>> after appearing university of oxford that aging was the most important scientific challenge of our time and with

computational biology using machine learning to predict heart attacks as a full-time science writer appearing on discovery and the bbc with a journey on the work being done to understand of human suffering of aging itself with the physical and mental deterioration of that inevitable part of growing older. [inaudible] and then to target those biological factors for own frailties. fascinating stimulating practical guide and how we could been those arrows to

improve and then says to be few issues can be more important for future to explain the extraordinary achievement and research along longevity. we are so pleased without further ado the digital podium is your. >> thank you so much take you for having me. and then to raise the profile of the issue of aging. and it taking this through computational biology before deciding that aging was so important under recognized even in biology i had to write a book about it. as you heard my book is ageless. the thesis of the book is just

a natural process but it is the single greatness humanitarian challenge of our time. that sounds like a strange claim to make but also aging is inevitable. we think it is the unavoidable side effect to be alive and our pets and farm animals seem to follow a similar trajectory of decline but we know that is not universal at all. and we have these experiments. dozens of different ways to slow down and reverse the process of biological aging it is this combination that makes it most exciting as a humanitarian challenge on one hand and then the science to rise to that challenge.

and since the discovery of antibiotics. as we heard already i change my career and there are reasons because of a graph. i will start by showing you this graph in a convention of the importance of this topic. and then the risk of death not that more people are more likely to die but if we look at what the curve looks like and then to see to really make sense of this go to the numbers when you are born you have.5 percent chance of not making your first birthday fewer in modern times. you can be born with genetic

issues but if you're lucky to make it to the first year then your risk of death goes down throughout your childhood and tell you are about ten years old. current ten -year-olds have a fantastically important distinction. they are the safest human beings in the history of humanity. lesson 1001 not one —-dash one in 10000 chance not to make the 11th birthday. but then it's all downhill or uphill from there. at 18 it is one of 3000 chance come in your thirties it's around one in 1000 per year but to transpose those numbers into your life if i could somehow continue with that same chance throughout my life and then just based on how long we expect people to live but unfortunately as an adult your risk of death doubles there is the exponential

growth in the last year so we see that huge power to get very big very quickly by the time you reach 65 of 1 percent challenge and then if you are 65 and you make it to 165 on average 1 percent is a fairly significant challenge severe are lucky enough to make it to 80 of one and 20 chance if you make it to your nineties it's about one out of six per year. it is like the role of the dice. so you think this is terrifying because i have this mortality racing towards me

but as a scientist you think this is fascinating with a sudden increase with your seventh or eighth decade was at the cause of the synchronized change all at once so the question we have to ask ourselves is what is aging when most of us think about aging we think of a variety of effects when aging happens things like wrinkles and gray hair that is just the external side. but the scarier things are the risk of diseases like cancer or heart disease and dementia this is that we characterized by the aging process the single biggest risk factor is just getting older. we have a whole range of other

changes. so i group these two together loss of hearing or muscle or vision. there is the umbrella is the loss of independence you are less able to get around the house, socialize, bed the seed away at your independence and you can't do the things you would like to do. finally things that are not directly related to the aging process but significantly worse to an older age. like infections and injuries if you are young person if you broke a bone it would heal but then in your seventies or eighties as like breaking a hip and then you're stuck in a bad for weeks and weeks muscle wastage and contract as secondary infection it may not kill you that dramatically effect the future course of

your life something shrugged off in a few weeks as a young person can affect you as you get older. these constellation of changes for the aging process. now we can see these poor changes underlining the deck and what causes this now it slightly changes the graph but now you have the risk of getting a particular d's like cancer, heart disease, stroke, dimension have a similar exponential looking risk that rapidly increases and it goes higher. it's basically caused by the underlying aging process. is represents chest infections that this is deep into your lungs and you still have a reasonable chance one or 2 percent even at your lowest

risk at any point in your life but if your immune system starts to decline because of aging you're more likely to get one of the's diseases. because if you protect yourself against one of these infections but then one thing over the last year or so if you look at your chance of death are to be infected like infection of the coronavirus that's a terrifying exponential increase rising at an even faster rate of risk overall if you catch it in your twenties literally hundreds of times less likely to die than someone who catches it in their eighties. now a lot of 80 -year-olds are vaccinated. that nonetheless it shows a huge impact on the ability to fight off infections.

