you truly want to live?

00:23:05.000 Do you want to live to be a thousand?

00:23:06.000 Do you want to live to be a hundred thousand years?

00:23:08.000 And will that be an issue as...

00:23:12.000 As far as natural resources go.

00:23:15.000 I mean, are we already overpopulated?

00:23:17.000 Are 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? 0.82

00:23:27.000 So I'm going to answer that question in two very separate parts.

00:23:30.000 First, I'm going to talk about the so-called philosophical issue of how long one would want to live.

00:23:35.000 I find it quite remarkable that people worry about this, simply because it's not the way that people actually think about anything else.

00:23:46.000 Let's remember that the longevity aspect of all of this work is a side effect.

00:23:52.000 I don't work on longevity.

00:23:54.000 I certainly don't work on immortality the way you might think if you read the papers.

00:23:59.000 I just work on health.

00:24:01.000 I'm just interested in stopping people from getting sick when they get older.

00:24:06.000 Now, if you think about it, all medicine is like that.

00:24:09.000 All medicine involves stopping people from getting sick or fixing them up if they are sick.

00:24:14.000 And all medicine has a side effect, that people live longer than they otherwise would have done.

00:24:19.000 So the only real difference between the work that Sensory Research Foundation does and the work that everyone else in medical research does...

00:24:27.000 is a difference of degree.

00:24:28.000 The fact that the longevity side effect of our work may be substantially greater than the longevity side effect that we're familiar with.

00:24:37.000 It's still a side effect.

00:24:38.000 So if we come to the question of how long one might want to live, You know, is that even a meaningful question?

00:24:46.000 To me it's like saying, what time would you like to go to the toilet next Sunday? 0.88

00:24:50.000 You know, we know that that's a dumb thing to have an opinion about. 0.88

00:24:54.000 It'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. 0.94

00:25:04.000 And it's the same deal. 0.85

00:25:06.000 You know, nobody makes decisions on the basis of how long ago they were born.

00:25:11.000 People 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.

00:25:23.000 If 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.

00:25:34.000 You 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.

00:25:42.000 Oh, yeah.

00:25:44.000 Think about what you were thinking at the time.

00:25:48.000 Were you thinking, oh my god, oh my god, I have to get this person into bed right now because I've only got another 60 years to live?

00:25:56.000 See what I mean? 0.99

00:25:57.000 It's just ridiculous.

00:25:59.000 Okay, so then I want to come to the second half of your question, which was the business about overpopulation and such like.

00:26:05.000 This is, again, I recoil somewhat at the idea that this is in any sense a philosophical question.

00:26:12.000 To me, it's a sociological question.

00:26:14.000 And that's not the same at all.

00:26:15.000 But without getting into semantics, what is the answer?

00:26:19.000 I have a kind of three-level answer.

00:26:23.000 And 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?

00:26:34.000 So, first thing is specific answers.

00:26:38.000 Just 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?

00:26:45.000 Now, 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?

00:26:57.000 And how badly would that matter?

00:27:00.000 At the moment, we've already got an overpopulation problem.

00:27:03.000 We've got too many people on the planet.

00:27:05.000 We've got global warming and stuff.

00:27:06.000 But how on?

00:27:07.000 Why do we have global warming?

00:27:08.000 It's not because we have 7 billion people.

00:27:11.000 It's because we have 7 billion people, all of whom are burning a lot of carbon.

00:27:16.000 I think?

00:27:38.000 It'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.

00:27:53.000 So that's the first level of answer.

00:27:55.000 The second level of answer is perhaps more important.

00:27:58.000 It's a kind of general one.

00:27:59.000 It 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.

00:28:09.000 The answer is, how bad could it be?

00:28:12.000 Let's have a sense of proportion about this.

00:28:14.000 How bad could these problems be as a Relative to the severity of the problem we have today.

00:28:23.000 In order to answer that question, we have to remind ourselves exactly what is the severity of the problem we have today.

00:28:29.000 How many people die of aging every day?

00:28:31.000 The answer is a hundred thousand.

00:28:34.000 And 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.

00:28:44.000 So there is no question that aging is responsible for the vast majority of human suffering in the world today.

00:28:53.000 We don't even have to restrict ourselves to the industrialized world.

