scientists i think all of them actually in one way or the other, and also skeptical scientist pretty. [inaudible]. we do this for a day or so. again there are things here with that we don't understand. and it's very important and i was also surprised by how those shortfalls in time that i had been studying the matter and so it was the substance of the signs but also how clearly it had been communicated to the literate public and pretty. >> you watch the rest of this program a booktv.org, use the search box at the top of the page to look for stephen the title of his book, unsettled. >> phd in physics at the university of oxford.

in an important scientific challenge of her time and the computational biology. and using machine learning and the delay in predicting medical records pretty based in london and appeared on discovery tv. on the journey through the work being done to combat the death and suffering and aging itself. the physical and mental deterioration is inevitable part of growing older. not all declines at the same time. an understanding why that might be and this is about therapies that target the biological puzzle for this. and a book that "ageless" fascinating and practical guide to the science of aging and we

might be able to bend our biological health and andrew steele in these issues can be important for future by ensuring that we age as low as possible. and bringing this extraordinary achievements and promise of current science andes longevity. we are so pleased to be here tonight without further ado, andrew steele. it. >> hi everyone and thank you so much that you for having me reading about it would start off by giving instruction by myself, i'm scientist had a campaigner and raising the profile of this issue of aging and as you heard i started out as a physicist and ended up in segway through confrontational biology and did that for about five years before deciding and aging is important is so underrecognized even within biology that i had to write a book about it. in my book called "ageless", new

science of getting on without getting old. and the thesis of the book is a lot of us think of aging as a natural process but i try to make the case and aging is the single greatest humanitarian challenge of our time that might sound like a strange thing to make. now talk about in the next half-hour some also going to talk about the fact that aging is another avoidable side effect. that you got animals and pets and they all seem to follow similar trajectory but actually, we now know that's not universal throughout the animal kingdom at all. these experiments are going on and all around the world, dozens of different ways to slow down andsl reverse the process of biological aging. that's genuinely exciting. it enormous humanitarian challenge of the one hand and on the other we've got the biology in the science to rise to that challenge it.

and i think that what this means is that will end up having the biggest revolution in the way you look at medicals since the discovery of antibiotics. so as we heard already, might change my career from a physiologist to a biologist and there are reasons i change my career. i often tell people that all start by showing you this graph. not convince you the importance of the topic.th it's simple in some ways, age of the bottom and the sides the risk of death in that year. new orleans know that older people are more likely to die just more how likely is very shocking. the street with that curve looks like a pretty you can see is quite surprising how it ascends of the ends of life. solid start in that. we are born, you have about .5 percent are not making your first birthday if you're born in an average country in the world inin modern times is because obviously can be born with

genetic issues but if you are likely enough to make it through the first year of life, then your risk of life carries on down until you reach about ten in current ten -year-olds have a fantastically important distinction, they are the safest human beings in the history of humanity. less than one in 10000 chance of not making their 11th birthday which is really quite amazing. but unfortunately, it goes downhill after that. so when you rise about one in 3000 chance, by reaching your 19th birthday pretty in your risk of death is about one and a thousand euros 30th year. and then those numbers and to your life and what it could mean. somehow that continues with the same chance of death throughout my life. and pretty clear to say how long you will expect to live. and unfortunately, we are an

adult your risk of death doubles about every seven or eight years predict and next financial growth of your risk of dying it. we see the huge power of exponential growth in a concern a very small but get very big very quickly what that means is you doubling a thousand, or one in 1000 is a challenge but as you go through the years, 65 of 1 percent chance of not making your next birthday. ... ... if you're fortunate enough to make it to your 90s at the top of this graph, he got 16 year, five or death of the relevant facts. the first is human being can think it's quite terrifying because all caps this mortality