>> there is a myth you can die of old age and then one night you passed away peacefully with no suffering. the vast majority get a disease that advances over years or decades sometimes the treatment is hard work and then it comes to take your life whether heart disease and it robs independence when you are sick with that and then you die from that as well. we have multiple diseases at once. the average radio has five different diagnosis and takes those medication to counteract. it's a serious effect of quality of life overall. that's why aging causes so much suffering that you may think this is my favorite graph. you may say risk of disease but this is something we in the rich world are lucky

because we can live love one - - long enough to experience these effects. normally presume i would have said think about this. what is global life expectancy for every country in the world? the reason i like to ask this question this is significantly younger than is that case. people get ten or 20 years lower. that's because this massive developing world poor access to sanitation living much shorter lives but actually there's been a huge living standard that global life expectancy is cut up with the richer countries so global affect back in 2019 was 73.six years.

this is a double-edged sword people are living longer and healthier lives. but on the other most people in most countries are a significant way to experience side effects and the causes of death. what this means at the global that statistics of the 150,000 people who day - - diver they on planet earth over 100,000 similar to 2000 deaths around the world are caused by aging. fundamentally went the roles largest he military and challenge and then the majority of suffering they are horrible and drag out your death and suck your quality of life and can reduce your independence so it is an enormous tsunami of death and suffering as a global community so this could be

quite a depressing thesis so what can we do about it? are risk of death double on - - doubles about seven or eight years that in the animal kingdom this is a striking example it's similar to hydra a fresh water animal. very small. the reason why hydra came to the attention of the scientific community incredible we generative powers you can chop off any part of it grow into a second fully functioning and the other one just grows back whatever was cut off. and pat one - - powerful regeneration so they are risk of death there's look something like this it is completely flat they don't grow old it just carries on throughout their years.

we had a lot of these long enough but it's estimated if it stays as flat into the indefinite future around 10 percent they would still be alive after 1000 years which is really incredible. is not from longevity but just the risk of death doesn't change as they get older. you may think this is a 1 centimeter long pond creature but there are those that are much closer to humans that display this property. this is the galápagos tortoise reaching 177 years old and they are also negligible their chance of death does not change as they get older they don't lose any of their powers or reproductive capacity talk

about jonathan who is a slight difference the oldest in the moment in the world counting is 190th birthday. he still likes to get it on with the ladies. they enjoy life until the end. they are not a close close relative but this is a naked mole rat. but this thing can live with no loss of capacity even though it looks incredibly wrinkled it stays reproductively active until very late in life we thought they were immune to cancer tell just a few years ago they did find some tumors in them but they are creatures they

become old without getting elderly so how do we learn from that biology or adapt or take these ideas? >> so return to this question of aging they are very helpful answers so these are very large high-level categories to talk about memory so me different ways your brain can learn lose that capacity very different levels inside biology and also to treat them one at a time they may give you chemotherapy or surgery but they largely ignore everything else that's wrong with you but that's treated by a separate doctor in a separate building. we treat these very differently and in a way treating the and cause we try

to improve the state of your muscles or give your walking stick they are and stages not causes. we tend to treat them in a way that's very separate. if you ask an aging biologist what is aging they may say the hallmarks of aging. i will not go into every single one of these but there is a variety of different ways it's more exciting than the slide i just showed you. these are fundamental underpinnings most can be chalked up to a variety. the ideas if we go after these changes we can slow down or reverse the progression from wrinkles and gray hair to muscle loss and dementia and all these various different things.

the reason i talk about this with antibiotics one of these hallmark seat on - - have those at the same time. i was choose a couple to highlight the first one is number two that's one of the most common questions you get and the answer is yes but it is complicated. if you look down inside the nucleus for constructing a human being so this blue stuff showing the chromosomes the start and the end of the chromosomes acting as protective caps if you zoom in

it will look a little bit like this. a string of repeated dna letters over and over tta ggg. hundreds or thousands of times. so why do chromosomes have that repeated nonsense at the end? they have been instructed to solve ridiculous problems. the first they protect chromosomes from dna repair systems that probably means dna has been damaged so you're selling solid try to fuse them together and fix the damage whatever it was. so it says don't worry that's what it should look like.

they also for a very strange mistake when it comes to reproducing so they have to copy that dna that they have a full repertoire of dna the problem is when we duplicate that that enzyme moves along but can't quite make it all the end to the chromosome. if it was chopping off critical of dna then you would lose that dna and slowly lose the function so hundreds of thousands of repeated nonsense and then nothing important gets lost you can see it is a temporary reprieve and then

you get down to the important dna. this is why you can see it's a problem and not causes of aging because as we get older and that means they are gradually shorter as we get older. so the aging on the bottom but it's up every single one of these is an individual person there is a trend but not the greatest in the world those that have telomeres as that is the outlines. the average to increase the

does seem like a candidate for the cause of aging they have shorter telomeres for their health. so clearly there is something going on here so we use this enzyme that was discovered as a nobel prize and then to discover there was an enzyme that adds extra letters for men to build them back up. can we turn that back on and cure aging?