00:28:59.000 Overall, I was asking about life expectancy earlier, so I was saying there's only four years' difference between the US and Japan.

00:29:05.000 Turns out there's only ten years' difference between the world as a whole and Japan. 0.55

00:29:11.000 Is that amazing or what?

00:29:12.000 That's pretty amazing.

00:29:13.000 So worst case scenario and best case scenario is only 10 years.

00:29:16.000 Well, not worst case, average case, right?

00:29:18.000 Average case.

00:29:18.000 Yeah, if you take the real worst, then they're down in the 40s or 50s.

00:29:21.000 Well, worst case as far as global mean, right?

00:29:24.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:29:25.000 So, I mean, what we're saying here is aging is undoubtedly the world's worst problem right now.

00:29:30.000 It has been for a long time.

00:29:31.000 And 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.

00:29:44.000 So 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. 0.99

00:29:56.000 How bad is that?

00:29:58.000 Seems 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. 0.96

00:30:07.000 And the third level of answer is perhaps the most decisive of all.

00:30:11.000 The 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?

00:30:25.000 Who should actually be making the decision as to whether these therapies are used?

00:30:32.000 The answer clearly is humanity of the future rather than humanity of the present.

00:30:38.000 If we say to ourselves, oh dear, oh dear, you know, overpopulation, whatever, let's not go there.

00:30:44.000 And 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.

00:31:00.000 Whereas if we develop these things as fast as possible, then humanity of the future does get the choice.

00:31:04.000 Now, I do not want to be.

00:31:06.000 Someone 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.

00:31:17.000 Well, innovation and advancement seems to be a fundamental part of human society and civilization.

00:31:23.000 It just seems to be something that we do, no matter where you go, there's someone who's always trying to improve upon everything.

00:31:29.000 When 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.

00:31:45.000 That's going to be a huge issue.

00:31:47.000 It's going to be a huge issue that we're going to try to solve.

00:31:49.000 It's a fundamental part of being a human being.

00:31:50.000 I very much like the way you said that.

00:31:52.000 I think that's the right way to explain the fallacy of we should leave aging alone because it's natural, which some people say.

00:32:01.000 Some people say, well, you know, aging is not like a disease.

00:32:03.000 It happens to everything.

00:32:05.000 It's basically natural.

00:32:06.000 We shouldn't touch it.

00:32:07.000 And you're absolutely right.

00:32:08.000 You said it perfectly.

00:32:09.000 The way I would say it is like...

00:32:13.000 It would be unnatural for us to say, oh dear, let's leave it alone, even though it's horrible.

00:32:20.000 What's natural for humanity is to see what's natural and we don't like and to fix it.

00:32:27.000 There's that existential angst that people tend to wallow in.

00:32:31.000 What's the point?

00:32:32.000 It's all going to end someday.

00:32:34.000 What's the big deal?

00:32:36.000 And there's many different schools of thought when it comes to that.

00:32:40.000 Some people just think that's nonsense.

00:32:41.000 Enjoy the moment.

00:32:42.000 Live in the moment.

00:32:43.000 Live today.

00:32:44.000 Don't worry about the future.

00:32:45.000 But there's a lot of people who don't subscribe to that.

00:32:48.000 Who really do get depressed when they're worried about their inevitable demise.

00:32:52.000 When 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.

00:32:59.000 We're going to meet the first person who lives to be a thousand years.

00:33:02.000 They're like, well, great, a thousand years of suffering and existential angst.

00:33:06.000 They don't want in.

00:33:07.000 And that's where it's a philosophical question, really.

00:33:09.000 Because it's a matter of how do you approach every day?

00:33:12.000 How do you approach this experience?

00:33:14.000 Do 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?

00:33:20.000 Or do you look at this experience saying, while this is going on, there are a million wonderful things to enjoy about this life.

00:33:27.000 And on top of that, it seems to me that as time goes on, we're getting far better at this whole civilization thing.

00:33:34.000 And 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.

00:33:49.000 Imagine 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,

00:34:06.000 not national society, not local society, but world society in a radical way, just with the wisdom that we would all be able to share.

00:34:15.000 I think there is a lot of truth in that.

00:34:17.000 Absolutely.

00:34:44.000 There 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.

00:35:01.000 Which 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.