is a toward me as i advanced in years but there's science you think this is fascinating because this is a sudden increase in the seventh or eighth decade the way you draw the line. what causes this synchronized change that makes us so much more likely to die all at once works question i have to ask ourselves, what is agent? when you think about agent, we thinkg about the end effect when aging happens. we think about cosmetic superficial, things like gray hair. the doesn't have a huge effect on our health, it's just what's going on inside of us. the scary things are increase in risk of diseases like cancer and heart disease and stroke and dementia. these are diseases we characterize as caused by the aging process, the biggest risk factor to get a disease is just nggetting older with also got

other changes. it's various different kinds, loss of hair or muscle or loss of vision. an umbrella for all of us is loss of independence because as you get older, robust able to be around the house and played with the grandkids and socialize with friends because these eat away at your independent remove your ability to do the things you would like to do. then we got things not relate directly related but nonetheless significantly worse at an older age, infections and injuries. imagine a young person and you break a bone. that probably means you're both healed but if you're in your 70s or 80s and you break a bone, you are likely to break a hip at that age. you could be in the hospital and stuck in about weeks and weeks, maybe you get an infection in the hospital and i will chain of

events that doesn't kill you, it can dramatically affect the future course of your life so some something you shrugged off as a youngge person, it dramatically affects as you get older. this is the aging process so now we can look at this graph not just the death but this whole monopoly off changes, particularly what causes but that's. now let's slightly change this. without risk of getting disease and the diseases, cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, they got a similar exponential looking risk rapidly increasing toward the end of life the chance of being diagnosed with this get higher because as i said, these diseases are caused by underlying aging process. white's not directly caused by severe, fist he was the green line, this is not just serious -- this is not just crops and sniffles.

a reasonable chance, one or 2% by or lowest risk of getting an infection at any time in2 her life but when you're young your immune is naïve and hasn't seen much than when you are old, are much more likely to get one of these diseases. of course the flu jab is important especially as you get older because that's your protection against these infections. former and blue has been one thing in the last year or so and if we look s at your chart of death, infections i should say, if you're infected with the coronavirus that looks like this and it rising faster than cap overall. if you catchf rice in your 20s, hundreds of times less likely to die than somebody who catches it inik their 80s like the u.s. or uk, or them not have a different rate but nonetheless, it shows us the huge impact the aging process has on our ability to show factions and pried off stress in general.

this graph, there's a myth you can just die of old age, he wrote old gracefully mnu just passed away peacefully but there is mostly how people died. people get these diseases in advance over years or decades in treatment can be hardd as well and eventually it becomes a.of ending your life. eventually it becomes so serious that you dieie from it. often you have multiple different diseases ate once. the average 80-year-old has five different diagnoses and a similar number of medications to counter the diagnoses so it's a serious effect in your quality of lifent overall so that's why ages aging process suffering great he might think of it as my favorite graph, we might see this a couple of more times, look at this graph and diseases and you might be thinking this is something we can the rich

world are lucky enough to have us because we can't lift long enough to experience these terrible effects of aging so normally we zoom, i would get this what you think global life expectancy is now? for every country in the world. if you do surveys, and that's because there is this developing world, poor sanitation and all kinds of issues and what that means is they are living shorter lives than we in the rich world but there's a huge acceleration in living in poor countries and that meet the global life expectancy is really caught up richer countries the last 50 years or so. you got in your head, global life expectancy second 2019,

72.6 years. this is a double edged sword people are living up longer lives. most people in most countries are living long enough to experience a significant number of side effects of growing old. what this means if you break this down, to ask the 150,000 people of dying everyday representing 1000 people. over 100,000 people participating, two thirds of deaths around the world are caused by aging. also majority of suffering because they drag out your death every year so they can suck your quality of life and if i kill you, they can reduce your independence and that means aging is this enormous tsunami

of death and suffering, something we should be looking at global community to be looking at. it's more interesting to think what can we do? warmer time with this graph, this doubles every seven or eight years for there are some other animals in the animal kingdom, this is a striking example called freshwater animal, it is very small in the first reason it came to the attention of the scientific of memory, they've got regenerative powers, you can chop up basically any bit you like it will grow into a second fully functioning one. it's incredible, powerful generation but scientists are studying them and something else amazing, it doesn't do what human does as they get older. something more like this. it's just completely flat, negligible, they effectively don't grow old. they just carry on throughout