and then replacing the cells and then to manifest for all of us. because that is a cancer defense mechanism. it's what happens when sl gains the infinite number of times. to say it keeps on dividing with that right combination and then to grow big enough and then that first experiment in mice so they were told to carry on what was a very unfortunate side effect. some of the first experiments were done there were some very excitable documentaries talk about the fountain of youth and it was a telomerase but it

doesn't mean cancer but it has way and helps them divide infinite number of times. i shouldn't burst the bubble but turns out it's more complicated. but fascinatingly much more recent research has shown there's a friday of ways to get around the cancer problem so back in 2008 when mice were given an extra copy not only of tell telomerase but also three other genes. but basically enter on - - anticancer genes so they stop dividing. so if you got the telomerase that these anticancer genes in

combination and why hasn't give that genetic modification. so if you add the telomerase that doesn't work if you add in those it does seem to improve lifespan with healthier lives in the more recent experiment that's optimistic for the rest of us so there was some temporary telomerase and then just added for a short period of time it extended it but they would live 20 percent longer. forty years old if you convert the years not just longer but healthier. and better performance walking

a tight rope that we can all aspire to as we get older. so we have these different therapies with the new nuanced approach and then with the human therapies. so the cells that i mentioned one of the ways when the telomeres get too short the means is stops dividing is just a biological world word meaning how old so that means as the bodies age we accumulate one of the reasons i have already mentioned is the tell me's - - the telomeres get very short maybe to become cancerous and then the cell stops dividing maybe if it has damage to the dna that it is a risk of becoming cancerous. that means cell cannot keep

dividing but unfortunately they don't just that they are not dividing from the cellular community they pop out a toxic compound the primary purpose is that you don't need in our bodies to come over and gobble them up and get rid of them but unfortunately this is not as effective in more ways we can acquire them because the telomeres are getting shorter and then they are accumulated but on the other hand that they are quite old by the standards of a seven -year-old human being.

so it gets you to some of those cells what they found was basically it makes the mice biologically younger and they get less cancer less heart disease it's also good news that they live longer which is of the aging process a couple of months longer but they just don't hobble on in that geriatric late stage of life they can run further and longer on a treadmill in their more curious and amazed they even have better for. so what is clear by targeting these hallmark's you can globally reverse the aging process but actually improve their health for the rest of

their life and live longer. that is fantastically exciting news and what is cool evening closer than telomerase therapy as we have these companies that are trying to turn these for what's happening in the clinic in the first human trials have already started in 2018. the way this will pan out the first treatment will be those for those who have diseases like arthritis or lung fibrosis but if they work improve safe we could start thinking about those are in their fifties or sixties don't have a particular disease that we currently diagnose but that they accumulate and by clearing them out to prevent

that in the first place award to reverse summit respective aging to stop us from becoming ill. so to end the talk i would ask should we cure aging? that is a strange question because just talking about cancer research nobody would ask about q&a in the end shouldn't we be concerned if we cure these people of cancer? will have a sudden increase the population on our hands. that means dealing with the environmental consequence. as an aging researcher you get these questions he put the and a separate and moral and ethical category. to give you a very generic answer there is equal access were only available to the rich. it opens a can of ethical worms. but turn the question around. imagine we lived in the

ageless civilization they live healthy and young lives would you invent aging to solve these problems if we were straining with resources and those environmental catastrophe guidelines and then to invent aging would you condemn people to slow the degeneration and suffering? and then to and that should be the option. and then to lose those faculties and independence to

finally succumbing the panella plea of diseases. and that applies to all the appropriate questions i don't think i'm then reversing the question and just not morally accepted second and to really raise the profile in the scale of the challenge. that the cost of various chronic diseases. and then the killers in the modern world. costing hundreds of billions of dollars per year is really

quite close to $1 trillion of all the various cost of aging now compare that to how much we spend researching aging in the us the national institutes of aging they get about three.$5 billion per year. just to emphasize this so there is a tiny amount compared to the enormous cost of $4 trillion per year spent on healthcare in the us less than 1000 goes to nih it's even worse that there is a running joke is not national institute on aging the national institute of alzheimer's disease because the bulk of the budget goes to the neuroscience division. basically researching