00:35:17.000 You know, the people that spend their time essentially living their life in front of the television.

00:35:22.000 The difficulty here is simply a lack of education.

00:35:26.000 The 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.

00:35:36.000 Those 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.

00:35:44.000 I'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.

00:35:53.000 And by the time I'm through that, I'm certain I'm going to have at least another 10,000 years of backlog.

00:35:59.000 So, you know, I mean all we need really is to educate people better.

00:36:04.000 That's an interesting way to put it, educate.

00:36:07.000 I tend to agree with you, but I think that for a lot of people it tends to be an issue of mental health.

00:36:15.000 There's certain people that suffer from depression or struggle with depression and life itself becomes very difficult for them to endure.

00:36:24.000 Well, okay, I want to stop you there for a second because I think we need to accept that there's a spectrum here.

00:36:30.000 There are obviously some people who are extremely depressed.

00:36:33.000 I have a friend actually in the UK who is clinically depressed right now about the problem of aging.

00:36:40.000 Her parents are in a bad way.

00:36:42.000 They're older than her, obviously, and it's really going to her.

00:36:46.000 And, you know, that's an extreme example.

00:36:49.000 If 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.

00:37:03.000 But I would also say that it's part of what I was talking about, lack of...

00:37:08.000 Training.

00:37:09.000 Lack of exposure to the opportunities that life has to offer.

00:37:14.000 Lack of understanding of how to actually seek out those opportunities.

00:37:19.000 So I don't think it's such a hard thing to eliminate.

00:37:22.000 I 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,

00:37:37.000 if you don't take care of it, if you eat poorly, if you smoke cigarettes, if you...

00:37:41.000 You tend to overindulge in alcohol, and it leaves your liver in a constantly processing state, and you're just a mess.

00:37:48.000 Like, those people tend to have a duller experience and perhaps a more burdensome experience.

00:37:54.000 Sure.

00:37:54.000 I just was saying, you know, it's like there's a tail of the curve.

00:37:58.000 There are people who are badly like that, and there aren't very many such people.

00:38:02.000 And 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.

00:38:10.000 But actually, you remind me of another thing there.

00:38:12.000 You 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.

00:38:24.000 There's a very strong tendency to think, oh my God, the quality of that life will be poor.

00:38:30.000 And that's because people have this sense in their heads that quality and quantity are inherently opposed to each other.

00:38:39.000 That the more quantity you have, the less quality you're bound to have.

00:38:42.000 And 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.

00:38:50.000 And so we'll shorten our lives by, you know, whether it's smoking or whatever.

00:38:55.000 But 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.

00:39:05.000 In those situations, these two things are going to be on the same side of the fence.

00:39:09.000 Quality is going to be the thing that confers quantity.

00:39:12.000 So you imagine a world where cigarettes would be inconsequential.

00:39:15.000 You'd be smoking cigarettes, just popping some sort of repair pill, and BAM! No more Marlboro cancer.

00:39:21.000 Well, basically, yeah.

00:39:22.000 I mean, I don't like to point that out too heavily because, of course, it's not true yet.

00:39:26.000 So you don't have people banking on it.

00:39:28.000 Well, right, that's right.

00:39:29.000 I mean, we don't know how long these therapies are going to take to come along.

00:39:33.000 And 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.

00:39:47.000 I mean, I was talking earlier about maybe you'll only gain a year or two, but that might be the key year or two.

00:39:52.000 It might be the key year or two that brings you to the next thousand.

00:39:56.000 Exactly.

00:39:57.000 You said that stem cells within a decade, you believe, there's a large possibility that it could cure Parkinson's.

00:40:06.000 These other things that may be 50-50 in 25 years, what are they?

00:40:10.000 What are the big ones that you're excited about?

00:40:13.000 Well, so most of what we work on at Sens Research Foundation is these hard things.

00:40:18.000 We actually do basically no stem cell therapy work, and that's simply because so many other people are doing it.

00:40:23.000 It'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.

00:40:35.000 And, you know, it would be a poor use of our limited funds to add a drop to that bucket.

00:40:43.000 But most of the other things that we feel need to be done are far more neglected.

00:40:48.000 So let me think where I would even start.

00:40:51.000 Well, okay, one great example that we've been working on is heart disease.