their years and week obviously have done this extremity because we haven't had lap on this for long enough their risk of death is not as bad, 20% a year into the government future. 10% ofni these would still be alive after 1000 years which is incredible. what's most amazing isn't that longevity, it risk of death doesn't change as they get older so you can see with these creatures, you might think this is a center meter long creature, how would we compare these two humans? there are other creatures closer to humans, this beautiful beast is of tortoise, the oldest on record from 177 years old oldest on record. again these creatures are a lot closer to humans, we know such as fs doesn'tch change nothing

becomes frail and about jonathan, a slightly different species, the oldest tortoise in the world, he's coming up on his one 90th birthday and still? the ladies so they are enjoying life into the end. but there's a much closer relative, this is something called naked mole rat, a little ammo the size of a rat or mouse. two or three or four here's this can move into his 30s, there's no capacity of age even though it looks incredibly wrinkly, it stays healthy and reproductive until late in their life. without these creatures were completely immune to cancer until future years ago when scientists weree starting a handful of them and they found

them resistant to generative diseases. they get old without becoming utterly. how can we learn from that biology or adapt and take these ideas and turn them into medicine for humans? so the question is about aging and these answers i get before, are not very helpful answers for two different reasons. the first is, these are very large high level, every single one of these tens of hundreds different kinds of cancer, so many different ways your brain can lose capacity to store memories. very different levels biology. also we have had to treat them one at a time so if you get to your oncologist, they might give youiv radiotherapy or send you o surgeries but they largely ignore , if you got heart disease at the same time, treated by a separate doctor in a t separate building and we treat all of these differently and often treat them in a way that's

treating the end because, if you have muscle plus, we don't try to improve muscles, just give you a walking stick so the problem is these root causes, and stages, there are loads that we tend to treat in a separate way so i'm going to try to ask this in a slightly different way. if you ask an aging person friday orio agent, the marks of aging i talk about in my book, i'm not going to get into every single one of these but there are a variety of ways that's much more exciting than the slide i showed you just now. the first reason is these are fundamental molecular under age. most diseases can be chalked up to a variety handful of these changes the idea is if we go after these changes, we can potentially slow down or reverse the progression of all the different things like wrinkles and gray hair to muscle plus to cancer too dementia, all by thee

various different things. ia think the reason i talked about this being as exciting, you can go after one of these and potentially hit several or even all changes at the same time. i'm not trying to - get to the office, i'm just getting a couple to highlight.t. the first is number two trimmed the reason i want to talk about this, one of the most common questions you get when you take your writingng about this, the answer is it is propagated. let me explain how. this is a beautiful image might see if you look down inside the nucleus of yourself, the dna, geneticoo instruction manual. what you can see is this stuff, they put fluorescent dye on the dna, the chromosomes inside the cell. you see red and green dots on the end of the box, the start and end of a the chromosomes and they have this on the end of the

dna if you zoom in and supervise the picture somewhat, it mightit look like this, a string of repeated dna letters over and over so you know the dna was from four levels, atg and c. they are just three letters, hundreds or even thousands of times so the question is, why do our chromosomes with these instruction manuals have basically strings of repeated numbers on the end of each one? the answer is co- constructed self ridiculous problems. the first disc they protect the ends of our dna repair systems, this, it's probably cleaning the dna is damaged so they try to fuse the dna to get in and stick them back and fix one of the damage was. we don't want chromosomes to be fused together so they tell

them, don't worry, this is what it should look like. we also exist with a strange mistake when it comes to reproducing. when a cell divides, they have to copy the dna and make sure both cells have a full repertoire of dna and the problem is when our cells duplicate the dna, it moves along the dna, they can't make it all the way into the chromosomes so they chop a tiny bit off every time for self divides. if this was chopping off critical dna, a gene coding something important than every time for self divides, you lose important dna function. you got hundreds of thousands of repeated nonsense which means dna can chop it off the end and nothing important gets lost but you can see a temporary reprieve from the situation because if

you have it on the end but every time for self divides and loses hundreds of these, eventually you're going to get down to the important dna, that's not a long-term solution to the problem. you can sleep like this can be a problem, a cause of aging because the self divides the get lost in a sanctified, they lose them and that means they are getting shorter as we get older so how much shorter? got these up here, if i stick this graph, every single one of these is an individual person measured in their blood, you can see a trend that's not the greatest trend in the world, some 90-year-old has them as long as unfortunate 30 -year-olds, and there's also others that outline, they've got incredible regenerative prop powers.

