here in san antonio. >> thank you, raul. thank you for questions. >> thank you so much. it was really a thrill to be here. ♪♪ ♪♪ >> after obtaining a pd in fix simms from the university of oxford andrew steele decide aging was the most important challenge or our times and he

was at the francis kirk institute using machine learning to decode our dna and -- he was thank you fewtime describes riter and presenter beared in london and appeared on discovery and the bbc. will be guiding us on a journey to understand the cause of much him suffering, aging. i come to accept that physical and mental deterioration is inevitable part of growing older not all of the species on earth decline with age at the same way we do. andrew's work introduces us to the scientist attempting to understand what thy mat might be develop theories that target the biological processes involved in our own age based traits. it's a pressingly practical good to aging and bend our time to improve our health and andrew scott says, two issues can be

more important for our future than ensuring we age as well as possible. andrew explains the extraordinary achievements and promise of current research around longevity. we are so pleased to be hosting him here tonight. without further adieu the digital podium is yours, andrew. >> thank you so much for that introduction and thank you for having me. i'm a scientist and a writer and also a campaigner, i'm right to raise the profile of this issue of aging. as you heard i started our at a physicist and took this through computational biology for five years before deciding that aging was so important and unwreck niecessed had to write a book so'll try to tell you about that. my book is called ageless think new science of getting older worth getting old. the sort of central thesis is we think of aging as a natural

process but i try make the case toes aging this he single greatest humanitarian challenge of our time and that might sound like a lightly-lightly strange -- i'll talk about the fact that a lot of imaging is inevitable, an an avoidable side effect of being alive. animals and pets are demeanor animals follow a similar trajectory of decline but that certain universal in the animal kingdom and we have experiments that are going on in labs. labs reasons the world with dozens of different ways to slow down and even reverse the process biological agening. enormous humanitarian challenge and we have the biology, the describes to rise to that alcohol -- the science to rise to that challenge and i think what this means is we'll have the biggest revolution in the wail we deliver medical care since the dover of antibiotics. so, as we heard already i

changed my career from a physicist to a biologist, and actually the reason i changed my career, i often tell people is because of a graph and i'll start out by showing you this graph. it's a simpling graph. your age along the bottom of and that up at the side your risk of death in that year. all of us know that older people are more likely to die but just how much more likely really shocked me. it's worth further adieu look at the curve. it's quite surprising how rapidly it certainly ascended end of life let's start with the numbers. wehner born you're zero years rolled and .5% of chance of not making fur first birthday a rich country. you can be born birth various congenital problem but if you make it through the first year of life your risk of death goes

down through your childhood until the edge of ten and current ten-year-olds have an important distinction. they the safest human beings in the history of humanity, they've got less than one in 10,000 chances of knock making their 11 until birthday which i amazing. incredibly likely to survive but unfortunately look at the graph you can see it's downhill on this curve uphill. at 18 you have one in three thousand chance if you're in 30s like i am your risk of death in ball park of one in a thousand per use and it's worth just transposing those numbers into your life and thinking what that means. if i can continue with the same chance of death throughout my life that would men i'd live into thank you mounds and 30s -- the thousands and and -- inner who an adult your risk of death downs so there's an exponential growing in your risk of dying and the last year or sew we have seen the fewer

how long of growth, can start out very small but rapidly get very big very quickly and doubles more than a thousand is still a small chance but accelerate to the years billion them time you reach 65 we have a 1% chance of not making you next birthday and the odds aren't that bad. you'd make it to 165 on average, clearly unfortunately by that opportunity 1% is a fairly significant chance, you can make very significant progress. i you make it to 80 you have one in chance chances of dying and if you're fortunate enough to make into it your 90s, you got odd offed death at one in six per year so that's life or death every roll of odice and there are two wayses to leak to graph. first as a human being and thing this is terrifying. because i have this wall of 0 mortality racing towards me. but as a scientist you look at

the graft and it's quietest increase in the risk of death in the -- what is it that causes this synchronized change across my biology that makes souse much likely to die all at once in the question we have to ask yours to answer the question, is, what is aging? when most of us think about aging we think about this variety of end effects we get when aging happens. the cosmetic superficial, wrinkles and gray hair but no huge effect on our health. just external signs the scarier things are increase in risk of diseases, cancer, heart disease, stroke and dementia, and these are diseases we characterize biologically as being dawgsed by aging process suspect. the single biggest risk factor is just getting older. we have a whole range of other changes. some or which of label as