00:40:55.000 So atherosclerosis is of course the number one killer in the Western world.

00:41:00.000 It'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.

00:41:10.000 In this case the type of damage is the accumulation of waste products in the artery wall.

00:41:14.000 The waste that matters here the most is oxidized cholesterol.

00:41:19.000 Cholesterol itself is not a bad molecule.

00:41:21.000 People get this wrong a lot, but cholesterol is a vital molecule.

00:41:24.000 You don't want to remove your cholesterol.

00:41:27.000 You do want to, however, remove the contaminated cholesterol that accumulates at low but significant levels in the body, oxidized cholesterol in particular.

00:41:37.000 This 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.

00:41:48.000 And we'd like to stop that happening, and we'd like to prevent atherosclerosis from emerging.

00:41:55.000 The 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.

00:42:08.000 And we've identified these bacteria and the genes and enzymes, and we've introduced those genes into human cells in cell culture.

00:42:17.000 And it works.

00:42:18.000 We have shown that these cells that have our engineered gene are much more protected.

00:42:23.000 They're much more robust in the presence of a certain amount of this toxic oxidized cholesterol than cells that don't have it.

00:42:31.000 And of course we're moving forward to take that to other types of cell and to mice before we go on to clinical trials.

00:42:39.000 That's the kind of thing that we're doing that's earlier stage so it might take a bit longer.

00:42:43.000 This oxidized cholesterol, can this be eliminated with diet?

00:42:47.000 Absolutely not.

00:42:48.000 The fundamental problem is that these molecules, these oxidized cholesterol species, they get into white blood cells.

00:42:56.000 They get into a part of the cell called the lysosome.

00:42:58.000 They poison the cell.

00:43:00.000 They inactivate the lysosome.

00:43:01.000 And that means that these white blood cells can no longer do what they used to be able to do.

00:43:06.000 They can no longer process normal cholesterol.

00:43:08.000 No, you can't do anything to the diet.

00:43:10.000 The stuff is just there because the cells don't have any machinery to get rid of it.

00:43:15.000 But are they a product of what we eat?

00:43:18.000 A product, but an accidental product.

00:43:20.000 So they happen just because they're bound to happen.

00:43:24.000 But cholesterol comes from animal protein, is that mostly?

00:43:28.000 Kind of.

00:43:28.000 We bring in cholesterol in our diet and we also synthesize our own cholesterol in the liver.

00:43:33.000 And that's how it should be.

00:43:35.000 That cholesterol is doing a good job.

00:43:37.000 The problem is that oxidation is a chemical reaction that is going to happen in the body whether you like it or not.

00:43:43.000 The fact is we are aerobic organisms.

00:43:46.000 We need to breathe.

00:43:47.000 We need to inhale oxygen in order to keep going.

00:43:51.000 And breathing is really bad for you.

00:43:53.000 Breathing is bad for you?

00:43:55.000 Breathing is why we get free radicals, but it's a bit non-negotiable.

00:43:58.000 This is the thing.

00:43:59.000 So 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.

00:44:10.000 Breathing is bad for you.

00:44:11.000 That's a pretty straightforward statement and it's unequivocal.

00:44:15.000 Wow.

00:44:16.000 So, when they use hyperbaric chambers, oxygen-rich environments to enhance healing, is that extra bad for you?

00:44:24.000 Not necessarily.

00:44:25.000 So, of course, breathing is also good for you. 0.97

00:44:28.000 If you don't breathe, then you're totally screwed, right? 0.98

00:44:30.000 Right. 0.92

00:44:30.000 So, it's a trade-off. 0.92

00:44:32.000 It's just that there are some aspects of breathing that are bad for you, and we need to fix those aspects.

00:44:37.000 And those aspects have zero to do with diet.

00:44:40.000 So this type of cholesterol...

00:44:43.000 I wouldn't say zero.

00:44:44.000 So 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.

00:44:57.000 And therefore, breathing will be even more bad for you than it otherwise would be.

00:45:02.000 So antioxidants are crucial if you're going to bother breathing.

00:45:05.000 Up to a point.

00:45:06.000 But 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.

00:45:17.000 It's made the best of a bad job.

00:45:19.000 And therefore, at this point, some of the toxic byproducts of breathing, free radicals, are actually not just bad molecules, they're also good.