you can see the average, something like 20 basis, dna letters every year of your life so not the best in the world. it does seemed like obvious for the cause of aging and if you look at the data in humans, people with short telomeres for their age tend to have worse health and die sooner so clearly there is something going on here. again, part from this, we do have something here. we can use this enzyme called telomerase, it wasas discoveredn the 80s and one nobel prize in 2009, they discovered this enzyme i can add extra letters to the ends, they call them repeats and build the telomeres back up. the question is, can we turn them back on and cure aging?

and thus manifest in group health and longevity. it might seem bizarre evolution hasn't already done this but it's because cancer is what happens when a cell gains the ability to divide infinite number of times so they divide and divide and divide and do it indefinitely. they can grow big enough to become a tumor spread around yourh body and then cancer can kill you. the first experiment in mice where the device was given, told to carry on using the gene much more naturally, patient get a lot of cancer. when it's being done from they were done in the 90s an early 2000 basically burst, documentaries i watched, it was

telomerase. we found it effectively ticking up cancer, it means the sounds have a way to extend to help and divide an infinite number of times n so you've got this but turns out to be more complicated. the fascinating more recent research has shown a variety of ways to get around this. the first, this is back in 2081 mice were given an extra copy when they were having an extra dna telomere increasing enzyme from there were three other genes, i won't go into details but basically they are genes that convince cells that they should maybe commit suicide may be go into medicine, stop, hold on, they are going to come back in the next part of the partners, might take their

cancers list, you got cancer genes and that means in combination, these mice live 40% longer than mice that haven't given that genetic modification so if you do naïve testing manipulation and add telemetry, it doesn't work but if you add an extra genes to hopefully prevent cancer, it improves their lifespan gives them healthier lives. more recent excrement, optimistic for the rest of us having cells modified is that mice temporary ones, injected with gene therapies for a short bit of time, extending that they live 20% longer when given this injection, 40 years old in human years. there living not just longer but also healthier. l they had tougher skin and better performance walking a tight rope

just something we can all aspire for as we get older. this is why i'm ecstatic, who got different therapies with a more nuanced approach in the next is to translate this into a human therapist. senescent cells, one right to combat this is rank it's too short and stoppedn dividing. it's a biological word meaning bold and that means we accumulate more of these cellsod and one reason is when the telomeres get short and they think you've divided the suspicious number of times, maybe you are atl risk of becoming cancers so they put the brakes on in the south stopped dividing.

putting on the brakes seems like a sensible move because it means that sal can'tee carry on dividg and turn into a cancer but unfortunately the cells don't just sit back not dividing or benign, they come part modules, the primary purpose is to tell the immune system to clear these up because they don't need to be in the body and the immune system can gobble them up and get rid of them but as we get older, our immune system is effective at clearing these cells, we got more ways to acquire them because the dna damage is frequent and someone so they accumulate with time. it apart is they can accelerate the aging process. what's exciting is we've got drugs that can get rid of these cells and kill cells and leave the other cells in your body unharmed and this has been done in mice. we've given these drugs, let's talk about an experiment done five years ago, excrement where they took mice that were 24 months old, quite old by my

standard, like a 70-year-old human being. i found the mice were made younger, less cancer embossed heart disease and fewer cataracts. they lived longer which isne suggested of a slowing of the aging process, they lived a couple of months longer which is like a few years in human terms. not disease, not dying but still in this geriatric late stage of life. there j living biologically younger, they can run further and faster on a treadmill, they are morelo curious, more similar younger and they have better for my fees mice look fantastic. what's clear is by targeting these, you can globally reverse the aging process, not making