diseases. i grouped these together, loss of hearing or loss of muscle or loss of expression umbrella is loss of independence but as you get older you've get less able to get around the house and go out and play with your grandkids and socialize because the various kinds of losses each away at your machines and remove your an to do things. and finally we have the things that aren't directly related to aging but worst when you get older. and that's things like infections and injuries. manage you're a young person and you break a bone. that probably means a few weeks in a plastic cast, the bone will heal. i you're in 70s or everythings it's common to break a hip tax and mean an extended stay in hospital and you're stuck in a bed for weeks and experience muscle wastage and if that doesn't kill you it can affect the future court of your life, something you slugged off as a outcome people can dramatically

affect you. the cancel addition of changes combines to be the aging process. and so now we can look at this graph and see not just the death but the whole panoply of changes that underlie that death and particularly what caused all these deaths is the diseases i mentioned. change the graph and at the side we have your risk of getting a particular disease and that's cancer, heart disease, stroke dementia, similar looking at risk, rapidly increases to toward the end of life and the chance of getting diagnosed gets very much higher because these diseases are basically caused by the underlying aging process. to mention one of these things isn't directly called becomes -- green light represents chest infections and sear -- deep into your lungs and you still have a reasonable chance, maybe one or two percent even at your lowest risk of getten aing-denar who lounge and your immunity system

is naive and aging you're more lick toying good ate disease and that's white you flu shot is so important because that means you're protecting yourself against one as those infections and one thing has ramped us home look at you chance of death from infections, if infetched with coronavirus that looks like this, terrifying increase and it's rising at even faster rate than the risk of death if you catch coronavirus in 20s you're hundreds of times less likely to die than someone would catches in their 80s. luckily in the u.s. and u.k. or 80 years vaccinated so the curve looks very different if you rook at people who haven vaccinated but this shows us the huge impact the aging process as on our ability to fight off infection. so party of this graph, you can die of old age.

one anything you pass away in sleep with no suffering but that isn't mostly how people. old people get one of these diseases and advances over years and sometimes the treatment can be very hard work and eventual i becomes severe enough to take your life,ly it's cancer or heart disease, rob yours independence during the time you're sick with and then becomes so serious you die from it. you have multiple of these different diseases at once the average 80-year-old has five different diagnosis and taking similar number of medications to so it's a serious effect on your quality of life overall. so, that's why aging causes quite so much suffering but you might by think about this and looking at the my favorite graph, and think about the risk of diseases and thickening this is something we in the rich world perversely lucky have to that and live long enough experience these terrible effects of age, normal hill in

the opera zoom world i -- prezoom wooled i would have again this we do. you global life expectancy is now. for every country in the world? he reason i like to ask the question because a lot of people trev difficult it's significantly younger than the casey. do surveys, people get it 10 or 20 years older than the real number and that's because i think we were taught in school that's a massive developing world, very poor countries, poor healthcare systems and poor access to sanitation and that means much shorter lives then rich worth but there's ban a huge acceleration of living standards and the global life expectton si has caught i one the richer countries. and i'll put you out of your misery 2019 it was 72.6 years. now this is a double edged sword. its means people are living longer, healthier lives that's

fantastic nut bus means that most miami in most countries are living long enough to get a significant way up the connection and experiencing a significant number of the second effects of growing old thanks suffering and diseases that causes death and that means with a break this down looking at global statistics 150,000 people who die every day on planet earth, stick figures is representing a thousand people. over 100,000 of those people debuts of aging. so more than two-thirds of deaths around the worlds are caused by aging, and this why i think the aging this world's largest humanitarian challenges, keis the death and the majorities of suffering. the way you go from aging they're horrible, and drag out our death and can suck your quality of life, even the thingses that actually kill you can reduce your independence and what that means is aging is enormous or tsunami of death and suffering, something we should he looking toot do something about. so, this could be quite depressing thesis and much more