00:45:29.000 They're used by the body as signaling molecules.

00:45:32.000 So 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.

00:45:39.000 You'd die at once.

00:45:41.000 We have, therefore, a rather interesting balance that the body takes.

00:45:45.000 If you have too few antioxidants, then that's bad news.

00:45:49.000 But 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.

00:45:57.000 The 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.

00:46:11.000 So, this bacteria that you're introducing to skin cultures...

00:46:14.000 We're not introducing the bacteria themselves, we're introducing one gene from the bacteria.

00:46:20.000 One gene from...

00:46:21.000 And we're not introducing it into skin, we're introducing it into the artery.

00:46:26.000 In culture so far, yes.

00:46:28.000 And how far away do you believe you are to implementing this in an actual human being?

00:46:34.000 Well, clinical trials, I think, could be 10 years away.

00:46:40.000 We're probably talking...

00:46:41.000 This is an intermediate one.

00:46:46.000 I would expect that we've got a 50-50 chance of bringing this to the point of being an approved therapy within maybe 15 years.

00:46:54.000 Now, me as a layperson standing on the outside, looking at all this stuff, I'm always very optimistic.

00:46:59.000 Oh, yeah, this is going to be great.

00:47:00.000 Within my lifetime, I'm going to see some huge changes.

00:47:02.000 Talking to you, though, it's not that I get less optimistic, but I get more aware of the actual landscape itself.

00:47:10.000 And 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.

00:47:24.000 There's reactions and counter-reactions, and all of these are not completely, totally understood.

00:47:30.000 So 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,

00:47:47.000 very long time, and not one person is going to ever understand all of the processes.

00:47:52.000 It 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.

00:48:09.000 Basically, it had become very frowned upon even to talk about intervention in a grant application, for example.

00:48:16.000 Essentially because everyone understood, oh my god, the body is so complicated, we understand it so poorly, it's never going to happen.

00:48:23.000 So here's the thing that changed.

00:48:27.000 In two steps.

00:48:28.000 First of all, a step that didn't work out, and then the step that did.

00:48:31.000 The first thing that happened, late 1980s, early 1990s, was people started to discover simple ways to extend the longevity of...

00:48:40.000 A certain laboratory organism, initially worms and eventually mice.

00:48:45.000 This was enormously exciting and those discoveries and the fallout from them still dominate the field in most people's eyes.

00:48:54.000 The problem is it doesn't work for long-lived organisms.

00:48:58.000 Essentially because it's all about the ability of the organism to respond to famine.

00:49:05.000 And short-lived organisms need to be able to respond more dramatically to famine than long-lived ones do.

00:49:11.000 So I'll go into more detail if you really want, but that's the basics of it.

00:49:15.000 The one that did work was when I came along 15 years ago and talked about damage repair.

00:49:20.000 Here's the reason why damage repair is so important.

00:49:24.000 It sidesteps all of that complexity that you were talking about and all of our ignorance about that complexity.

00:49:30.000 Why does it sidestep it?

00:49:32.000 Because the damage that the body does to itself throughout life as a side effect of its normal operation is only harmful late in life.

00:49:43.000 The 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.

00:49:53.000 So that means that until that point, the damage is not participating in this massively complex network of processes that we call metabolism.

00:50:03.000 It's just accumulating as an inert by-product.

00:50:08.000 It's only by mass action after it becomes so enormously abundant in late life that it becomes part of metabolism again.

00:50:15.000 And that's hugely important.

00:50:17.000 It 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.

00:50:34.000 Metabolism itself, yeah, it's a crazy, insane network of spaghetti code that's not got any comments, so to speak.

00:50:41.000 You 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.

00:50:50.000 But 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.

00:51:01.000 Is there any focus on concentrating on the potential of...

00:51:05.000 You were saying that the body has a very good ability to deal with all this damage at a young age.

00:51:12.000 And as you get older, it becomes less and less able to.

00:51:16.000 Would the real solution be catching it early, finding people that are very young and implementing these strategies on them?

00:51:25.000 Not 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.

00:51:34.000 They're carrying more of it around.

00:51:36.000 And why is that?

00:51:37.000 Because it's had longer to accumulate.

00:51:39.000 I see.

00:51:39.000 It hasn't been going away.