the mice live longer but improve theirs health for the rest of their life and make them live longer that is fantastically exciting news. what's cool about these iss that even closer to human telemetry, without about 20 or 30 companies trying to turn these on, things are happening the clinic and the first human trial, they start in 2018. what it's going to pan out is the first treatment, he got human diseases in these cells causing these disease, things like arthritis, lungs that occur in older people but if these drugs work improve safe, we can start thinking about giving these two people in their 50s or 60s if you don't have any particular disease with currently diagnosed but they were just born a long time ago and accumulate these cells. by clearing them out, we a can prevent them from getting built in the first place.

this is medicine that can slow down or reverse aspects of aging and stop us from becoming ill. i asked, should we care aging? that's a strange question for me because if i just give talk about cancer research, i would never get anybody to ask me shouldn't we be concerned if we cure cancer, we will have a sudden increase in population? that's going to meet we will have trouble dealing with the environment but when you're in aging researcher, you get these questions at the end of talks. it's a separate moral and ethical answer. there are loads of questions, whether we access these treatments or highly available to the rich, questions that will be in forever, it opens a whole can of worms but the way i like

to think about this is turn the question around, say imagine we lived in an age of society that didn't degenerate, who live healthy and long lives and they just don't die. would you invent aging to solve any of these problems? imagine we live on earth with 20 billing people, we had climate change and huge overuse of resources, and by another catastrophe going on, is a way to solve is to invent aging? would you condemn people to slow generations and horrible diseases to alleviate these charges? i don't think you what. it exhaust every other possibility, tryry to make thins permanent of these things are working. the only thing you could do was kill people, i suggest that should be a last resort, you certainly wouldn't do anything in an inhuman way to cross them to lose their senses, their

independence slowly over years and years before finally succumbing to horrible diseases. i think this applies to all the different questions he might ask, and fate invent aging to kill off a dictator? i just don't think you what so i think because to rent agent and a certain civilization to solve a problem, you can transfer that by reversing the question, not morally acceptable to try to prevent medicals from happening or solve other kinds of problems. the final thing i want to talk about quickly course funding because i really want to raise this research to make sure we find portions to the scale of the challenge. i want to get some figures here, chronic diseases in the u.s. something like cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia and all of that, the four leading killers in the modern world.

if you look at these things, these cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year.ol if you are back together, right close to $1 trillion so if you want all of this different get various costs of agent that will come to this enormous sum. compare that to how much we spent researching aging and the your unlucky -- lucky, unusual, the nia it's about $4.5 billion a year. to emphasize this square is in proportion to the scale of the amount of money spent so it's a tiny amount compared to the onerous concept diseases, quarterly dollars a year spent on healthcare in the u.s., less than 1000 public goes into the nia. it's even worse than that, there's a running joke aging scientists circle, the nia is not this because the significant bulk of the nia project is to the neuroscience, two and a half

billing going to part-timers. and there's various other stuff accounting for the billion or so and if you get to the aging biology, it's about $350 million a year, $5 american surgeon, why do we age and how do we stop it? a huge cost of aging to society, it doesn't make any sense that it should be self small so i want to raise the profile, let's increase the budget, read the book from scientists and doctors to realize the importance of this. the economic case is an incredible powerful thinking we could spend a tiny bit more on researching and reducing costs in society before we get onto the enormous challenge. o that's why i wrote this book fundamentally. more people talking about this in pubs and bars and dinner

parties. politicians and biologists and medics document this, aging in their education and understand how important this is. i know most of you watching the u.s., that's what your book cover looks like. if you want to find out more about the book and i buy a copy, ageless.link. if you want to follow me on twitter and find out more, i think that's all i want to say. i think we have time for a few questions now. >> hello, thank you so much for the informative talk and visual. i'm excited to get into these questions. we've got some great ones from the audience. if you have a question, enter it in the queue and i. i'm going to start with this