interesting, what can we do? who back to this graph. our risk of death as human beings doublings every seven or eight years but have a look at other animals and this is a particularly striking example. a creature called a hydra. a fresh water animal, very small and the first reason its came to attention of the scientific community bus it has regenerative powers. you can chop a limb odd it and rid grow back. scientists were studying them and the average risk of death doesn't do what humans does this, risk of death with age looks like this. just completely flat. this is something called negligeable. the don't die and just carry on and we haven't done this experiment because we haven't had any loan looking at them for long enough but it's estimated

if this risk of death stays as flat as that, .2% a year, into the indefinite future, we expect 10% of the tiny little beast questions to be alive after a thousand year kisses incredible. what's most amazing isn't that fantastic longevity it it's the next jib -- the fact othe risk of death doesn't change. so can we learn something from these creatures and become a little more like high contracts? how can we learn to applies this to human beings there are creatures much closer to human that display that's property. beautiful beast is a tortoise and the oldest one lived to 177 years old. and again these creatures are -- they're a lot closer to humans than hydra. they don't become flail or lose their powers to heal or reproductive ability. jonathan, who is a slight

difference species, the oldest known tortoise in to world, coming up on his 190th 190th birthday and still likes to get it on with the ladies so very much enjoying life until the end. er to 'tises north particularly -- tortoises are not close to us, it's something called a naked mole rot. the size of a rat or mouse but mice live two or three or four years in the lab. this can live into the 30s and it's -- there's no loss of capacity with age. looks incredibly wrinkling its stays fit and healthy and reproductively active until late inlight and we thought they were imminute to cancer until science toys studiesing really big colonies found a handful of tumors in them. they become old without becoming elderly. how can we learn from that

biology or take these ideas and turn them into medicines for human beings. so return to this question whats is aging? and this answer i gave were cheats. they are very large high level categories. they could have tens or hundreds of subit toes and cancer. so many different ways your brain can luigs the capacity to store its memories. very different levels levels ane tend to treat them one at a time. you get cancer you go to oncologist and the go to chemotherapy and ignore everything else that is wrong with you. if you haven't heart disease at the same time, that's treated by a separate doctor and a separate building. and we treat all these very differently. treat enemy a way that's treating the end causes. if you have muscle loss we just give you a walking stick. so the problem is these aren't

really cause they're end stages. we trend to treat enemy the a very siloed way, so i'll try to answer this question in a shriking didifferent way. asking a aging biologist this might with you this answer. this ten hall miracles aging. and -- hallmarks of aging. and not going to into every one but a variety of different ways the list is more exciting maybe slide i just showed you. the first reason is these are fundamental cellar and molecular underpinning. if we go after these changes we can potentially slow down or even reverse the progression of different thing, wrinkles gray entire muscle loss to canner and dementia. and i think the reason that i talk but this being more as exciting as discovery of antibiotics because you can go after one of these hallmarks and

sit every are so all of those age relatessed changes at the same time. i'm going to choose a couple. the first one is this, number 2 trimmed telomeres. the its one of the most common questions you get. and the answer is, yes, but it's complicated. so, let me explain how. this is a beautiful image that you right sigh if you've looked in the nucleus of a cell the dna, the general net tick instruction man manual and they put some die dye on the dna and these little red and green dots on then end odd the chromosomes their start and end of those chromosomes and act as protective caps on the end of our dna. if you sailors in on one of this and simply identified the picture it would look like this. just a string of repeated dna

hers over and over again, and these are -- and on and on, hundreds or even thousands of times. so, the question is, why do our chromosomes, detailed instruction manuals for building a human being have repeated numbers on the end? and the answer is, they've been constructed to solve some really rather ridiculous problems that evolution live us with. the first is they protect the end of our chromosomes from the dna estimate if you find a loose dna in your cell that means they dna has been damaged and your creel would try to fuse those he bits of dna together, stick them back and fix whatever the damage was. don't want our chromosomes to be accused told so thete lo me eres says that is what shies look like. also they -- correct for a very straining mistake that our cells

have when its comes comes to reproducing. when a cell guides they have to copy the dna and make sure that both sells eave a full repertoire of dna. did the problem is when our creels -- cells dupe lick indicate the dna, its can't quite make it all the way to owned of chromosome to chops a tiny bit off every time a cell divides and you seek can be problem. if is this chopping up a critical dna that told the cell what it supposed to do every your cell dieds you lose that dna and you have these hundreds thousands bases repeated nonsense which mean that then the dna can chop a tiny bit off and nothing important gets lost. you can cease tis rare to temporary reprieve because you stake few thousands bases like this on the end but easter every time your divide is yous bases and that means you are going to get down that important dna. so it's not a long-term solution