00:51:40.000 So a young person doesn't have much damage.

00:51:43.000 It doesn't really make sense for someone in their 20s.

00:51:46.000 Let's look 20, 30, 40 years from now when these therapies actually exist.

00:51:50.000 Would it make sense for a 20-year-old to actually...

00:51:54.000 Do you partake of these therapies?

00:51:55.000 Probably not.

00:51:57.000 Because 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.

00:52:07.000 And during that time, the therapies are going to get better, both safer and more convenient and more comprehensive and so on.

00:52:15.000 So the trade-off is better to wait for the therapies to be improved.

00:52:19.000 That's not necessarily what I was getting at.

00:52:22.000 What 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.

00:52:28.000 Would it be more advantageous to catch it before it accumulates?

00:52:32.000 To deal with the issues before they become substantial?

00:52:35.000 Well, that's what sense is.

00:52:37.000 We're going and saying, let's not take 20-year-olds, but let's, yes, take 40 or 50-year-olds, not 80-year-olds.

00:52:43.000 Not 80-year-olds. 1.00

00:52:44.000 You're fucked if you're 80. You're not necessarily fucked. 1.00

00:52:46.000 You're just fucked for now? 0.99

00:52:48.000 But it's harder. 1.00

00:52:48.000 It's harder. 1.00

00:52:49.000 Let me go into that in a little bit more detail.

00:52:50.000 Okay.

00:52:51.000 If 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.

00:53:01.000 And, of course, one does it periodically.

00:53:04.000 Now, 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.

00:53:18.000 They're going to be useful when used in combination with traditional geriatric therapies, the kind that currently we have today.

00:53:27.000 Remember what I said earlier that the geriatric therapies today don't work, and they never will work, basically because they're attacking the symptoms.

00:53:35.000 They are kind of laboring under the misapprehension that the diseases of old age are like infections.

00:53:41.000 What 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.

00:53:55.000 So 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.

00:54:06.000 We would allow the geriatric therapies to actually work.

00:54:09.000 And it may end up being that we need to do that.

00:54:12.000 That 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.

00:54:22.000 We may need to go in at two levels at the same time.

00:54:25.000 What are these geriatric therapies that are...

00:54:27.000 Oh, I just mean like, you know...

00:54:35.000 Injecting dopamine for Parkinson's disease, for example.

00:54:37.000 Basically, you know, short-term benefit, mild benefit.

00:54:42.000 Reason is, basically, the problem's getting worse.

00:54:44.000 The cells are continuing to die.

00:54:46.000 You need more and more dopamine.

00:54:47.000 You become more and more resistant to dopamine.

00:54:50.000 It's being supplied in the wrong schedule, anywhere at the wrong times, because you can only...

00:54:56.000 Because of the nature of delivery, you can only deliver it in a bolus.

00:55:00.000 You know, these things are all ways in which such therapies cannot be perfect.

00:55:06.000 Whereas 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.

00:55:23.000 What other methods are you looking into for repairing damage other than introducing this bacteria to...

00:55:28.000 Okay, so that's the second one I mentioned.

00:55:30.000 The first one I remember was just stem cell therapy, right?

00:55:33.000 Let's take another one.

00:55:34.000 Let's take the immune system. 0.99

00:55:38.000 The immune system is a classic example of the problem of what I call death-resistant cells.

00:55:44.000 That means cells that rather than having too few of them, as in Parkinson's disease, you have too many of them.

00:55:50.000 And in particular, you have too many because they're not dying when they're supposed to.

00:55:55.000 People don't often think in terms of the idea that there could be any cells that should die.

00:56:00.000 But the immune system is a great example of that.

00:56:03.000 Where 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.

00:56:17.000 And after that's happened, then almost all of them die again.

00:56:21.000 To leave room, basically, for a completely different subset to divide like crazy next time you get a different infection.

00:56:27.000 Turns out that in old age, that whole cycle of division and death basically goes wrong.

00:56:36.000 And 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.

00:56:44.000 And they're going the way.

00:56:45.000 They inhibit the proliferation of other cells.

00:56:48.000 So what do we want to do about that?

00:56:49.000 Well, there are various options out there, but we think that we need to go for the jugular of this.

00:56:55.000 We need to do something that's very decisive.