iquestion from an anonymous attendee who says what you currently do currently to live longer? >> is a chapter in the book that i call how to live long enough to live in vermont and the reason i did is because if i can live long enough in good health, i can be alive in time for history to be developed and that's exciting and compelled me, it compels me on this health advice. some surprises like not smoking, eating a variety of different foods and not i too much i'm getting enough exercise and sleep and that kind of thing when i found was a compass more compelling because i want to experience some of these treatments but b second, what yu understand biology and you realize that this health advice effectively slows down the aging process, i go into detail why does that these things work, it's not just a single disease, it's not like exercise benefits only your heart formosa, this whole aging process, it improves

your mental health and brain power, explosive progress it declined. it reduces some cancers, it is incredible this topic five so i highly recommend it, i know it sounds boring but it's important. brushing your teeth, not my favorite example, we understand if you have good dental hygiene, it can effectively start on the aging process because aging is driven by chronic inflammation so inflammation is a normal process by which our bodies heal wounds and product disease, our bodies call attention to the infection from across in the immune system, calling the calvary and solve that solution. acute inflammation, information

is brief and comes in and solves the problem and does away and that means it doesn't do is wait in the background. whereas if we got older, information is in our immune system and that's why this effectively accelerates the aging process so imagine you got pork dental hygiene, tooth decay but you've got bacteria and various parts in the immune system, it's driving chronic immune, there's a link between poor dental hygiene and heart health, heart disease and improving evidence starting to come in that it might be linked to dementia. it's incredible to realize brushing your teeth potential he can reduce your risk of dementia. make sure i religiously brush my teeth and foss is to ensure i slow my aging process down as much as possible. >> great to hear. good to hear.

i'm going to move onto this question, will some prevent people from benefiting anti- aging treatments? >> i don't think they will because a lot of these drugs have a g global effect. obviously there are always certain health conditions so you can't take a particular drug or certain health conditions or drugs you take that might interfere with another drug and so many different options, i'm confident this will happen in the next few years. so it's not inconceivable a few years after that we can rule out preventative age precludes another drug i can talk about a diabetes drug currently, we think it might slow down but aging more globally. as a child that was supposed to

start more recently -- a while ago but it was delayed because of covid. the idea is to use this to slow down the aging process. it's a commonly prescribed drug given up in the uk since the 50s, huge safety record on this. if the trial works out, we can roll out immediately. i think we can be confident if it works but it will arrive in time for many people so i don't think there is any reason unless you are on death's door that this could arrive in time for you. >> that is crazy and addressed a couple of other questions here. i'm going to turn to another question,.

[inaudible] >> there are various studies don't give into the mice and in particular, there's a place these compounds are most effective, the mitochondria which is often called a powerhouse of the cell to generate all the energy. what they are lacking is decent long-term so i think there was a recent, a big trial called the intervention testing program in three different research labs in the u.s. what they do is they have regressed protocols trying to determine which medications in which interventions can prevent -- i think -- a precursor of the molecule you

mentioned our nad subtest in the last round of the testing program and i think they showed it had no effect. never completed write it off but we don't have solid data that they do improve long-term. our studies that show the help of mice and might live, do they actually slow down aging? applicable know soon but right now i don't think we have enougl comfortable taking it myself yet. >> right, this next question, i was wondering science and medicine but what impact for this fascinating and a difficult question to answer. most countries around the world,

i've spent continues to increase but you might know in the u.s., the uk as well has been flatlining with lifespan. in the u.s., certain areas are declining, depths of despair is what they are called affecting all age, it's incredibly wicked way, there are so many things going on. headwind for increasing lifespan, these are subtracting from life they improve care and generally improves lifestyle and prevents edison and contracting those effects. she was in this could only illusion is like smoking, a primaryt effect of pollution on the lungs, clearly that will affect these particulars but they do seem to cause changes in the body i hope alongside developing these medicines, will carry on with reducing