to the problem. this you can really see what's it's a problem could be one the causes of aging because as you get older our cells divide to replace cells and as they divide they lose and telling omere teleomears, so this is a graphic that aging on the bomb and the length of the teleomears on the end and if i stick a graph every single one of these is a person and the length of their teleomeres and you can see there's a trend but it's not the greatest tend in the world. you can see that senate particularly lucky another year heal teleomears as long as some unfortunate 30 years and this -- have incredible regenerative powers. dry a line of best fit through the data you can see the average decrease in length of teleomeres is something like 20 dna hers

and there's a gradual decrease. but it does seem like an obvious candidate for cause of aging and if you look at the data in humans people who have short teleomears have worse halve and die more quickly, die sooner. so clearly there's something going on here. and that could be quite tpcing apart from we have something we can do about it. what we can do is use the enzyme discovered back then set 80s and got a nobel prize in 2009 for the discoverers. and together they discovered theirs an enzyme that can add extra letters to the end of the teleowe mears and add more repeats and bell the teleomears back up and it's deactive rated in most adult cells. so at the question can we turn its back on and cure aging. and allow cells to replace our old cells and thus manifest in

improved longevity and improved health. now, it might seem a bit bizarre he ever luigs condition do. cancer gains the ability to divide infinite numbers of times and the cells divide and divide and if it can keep on doing that and grow fig fluff to become a tumor and that's how cran sir kills you and the first experiments in mice where the mice were begin teleomears and told to carry on using that again and that was a very unfor side effect the mice got cancer. these fer storms were being done, this -- the experiments were doing done, it's -- documents i was in school saying we found the fount of youth it and was teleomears and its

doesn't actually create cancer but means the cell have a win to extend their teleomeres and helps them device, so really burst the bubble, this supposed fouts of youth and then on out to be more complicated. but fascinatingly much more recent research showed there are a variety of ways to get around the cancer problem and mice were given an extra copy of teleomears and have -- tell omere. but basically they're anticancer greens that con convince cells to commit suicide or stoop stop dividing. the pointing point being if you have these they might pretick something on the cancer list and that means that actually in

combination the mice liver 40're lock ever and didn't get extra cancer. if you do a -- that doesn't work but if add in a few extra genes that can prevent at the cancer improves the life span of the mice. and more recent experiment which is more optimistic, having our cells modified from birth, contemporary teleomeres. and extended that tell omears but didn't precheck the check box for cancer and they lived longer. and and they also living longer and healthier, they have things like high bone density, plumper skin and better performance walking a tightrope. so, this is the reason i'm excited. we have these different therapies that have a slight mere nuances approach and appear to be able to extend a mouse

life responsible and the next stage extras lint into the human therapies. so back the hallmarks. the one is -- sines sent cells. one of the way a cell can become -- when its teleomears get too short and stands dividing. ken essence is a word meaning old and that means as our bodies age we accumulate these cells and the cells are short and you divide into suspicious number of times, maybe at reaction of becoming cancerous and they put on the brakes. and put ago then brakes seems like a sensible move but a it meanses the cells can't carry on dividing and turn into cancer but unfortunately the cells don't sit there not dividing or

benign. they pump out a tookic cocktail of molecules whose primary purpose is to tell the immune system to clear up these cells because we don't need them and they can come over and gobble them but unfortunately as we get old their he museum system is less effective and we get more ways to acquire them because of dna damage is more frequent and teleomears are getting shoredder and they tend to accumulate. they can accelerate the aging process globally. what is really exciting we have drugs that can get rid of these cells, killing the cells and leave the other cells in your body unharmed. and this is actually done in mice women have given mice these drugs and let's talk pouts an experiment done fie years ago now. they took some supplies that were 24 months old, quite old by mouse standards, equivalent to 0-year-old human being and give the mice this drug, gets rid of the cells, and what they found

