400 miles and most nights, we were the only people who knew where we were. >> sure. >> and there are many definitions of freedom, but surely that's one of them and that's one that i particularly enjoyed. >> to watch the rest of this program, visit bock tv.org. and search for sebastian younger using the search box at the top of the page. >> after obtaining a ph.d. in oxford, that aging is the most important scientific challenge of our time and switch fields and competitional biology and he worked at the institute and predicted heart attacks and records. >> he's appeared on discovery and the bbc. he will be guiding us on a journey on the work being done to combat the causes of death

and human suffering, death itself. and that physical and mental deterioration is an inevitable part of getting older. no other species declines in age like we do. why that may be and and the biological process is responsible for our own age-based frailties. it's called a practical guide to the signs of aging and how we might be able to use our biological time to improve our health. ensuring that we age as well as possible. it explains the extraordinary achievements of prominent and current research around longevity. read it and be prepared to think about your future. >> hi, everyone, thank you for

that introduction and thanks for having me. i thought i'd start out by giving a bit instruction to myself. as you heard, i'm a scientist and a writer and also a campaigner and trying to raise the profile of this issue of aging. i started out as a physicist and took a segue through computational biology by deciding that aging was so important and underrecognized even within biology i had to write a book about it and i'll try to tell you that now. and the book is ageless, the new science of aging without getting old. the central thesis, don't think of aging as a natural process, but try to make the case that aging is the single most humanitarian thing of our time and i'll unpack that in the next half hour or so. a lot of us think that aging is inevitable. that it's unavoidable side effect of being alive and gotten older and wrinkling, and our animals and pets follow a

similar trajectory of design and we know that's not universal around the animal kingdom at all. and there are experiments in labs, ways to slow down and reverse the process of biological aging which is exciting development. and the combination is more exciting. there's an enormous human challenge on one hand and then the biology and science to rise to the challenge. >> excuse me. >> i think what this means is there's the biggest revolution the way we deliver medical care since the discovery of antibiotics. i've changed my career from a physicist to a biologist and the reason i changed my career is because of a graph. i'll start out showing the graph and see if it can convince you of the importance on the topic. at the age, and then the side

risk of death. all of us know more people are likely to die, but how much more shocked me and let's have a look what the curve looks like. there you go. you can see it's quite surprisely how suddenly it asends at the end of life. when you're born you're zero years old. ... 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 unfortunately it's all downhill

or rather on this curb appeal from there. you havell about 13,000 chance. it's in your your 30s your risk of death is somewhat into ballpark of 1000 per year. if i could somehow continue with the same chants of death throughout my life, that being i would live in july 1000. based on how old we expect to live also base of this graph but that isn't what happens. unfortunately when you're an adult your risk of death doubles every seven or eight years. in e 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

just to emphasize this little square is in proportion to the skill of the amount of monies -- >> we will break away here to take you live to the senate. part of our commitment for more than 40 years to bring you coverage of congress. we will return to booktv following a short pro forma session here on c-span2. the vice president: the senate will come to order.