pollution, clearly makes an o impact for the does increase their aging. we should try everything we can to improve people's lives and. >> is aging intentional from an evolutionary perspective? there's something holding species back in some cases. >> is a great question, i think it's -- intentional wrong word but clearly it's not an accident a lot of species age. the simplest way to understand why agingci evolved -- excuse m. let's rewind. the thing is, people say survival of the fittest and say might look at aging as being strange, optimizing about

growing old, becoming frail and losing senses and becoming slower getting diseases late in life. the practice in the wild, animals die of other things related, but think about a short-lived species like mice. there are loads of them, even death from really cold from reserves of energy to keep themselves warm, they can just die on a cold night. there are lots of different things that can cause a mouse die and therefore, evolution hasn't done is decide rather than investing in excessive anticancer, rather than construct their bucket heart disease into the fourth decade, that evolution invested in making the mice weekly, get to reproductive quickly and go through it fast as possible in hopes that they can become get a

few quarters of kids before they get hit by something else. evolution basically doesn't care happens after lifespan. essentially if it's cancer, it doesn't matter because most mice in the wild along that become by the time they get to that age and if you think about a number animal about the naked mole rat that i mentioned, very similar biologically to rats and mice, they live in colonies in the ground and burrow into tunnels and that means there is less risk, they are safer in tunnels. it got the opportunity to mature because they are less risk about the kinds of death, it far more important, it's likely to be alive so they invested more in these defenses against cognitive decline and that kind of thing because they are still going to be going so it's a trend you find throughout the animal kingdom. animal with mortality, risks of

death outside its body that compensate for that by having lower risk, delayed aging process. dietary restriction seems to be big, imagine you are a mouse, really low food supply and the best thing to do isn't to have kids at that moment, your kids will be born into a world with no food and starve themselves so it's far better at that time to for evolution to redirect the energy normally put into reproducing as quickly as possible to maintain the body of the animal trying to help it survive and hopefully there will be for food so that's why we think the simplest explanation for dietary restriction puts the brakes on aging. it appears to be collocated relationship aging. dietary reductions are a window into that, yes, i have been

asked that. >> that was very illuminating, thank you. how can a biologist skills to help solve aging? >> there is loads, a creative answer is it's almost universally needed, biology data driven science so there is obviously imagine someone came around mice in the lab getting a dish full of cells but the fact is more experiment huge readouts because one thing i was working onhi is a biologist with looking at dna sequencing data, a fantastic example because we went from human genome, the first readout, couple genetic code cost billions of dollars in 2001. if you wanted to see the human genome regulator or something, it would cost $100 million, it

would take weeks and weeks of work whereas now, it can be less than $1000. we are generating biological data, genomes and animals and people, we can see which genes are used in which sell at what time and we can determine how the dna is being used, we have studies where we can look at the different proteins in cytosol and generate vast data that means we need biologist to analyze the data and the great news is computer power has been outpaced by the growth of the data we've produced, who got to where we have machine learning nai digging into the data to find the patent and that is, there's no t use having office data if we can extract anything from them so that means if you've got programming skills, hopefully you can go ino and hep

the biologist interpret some of the data and give a concrete example, fascinating breakthrough, about a decade ago, this is what happens when you lookic at these marks, thins that determine which genes are turned on or off in our cells in a biologist that there must be a relationship in this the problem was he couldn't find anything, it was very speculative so what he did was took advantage of the biological data put out a line free for anybody to use. he demos ao bunch of different data, extinct or dna him he downloaded this data with a variety of unrelated experiments from abnormality to cancer and of different stuff, his only

constraint was the data needed america and he found millions all over, he could take this and determine the age of the person within four years, and credible. it was so incredible nobody could believe it was not accurate. if you have accelerated, it's higher than your birthday cake. you age more rapidly than younger age and more likely to die. because of this culture of open data, it shows you the power to find signals we didn't have.