was basically makes me mice biologically younger. they get less cancer, less heart disease and fewer cat rackets, and they also live longer which is suggestive of a slowing to the age process, couple of months longer which is like a few years in human terms but not just hobbling on, not disease, not dying but still jeer at trick late stage of life. they're more curious and wow put enemy in a maize, more similar as younger mouses. they even have better fur so these mice just look fantastic. and what is clear is that by targeting thing hallmarks anding forking something like shortening tell omere or -- you globally reverse the aging process cannot target a disease or live longer but improve the health for the rest of their life and make them live longer as a sort of side effect and

that's exciting news. what is really cool is even closer to human realization than tell omere therapy. -- teleomere therapy. we have companies trying to turn these to the clinic and thirst human trials have started, started black 2018:... ... the slowdown or reverse the process of aging and stop us

from becoming ill. to end the talk i've been asked the question should be cure aging? that's a strange check and -- question. should we be concerned if we hear all these people with cancer and then we'll have an increase in population and that's going to mean we will have to deal with the environmental consequences but when you are aging you often get these kinds of questions at the end of talks. to separate moral category and medical research. they are all those different questions like treatments and if they will only be available to the rich and when dictators live forever. but i'd like to turn the question around and say imagine what lived in an age of civilization that didn't

generate time and we lived healthy long-lived and we dropped off a cliff basically. would aging solve these problems? if we lived on earth where we had 20 billion people and yet climate change and huge overuse of resources and there's an environmental catastrophe going on. is the way you solve that problem y the two slow generational suffering and have these diseases do impact the apartments of changes. i think you've exhausted everything and tried to reduce the footprint and none of these things are working. the only thing you can do and i would suggest the action of last resort. it's a inhumane way to force them to lose their dependents year after year before succumbing to one of these

diseases. i think this applies to all of the questions and whatever the problem is we do and don't aging to solve the quality? i don't think you have the word. you can transfer that by reversing the question. is not more accessible to prevent medical problems in the solve current medical problems. the other thing was funding. they really want to raise research in order to make sure we funded in proportion to the challenge. the cost of various chronic diseases in the u.s. because theyio think cancer heart diseae stroke dementia are the four leading killers in the modern world. if you look at those things these cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year and if you add them together it's really quite

close to a trillion dollars. you look at all the barriers and the cost of aging and it's going to come to this and are missed some and now compare that to much is spent researching aging and the west were quite lucky and there's an organization called the national institute of aging. $3.5 billion a year and just emphasize this in proportion to the money spent it's really quite a tiny amount. the enormous cost of aging diseases in the $4 trillion a year that spent on health care in the u.s. in less than 1000 goes to the nia. actually it's even worse than that. there's a running joke by g. anthology which is in the aging circles. stands for not national institute of aging but nationals

into the alzheimer's disease because the bulk of the budget goes to the neuroscience division about 2.5 billion goes into the research of alzheimer's disease and if you get to the aging biology it's $350 million a year so it's going into into researching wide as we age and how we can stop in when you look at the huge cost of aging to our society it doesn't make any sense that the number should be quite so small so want to raise the profile in this field and i want politicians and policymakers to increase the research budget and i want people to read the book to write lyyour representatives and tell them how important this is my one scientists and doctors to realize the huge importance of this. the economic case is incredibly powerfulit and you could spend a tiny bit of research inning increased its enormous cost to societyab which is an enormous challenge. fundamentally that is why he wrote this book. in order to raise the profile

and people have been talking about this at dinner parties and i want policymakers and politicians to talk about it in the biologist and the medics. they don't get enough aging and education to understand how important this is. i have a couple of pictures here and we will show at the cover looks like. this is a uk cover as well. if you want to find more about the look or buy a copy in good ageless. link and if you want to follow me on twitter and find out more about my stuff i am @steptoe. i just wanted to give a quick introduction to the book on the aging and biology now have time for a few questions. >> thank you so much. i'm excited to get into these questions from the audience and if you have a question at any point put it in the q&a box will

get to it as soon as we can. what things do you currently do? >> there's a chap or in the book and i call it how to live long enough to live even longer than the reason i did this is if i can live long enough i can be alive in time for these treatments are developed and it really compelledlt me. i'm compelled to follow this health w advice. things like not smoking and eating a variety of foods and getting enough exercise and sleep and i found these more compelling because i want everyone to experience these treatments but secondly because went to understand the biology of aging and realize this health advice slows down the aging process and why does these things work. it's not just exercise only

benefits your heart and your muscles. there's a global benefit on the whole and exercising improves your mental health and your brainpower and slows decline. some cancers have a high -- with exercise. so i'd highly recommend it but these are really important. the other thing is there less conventional reasons that biology can illuminate in one of those is that this is my favorite example. we now understand if you have good dental hygiene it can effectively slow down the aging process and the reason is a lot of aging is driven by something called chronic inflammation. if we want to stop inflammation come inflammation is the normal process for which our body fight off disease and heals wounds and the body calls attention to the site of infection and brings in the calvary and solve thatn problem. for young people it's a good thing.