00:56:57.000 And so we're looking at a method that's called suicide gene therapy.

00:57:02.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:57:03.000 Now, that sounds pretty crazy, doesn't it?

00:57:05.000 But it turns out that...

00:57:07.000 It's actually much less crazy than the name implies.

00:57:11.000 Suicide gene therapy has been a routine technique in the lab, used in mice, for example, for quite a long time.

00:57:18.000 Essentially what it is, is you introduce a gene into cells that produces a toxic protein.

00:57:25.000 And when the protein is produced, the cell dies.

00:57:29.000 You arrange this so that the protein is only produced when the cell gets into a particular state that you don't want.

00:57:35.000 So you want the cells to die at that point.

00:57:39.000 Relatively routine idea.

00:57:41.000 What we would like to do is to make it well for humans.

00:57:44.000 And the problem there is you've got to make it safe, of course.

00:57:48.000 Now, 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.

00:57:55.000 But the concept of suicide gene therapy has additional difficulties.

00:58:00.000 You really don't want this gene that produces a toxic protein just killing cells randomly when it shouldn't be.

00:58:09.000 So, we're working on new, more elaborate ways to put multiple lines of defense against that problem.

00:58:17.000 How many different people do you guys employ that you have working on all these various methods?

00:58:23.000 It 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.

00:58:35.000 And do you personally oversee all these various projects?

00:58:39.000 I'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.

00:58:53.000 I talk regularly with the professors and other lab heads that are responsible for the project.

00:59:00.000 So, yeah, that's what I do.

00:59:01.000 In addition to, of course, also being the Chief Outreach Resource.

00:59:05.000 And the chief wizard.

00:59:07.000 I mean, it's not...

00:59:08.000 I mean, everyone notices.

00:59:10.000 You're talking about life extension, and you have a sorcerer's beard.

00:59:14.000 I suppose I do, yeah.

00:59:15.000 It's all my wife's fault. 0.98

00:59:16.000 My wife is a beard fanatic. 1.00

00:59:18.000 Oh, really?

00:59:19.000 It's your wife's fault? 1.00

00:59:19.000 That's right. 1.00

00:59:20.000 Many years ago, my wife campaigned after we met for a long time.

00:59:24.000 We 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.

00:59:33.000 That's interesting because that's kind of your calling card.

00:59:35.000 I suppose it has become so.

00:59:37.000 Are you satisfied by this research?

00:59:39.000 Is this stimulating to you?

00:59:41.000 Is this something that you're truly enjoying, this process?

00:59:44.000 Well, I always have an ambivalence there.

00:59:47.000 On the one hand, yes, I'm extremely gratified that it's going so well.

00:59:51.000 From a personal perspective, obviously, I'm proud that I've been able to make a significant difference.

00:59:55.000 But 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.

01:00:06.000 So I talked about our budget before.

01:00:08.000 I said, like, you know, we have about five million dollars a year that we spend.

01:00:13.000 That's an incredibly small amount for the thing that produces most of the world's suffering, right?

01:00:18.000 What the hell?

01:00:19.000 What the hell's going on there?

01:00:21.000 And that's why I spend more of my time trying to raise money than I do actually overseeing the science.

01:00:27.000 I have to.

01:00:28.000 The politician's dilemma, right?

01:00:30.000 Well, that's right.

01:00:30.000 I 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.

01:00:42.000 Three times faster.

01:00:44.000 And that would save the most insane number of lives.

01:00:47.000 That's the thing that really gets me out of bed in the morning.

01:00:50.000 Do you have the ear of politicians?

01:00:53.000 Do you have the ear of people that are in charge of universities that would listen to you and perhaps allocate more money your way?

01:01:01.000 It's a very complicated network of conversations that needs to happen.

01:01:05.000 The difficulty with politicians, of course, is that politicians ultimately have one single goal in life, which is to get re-elected.

01:01:12.000 And as such, their public policy tends to follow public opinion rather than leading it.

01:01:17.000 So it's more important to me to appeal to public opinion and try to educate people and raise the quality of debate.

01:01:24.000 That's why I do so many interviews like this, apart from anything else.

01:01:28.000 Then, of course, there's other people.

01:01:30.000 You know, there's wealthy individuals.

01:01:32.000 I try to meet as many of those as I can and generally get them to understand what's going on.