alzheimer's. so if you get to the actual aging biology about one dollar per american goes into research why it is wage and how we can stop it. and a huge cost of aging to our psyche doesn't make sense. i want to raise the profile so to increase the research budget and what you to read the book and scientist and doctors to realize the huge importance of this the economic case is already incredibly powerful if we can reduce this number on - - enormous cost to society with that humanitarian challenge. that's why i've written the book i want people to talk about this in dinner parties and want politicians to be talking about this them to

understand how important this is. that's what you're but cover looks like this is the uk cover as well. to find out about the book you can get it from the harvard bookstore. follow me on twitter. that's just a quick overview and now we have time for a few questions. host: and hello thank you so much for that informative talk. we have some great ones from the audience. so i will just start off for the question that says what things do you currently do for

your attempt to live longer? >> there is actually a chapter of health advice i call it how to live long enough even to live longer if i could live longer than i can be alive in time for more treatments to be developed. it really compelled me to follow some health advice. some of that is apprising me obvious like not smoking or eating a variety of foods with exercise and sleep. what i found these more compelling but secondly because once you understand the biology of aging you realize this health advice it slows down the aging process. is not like exercise only benefits your heart or muscles but it's a whole aging process. it improves your brain power

cognitive decline on - - decline. it is incredible i highly recommend it. i know it sounds boring but it is important. and then convention all that's of advice and one of those is brushing your teeth. we now understand if you have good dental hygiene it could slow down the aging process. a lot of aging is driven by a chronic inflammation. that's a normal process that we heal a wound and call attention to bring in the calvary. and in young people it's called acute inflammation it solves the problem then dives away.

so it doesn't fit is away in the background so it is a constant paranoia. that's why it accelerates a whole aging process. if you have poor dental hygiene and tooth decay that's a constant standoff in your mouth between the bacteria and your immune system driving chronic inflation with the link between poor dental hygiene and heart health. some of the first evidence comes in it could be linked to dementia so it's incredible to realize brushing your teeth potentially can reduce your risk of dementia so that's why make sure i religiously brush my teeth and floss everyday just low down the aging process as much as possible spec that's great to hear and now i've invested in the electric toothbrush.

>> will a certain age limit benefit others from antiaging treatments? >> i don't think they will they have a global effect there are some certain health conditions or drugs that might interfere with another drug but i'm confident this will happen in the next few years some already and human trials in the next few years. so it's not inconceivable a few years after that and then another drug i didn't talk about in my book that for men is diabetes it could slow down the aging process and has been delayed because of covid so

they will try to use this to slow down the aging process and this is a commonly prescribed drug with a safety record on this and if that trial works out so we could be very confident if it works for many people. i don't think there's any reason for pessimism unless you were on death store. >> that's good to hear that addresses a few other questions and on that note.

[inaudible] >> there are some preliminary lab data various studies given to the mice to show muscle function and where they seem to be most effective is the mitochondria which is the powerhouse of the cells. so that is decent data so there is that testing program with research labs on the us and then to determine which medications can prolong the lifespan of my one - - of mice it is a precursor of what we just mentioned tested in the

last round. but we just don't have that validated his share. and those studies that show that doesn't actually slow down aging? the trial is ongoing that right now i don't know it be after this year. >> . >> what impact from that society quick. >> a very difficult question to answer. the good news is most countries around the world you may know in the us there is us

there certain age groups with the depth of despair in particular of middle-age there are so many things going on and it is obesity. so that the moon but on - - at the moment to prevent the medicine with those affects but they are very serious problems and there is some good evidence it is a bit like smoking the primary pollution is in the lungs that they do seem to cause inflammation and changes all over the body to the aging process so i very much hope we can carry on with the attempts of urban centers and then it does indeed

increase the rate of aging. but we can try everything we can to help improve their life span. >> is it intentional from the evolutionary perspective to hold something back quick. >> it's a great question. intentional is the wrong word but clearly it's not an accident. the simplest way to that aging evolved and then going old.

and then all those other things that are not aging related. and even from exposure because of those tiny bodies and to keep themselves warm if they could just die on a cold night like that. and then what evolution has done and then into the decade. and then to get to reproductive capacity and that

evolution and basically doesn't care. it just doesn't matter. but then if you think of another animal. and talk about the naked mole rat that is very similar but they live in these colonies underground in tunnels. so there's much less risk of predators. they have the opportunity to mature because there is less risk of death now it's far more important if a naked mole rat through history so they have invested much more. so they will still be going. if they have less intrinsic mortality and with that

intrinsic mortality. and with that dietary restriction is a measure that imagine you are mouse and then basically they will stop themselves. and then to redirect that energy for into reproducing as quickly as possible and then try to help it survive. so that is why we think that the simplest explanation to put the brakes on aging to some extent. so i hope that answers the question.