it's a cute inflation that's brief comes in and solve the problem and diese away. that means it doesn't does away in the background. as we get older omission becomes chronic and is a constant paranoia of our main system and that's what these accelerates the whole aging process. if you have poor dental dental hygiene that's a constant that area and the various parts of the immune system. that's driving chronic inflammation so there's good evidence of a link between poor dental hygiene and heart health and heart disease and strokes. there's improving evidence that starting to come in that it might be linked to a decline in dementia. it's incredible c to realize brushing your teeth can reduce your risk of dementia so that's encouraging. just brush brushed my teeth and floss every day to ensure i'm slowing the aging process down as much as possible. >> that's great to hear and

people it's all really good about investing in an electric toothbrush during the quarantine. barry says will some medical problems and -- benefit from antiaging treatment? >> i don't think they will because a lot of these drugs have global effects. they are certain health conditions that you have to take a drag in there some drugs you take that interfere with another drug but there's so many options on the table and i'm comfortable that these things will happen in the next few years unless you are very old and very unwell. some of the things will happen in time for you. their n human trials for specifc conditions in the next two years. it's not inconceivable that a few years after that we can roll them out. a diabetes drug might slow down the aging process more globally and there's a trial that was

supposed to start more recently a while ago but it's been delayed because of covid called pain which is targeting aging with metformin so to use this metformin to slow down the aging process and they are randomized trials where have the people are -- and have the people received the drug. it's been given out of the uk since the 1950s and a cost pence per dose and if the trial works out we can roll it out immediately. i think we can be very confident that it will allow time for many people. i don't think there's any reason unless you're on deaths door that won't arrive in time for you. >> that is great to hear. there a couple of other questions we have about metformin. on that note i'm going to turn to bruce's question.

can -- [inaudible] >> it's a great question and their preliminary lab tests done about these things. they are giving them to older my sanity improves things like muscle and these compounds the thing they are given force the mitochondria which often is a bit of a -- called the powerhouse of the cells organelles inside of your cells that generate energy. that's what it's trying to improve the performance of an so i think there was a recent, a very big, there's an big trial program called intervention tese different research labs in the u.s.. what we do is they have liquid protocols to try to determine which medications can prolong the lifespan of mice.

i think it was amanda and which is a precursor was tested in the last round and i think they showed it had no effect which is to say you can change the dose and you can never completely write it off. they do improve health and long-term and studies show they can do things in the dish that can improve the health of mice and the question is do they slow down aging? at hope we will know soon because trials are ongoing but right now i don't know enough about it. i don't know enough about it to share. >> this next question is from steven who asks i was wondering what impact has pollution increased stress from our industrial society? c that this fascinating question to answer.

the good news is most countries around the world you might know in the u.s. in the uk as well there has been a flat-lining of lifespan and the u.s. there've e-been age groups that are declining for several doubts of despair particularly in lansing -- it's incredibly complicated and there are some neat things going on and away to get - headwinds. these things are subtracting things likedi improved health generally and preventative medicine have effects. there's good evidence that lucian is a bit like smoking. the effects of pollution are primarily in the young -- the lungs.e they potentially caused changes all around the body so i very much hope alongside developing

antiaging medicines we will carry on with their attempt to reduce pollution because clearly it has a negative effect on our health and it does indeed increase the rate of aging. those things have been counteracted by other effects but obviously we should try everything we can to improve people's healthy lifestyles. >> william asked his aging intentional from an evolutionary perspective? the fact that famines in many species suggest the body is holding something back. >> that's a really great question. i think intentional is the wrong word but it's clearly, it's not an accident. the simplest way to understand why aging has evolved, let's rewind. you might be looking at aging and this is very strange.