01:01:37.000 The fact that we're a 501c3, a public charity, obviously does help.

01:01:41.000 It means that anyone can give us money in a tax-efficient manner.

01:01:44.000 But still, we've just got to get more of that money in the door.

01:01:47.000 Do you have Kickstarter, GoFundMe, any of those accounts?

01:01:51.000 We 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.

01:02:03.000 Essentially 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.

01:02:18.000 And with early stage research, it's really hard to explain that in terms that really grip people.

01:02:23.000 So it's not really worked all that well for us.

01:02:25.000 Well, we were describing before that pharmaceutical companies sort of hedging their bets, waiting on the sidelines for something to be worth betting on.

01:02:32.000 Boy, I'd like to change that if we can.

01:02:35.000 Whatever 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.

01:02:45.000 Do you need things tweeted for you and posted on...

01:02:48.000 The more the better.

01:02:49.000 The more the better.

01:02:50.000 This is fascinating stuff to me.

01:02:53.000 Obviously, because I have zero research background, no medical science background.

01:02:57.000 So, 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.

01:03:07.000 I think it's massively important.

01:03:14.000 Discussed 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.

01:03:29.000 I 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?

01:03:42.000 Our fundamental problems are the intoxication of the environment, blah, blah.

01:03:45.000 I think we could put more emphasis on that if we could have some of the brilliant people that we have alive today live longer.

01:03:53.000 I think that's true.

01:03:55.000 Back in 2006 when I spoke at TED, actually I made that whole concept the centerpiece of my talk.

01:04:01.000 I said basically, you know, you guys, you're all visionaries, you like aiming high.

01:04:05.000 This could be the critical feature of this.

01:04:10.000 Even 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.

01:04:27.000 If we can bring that truly under control, then this will empower us.

01:04:32.000 It 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.

01:04:42.000 The 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?

01:04:53.000 Is there a cooperation between these two groups?

01:04:55.000 Sure, sure they are.

01:04:57.000 There's always a spectrum of opinion with regard to desirability and feasibility of these things.

01:05:04.000 But absolutely, everyone knows that we're on the same side.

01:05:08.000 We're not in favor of getting sick. 0.98

01:05:10.000 You are truly a mad scientist.

01:05:12.000 I know you're tired, and I know you're way past your bedtime now when it comes to the UK, so I really appreciate you being here.

01:05:19.000 And for folks at home, what's the best way to contact you?

01:05:24.000 What's the best way to send money?

01:05:26.000 What's the best way to reach out?

01:05:28.000 The best way is to go to Sense.org.

01:05:32.000 S4Sugar Eve for Elephant, end of November, S4Sugar.org.

01:05:37.000 Just go there.

01:05:38.000 It has all the information about what we do, about what we'd like to do, about what we have done.

01:05:42.000 It's got all the information you can imagine about why this is important.

01:05:47.000 It's got, obviously, a nice way to contact us and send us any messages you'd like.

01:05:51.000 And, of course, there's a nice, big, friendly donate button.

01:05:55.000 Anytime 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.

01:06:03.000 Please don't hesitate to ask.

01:06:05.000 I'd be more than happy to help.

01:06:07.000 Well, you're extremely kind, Joe.

01:06:08.000 Thank you for having me on the show.

01:06:09.000 I'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.

01:06:17.000 Wow.

01:06:18.000 I hope you're right.

01:06:19.000 You're really an impressive individual.

01:06:21.000 I really, really appreciate you taking your time.

01:06:23.000 Aubrey DeGray, ladies and gentlemen, you can...

01:06:26.000 Do you respond to your Twitter?

01:06:27.000 Do you ever go there?

01:06:28.000 Oh, yeah.

01:06:28.000 Do you look at it a little bit?

01:06:29.000 Check it out?

01:06:30.000 Don't send him anything rude. 1.00

01:06:32.000 Fucking freaks. 1.00

01:06:33.000 All right. 0.99

01:06:33.000 Thank you very much, brother. 0.99

01:06:34.000 I really, really appreciate it.

01:06:35.000 Aubrey DeGray, ladies and gentlemen.

01:06:40.000 Oh, that was fun.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 22, 2015

Joe Rogan Experience #638 - Aubrey de Grey

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