>> so how does dialysis help aging? >> one of the great advances it is almost universally needed is not so much a data-driven science you think of someone playing with my send the lab but the fact is more and more they have huge data readouts because one of the things i was working looking at dna sequencing data on - - data because we went from the human genome project costing billions of dollars if you want to sequence the human genome it's one year later $100 million taken weeks and weeks of work were now we can see for less than $1000 it is

routine so we have vast quantities of biological data so which sells at which time and then to determine and those studies and just generate vast volumes of data. and so the great news is that that computing power has been it has accelerated rapidly. that is the crucial thing because we have to extract understanding from them so if you have those skills to help out the's data together a concrete example a fascinating

breakthrough about a decade ago with the idea the epigenetic clock this is what happens look at the marks and what determines which genes are turned on or turned off in ourselves. so it must be a relationship between this and aging. so they are speculative so a lot of biological data is put out online so with that is the thing that sticks to your dna basically so with loads of this data completely unrelated experiments with developmental abnormalities and dozens of different tissues the only constraint wires that has to have a marker and he found off

of those millions is scattered across the genome he could take 250 to determine the age of the person and it is incredible so incredible in fact it couldn't be published because nobody including him did not believe it so this is a fascinating area of aging if you have accelerating age it's even higher. not suggesting you have aged more rapidly than someone that's younger but they find these all the time. so because of the culture of open data see you have to show the sheer power to find these signals if there are any or not. >> .

>> talk about bio hacking that that is the expected other future activities. >> i am fascinated by this there is a continuum if you google this you will find there are people online how they prescribe that or order that. and those that take more wacky drugs all the way up to the biotech ceo who actually went to a clinic abroad to have that to longer raise gene therapy so there's a whole

spectrum of people from these friday of different approaches to have completely experimental and everything in between. but that is becoming so much more open source the bio hackers have a whole lot more power been fascinated and then to make use of that data as well. i talk about this in the final chapter on some level it is pretty brave. i'm not ready for the experimental gene therapy that maybe someone who is a little bit less risk-averse and then to give the information first and with those risks are the potential benefits is to want people chasing a pipe dream and then second what we want

we don't want bio hackers growing up that differs slightly from one another and then with a different technique someone and so forth. so if they could do so to standardize it for what they think they have got in and try to do some useful trials that would be a fascinating time not just bio hacking but for all of us. because if we have to do more studies with the aging process so what is the evidence good enough to take the plunge? the ideal scenario you could go to the year 2500 taking

medications their whole lifetime that is the perfect experiment but we do have time to wait for seven years for the perfect experiment so we have to take these drugs and treatments with good or bad evidence. and have a much more wider discussion with bio hackers and all of society's really that is a fascinating area. >> the last question is will we see these treatments in our lifetime? >> i am a scientist so it's hard to tie me down obviously

it will be developed in a certain amount of time but the way i did that it is exciting if i genuinely think a lot of these treatments will be available in time for most people alive today. so first these treatments are already in human trials that could be five or ten years we all know the answer in five years so gene therapy and stem cell therapy they sound more futuristic but we are already doing some gene therapies they are being used in hospitals such a get used to doing these so we are at the point for the general public so even if it's

15 years away it is decades not centuries. so talking about all of this data in biology this means we do a systems biology of aging please sell computer models for human beings. we need to intervene in clever ways and to be more subtle to stabilize that and stop us from growing old. now to be crazy sci-fi to even speculate in this way but if you think about it that could easily happen inside the next 50 years a total revolution of computing power and so on and so on.

so that is a poor bats if you are middle-age you could expect to get the first generation may be stem cell treatment that you could expect even if nothing else happens and then among those scientist to develop more treatments those most of the people alive on the planet today but they could be extended further by these aging therapies so that's the first of these antiaging drugs in the next two years we could potentially see a much bigger

increase if that rate can continue fast enough as more technology is developed. >> thank you so much i thank you for asking the's questions. and on behalf of harvard bookstore have a good weekend. thank you so much. . . . .

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ welcome to "washington post" live. exec policy reported author of the technology 202 newsletter. my guest today is senator josh hawley a republican from missouri. senator, welcome to the "washington post". thank you. >> host: center i'm looking for to talking to a bet about your proposal to break up big tech companies in your new book. but we wanted to start today with the events of january 6. senator, you were the first senator to object to the certification of joe biden's electoral college victo