it's fitness optimizing about growing old in losing your senses and getting diseases. the fact is in the wild animals die of all kinds of things that aren't interrelated. that's a good species like mice. what are the risk of mouth has inin its everyday life? there are to get it and there's disease and masks populations and death from explosions. they have such tiny bodies and small reserves of energy to keep themselves warm. there are loads of different things that can cause a mouse to die so what it's done is to decide rather than investing encounter defenses and making sure the mouse will get heart disease into its fourth decade instead they make the mice grow quickly and pump out those little kids as fast as possible.

so that means evolution basically doesn't care what happens after the mouse is gunther adds lifespan. if a mouse gets cancer at age three doesn't matter because most mice in the wilder long dead before they get to that age but other animals at similar size date similar biologically like mice but they live in these colonies on the ground. they broke through these tunnels and much less risk of predation. what that means is they have the opportunity to mature much d moe sedately because theyak are less risk of death so it's far more important if at the age of three quite likely -- so they have invested much more in defenses against cognitive decline in things like that. this is a trend you find that an

animal that has less extreme mortalities and the risk of death outside of its body it will it compensate for the intrinsic mortality so basically to delay the aging process. dietary restrictions does seem to be measured. imagine you are a mouse and there's a famine and there's not much food for some reason or other. your kids are going to be born into a world without food and will starve themselves. it's far better that point to redirect the energy to reproduce as quickly as possible to maintain the body at that level and try to help it survive into the next season and that's why we think it's a simplest explanation as to why restriction puts -- the brakes on aging. there seems to be a complicated

history. >> they are was very illuminating. this is the big question who says how can it computational biologist uses skills skills to help solve aging? >> one of the great advantages is its almost universally led and its data differ in -- data-driven science. you reimagine the biologists as someone who plays around with a mouse in the lab and the fact is more and more hugest data readouts because one of the things i was working on when i was a biologists was looking at dna sequencing and it's a fantastic example because we went from the human genome to the first readout of full human genetic code for dna code. it cost billions of dollars. if you want to sequence a human

gene it would have cost $100 million to do that and it would have taken weeks and weeks of work worth now we can sequence a whole human genome for less than $1000 which is absolutely routine. we are generating vast -- looking at genomes of people and which genes are being used in which sells at what time and the marks of dna that determine how the dna has been used and protein studies and all the proteins inside the cell and fast data. what that means is the great news is the computing power has been outpaced by the sheer growth and nonetheless -- [inaudible] that is the crucial thing because there's no use having these huge reams of data type you have competition of

programming skills and how the lab interprets some of this data. a fascinating breakthrough in gerontology a decade ago was the idea of something called a -- and this is what happens when you look at the marks all over dna that tells us which genes are turned on and which are turned off and the biologists thought there must be some relation to this and aging. the problem was they couldn't find enough to get any funding and it was just a speculative piecet of science. he took advantage of the fact that a lot of fire engineering was put on line and free for anyone to use. he downloaded a whole bunch i of different apogee in that it marks which is a particular thing that sticks to your dna. he downloaded all the data which is affrighted completely -- from developmental eyebrows to cancer

and all this different stuff in different tissues around the body prince only constraint was that had to have a -- to tell them how old the patient was. he found millions of sites scattered across their genome that he could take three to 50 of them and determine the age of that person within four years. incredible and in fact it was so credible it took him a while to get it published because no one including him believed it. it turns out these apogee and edit clocks are one of the most fascinating areas of aging. it suggested age were rapidly than someone has the younger age and you are more likely to get diseases and by and what we are finding is apple genetic clocks are purely economics. it shows you the sheer power of using this data to find signals

where we didn't have before. >> that's fascinating. this next question is from david who says more people that i know are talking about biohacking and it seems to be slowly injuring the mainstream and what do think of the role of biohacking? >> i'm fascinated by this because there's a real continuing for self experimentation. if you google this you'll find there quite a few people on line and even they are -- even though they aren't diabetic they can order it from a pharmacy. they are people who take cocktails of drugs like experimental and taking it speculatively. liz parish went to a clinic abroad because it couldn't be done in the u.s. and had gene