>> next questions from david. fire hacking is coming into the mainstream. while hacking is the future of antiaging for ordinary people. >> i am fascinated by this because it's real continuing self excrements patient. there are, if you google this, he will find quite a people on line even though they are not diabetic, they get there dr. to prescribe it for my shading on my pharmacy perhaps. they hope it will slow their agent when people take more drugs, we don't have any human data to go on although someone went to a clinic because they have the gene therapy done to herself so you got this whole

spectrum of people during this period and everything in between and because of the fact that biology is becoming much more open, something you can do in your garage, these hackers will have a lot more power and am fascinated how this will progress and vacate and make use of the data. i talk about this in the final chapter of the book, i people, i'm not taking drugs are ready for gene therapy, i sometimes will have to maybe i will take the punishment somebody based less risk, what i hope for as we can somehow pull together this community of people interested in these extremities. i want to give the information and make sure they understand risks and potential benefits, how much is known or unknown, we

want people doing dangerous extremities. the second thing is allow them to have these experiment's because we want less than 1005 hackers with 1000 different ones from we get this from another, it is pure in a different technique and so on and so forth. if these people self excrement anyway, good to wait to allow this to standardized and we can make sure they are all getting the same they do useful trials to understand why these things are happening because it will be a fascinating time not just for bio hacking extremity therapy but for all of us. as we do for studies with all of these different things you can do, the question is why isn't this good enough? the idea was your born in 2500

decades or centuries of people taking these medications successful life with all the side effects various different diseases, that's the perfect excrement but usually they don't have time to wait for 70 years for the perfect experiment so they take these treatments at various different points with good evidence. getting that will be a challenge, meaning need a wider communication on that. it's a different can of worms, it's a very fascinating area. >> i definitely agree and that leads us into this question, you touched on it a little bit but can you give us some ideas how likely we will see this in our lifetimes? >> i'm a a scientist, it means t

hard to have a number. but i can say i still think this is exciting, i generally think these will be available in time for most people alive today. these treatments are already in human trial, exhibit potentially five or ten years. we all know the answer in five years and if it works, it will start handing it out to people. gene therapy and stem cell therapy, we are already doing gene therapies, extreme diseases, gene therapies are approved and have been used in hospitals now so as you get used to doing these things, people who have severe and mild diseases tell us finally safety

get them to the general public entity even if they are ten or 15 is a way, take decades, centuries were talking and the other thing is i talked about this data, i talk about how revolution means we do assistance biology to summarize that. rather than targeting what i showed on the slide earlier, we need to understand how these relate and intervene in clever ways. we need to improve biology in such a way to stabilize it and stop growing, reprogram our bodies not to age. so far into the future, if you think about sci-fi, it could easily happen in the next 50 years because of you think about the last 50 years, is a total revolution in biology computing power which has doubled since the 60s and so on.

think of your middle age in good health now, you could expect to get the first generation, maybe stan so treatment to extend your life and so on. that means you could potentially expect to live into my 80s even if nothing else happens even if you make signs stand still. whatever first treatments are, that gives scientists more time to develop my treatments so that means even if it sounds like 50 years away, that's potentially long enough or soon enough for people alive today because not only will there lifetimes extend that time but they can extend even further so i think we are going to see the first of antiaging drugs in the next ten years and depending on how they improve health, we could

potentially see a much bigger increase the program continues fast enough. >> thank you for taking the time to answer these questions and thank you all for asking these fantastic questions. i feel like i learned a lot and thank you to everyone out there for spending your evening with us. have a good weekend, keep reading and be well. thank you. >> bye-bye. >> during our weekly author interview from "afterwards", university professor eddie spoke with robin d'angelo about her

new book nice raisin. >> unfortunately i haven't seen the energy we saw last summer being sustained. running onto your protest on some level is exciting and exhilarating but the daily work of putting racism on the table, looking up policies and practices in the workplace, that's the hard stuff and in case i don't say it later, it takes courage. it takes commitment and also courage and niceness is not courageous. so so many white people see the presence of niceness is an indicator of the absence of racism. a culture of niceness is one that prevents difficult conversations about racism. >> to watch the rest visit booktv.org. click on the