therapy done to herself. you've got this whole spectrum of people taking a variety of different approaches from all the way to having experimental gene mapping and because of the fact that biology is just becoming so much more open source that you can do it in your garage these biomarkers have a lot more power. fascinated how this is going to progress and how we will regulate this and try to make use of some of that data as well. i talk about this in the final chapter of the book. what i hope is on some level these people are pretty brave. i'm not taking any drugs or going through experimental gene therapy but at some point we'll have enough data to take the plunge. i really hope that we can somehow put pulled together this community who are registered in doing these experiments. we have to make sure they understand what the risks are the potential benefits are how

much is known of how much is unknown as you don't want people chasing dangerous experiments for themselves and the second thing you have to do is allow them to -- these experiments. what we want is biohackers bring up a thousand different things is slightly differ from one another. maybe they have used a different technique and so on and so forth. these people who are going to self experiment anyway if they could do something that would get us more data and we could make sure they all get the same dose and trite to do useful trials to understand the effect these things are happening. it's a fascinating time not just for the bio hacking and people willing to give themselves for gene therapy but for office. as we do more studies and all ngthese different things you can do with the aging process the question is why is that the evidence good enough that you can take the plunge?

the ideal scenario is you are born in the year 2500 you've have centuries and centuries of people taking out these medications through their whole lifetime in you'd know all the side effects and the effects they have and that would be the perfect experiment. most of us alive today don't have time to wait 70 years for the perfect experiment to be done so we'll have to take these drugs and treatments at various different points in terms of bioevidence. it's a real challenge and something we have to have a wider discussion about in the scientific community and amongst the whole of society. it's a different kind of world. it really is a very fascinating area. >> i definitely agree and that takes us into this last question which i think you touched on a little bit but he is asking can you give us some idea of how likely does we will see these treatments in our lifetime and how far we are away from these

treatments? >> i'm a scientist and it's hard to tie me down to hard lines. what i can say and the way i hedge my bets is i generally think a lot of these treatments will be available in time for most people alive today. i'll unpack what i mean by that. the first thing is there are treatments that are art in human trials on there will be a few years before we know how the first ones were. maybe five or 10 years and metformin the answer is five years and if it works we can start handing out to people and things like gene therapy and stem cell therapy, they sound a bit futuristic and sci-fi but we are doing some gene therapies for people who have extreme diseases like ebola for example in these drugs are approved without being used in hospitals now. as you get more used to doing these things people with severe diseases to people who have mild

disease until eventually it's the general public. even if these things are 10 or 15 years away adds decades and not centuries where talking about and the other thing is i talk aboutea all the data toward the end of the science i talk about how this computational revolution will really summarize that. we need to bring -- build computer a models of human bein. we need to understand how those things interrelate and we want to do something more subtle and improve our biology to stabilize and stop us from growing old to reprogram our bodies not too ag. i know it sounds crazy and sci-fi and why am i speculating this but if you think about it that could easily happen inside the next 50 years because of you think about what happened in the last 50 years we have had a total revolution. we have had a total revolution in computing power and the

computing power is doubled since the 1960s and so on. against 150 years time if you are middle-aged and healthy now you can expect to get the first-generation of maybe tell maurice treatment -- what that means is you could potentially expect i'm in my 30s and i can expect to live in my 80s even if nothing else happened in science standstill. if i get therapies like telomerase whatever these treatments are maybe a get of five extra years of great help and that gives us more time to develop more treatments. even if something sounds like it's 50 years away that's potentially long enough for soon enough for most of the people who are like on the planet today because not only will their life potential expense almost that time but further by the first generations of these antiaging potherapies. will deftly see the first of these antiaging drugs in the

next 10 years and depending on how much it extends the health span we could see an increase in the lifespan if they rate continues fast enough. more and more technologies are adopted. >> thank you so much for taking the time to answer all the questions and thanks to all of you for asking such thoughtful questions. i just want to thank you again for this fantastic presentation but i feel like i have learned a lot and thank you everyone out there for spending time with us. you can purchase "ageless" at harvard.com the harvard bookstore the harvard division of science and the harvard library in massachusetts. have a good weekend and keep breathing. thank you so much. >> thank you. bye-bye. ..

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> good evening everybody. and welcome to our live virtual book event tonight. coming in from the offices of the progressive magazine, as you can see in the background there. 112 years of publication. at eight most recent issue, just out and on newsstands and in the mail to subscribers right now. so thank you all very much for joining us tonight. it will be a very interesting and informative conversation i think with chuck collins and his brand-new book the wealth hoarders. before we get started i would have some thank