even to the reporters as if they were sort of silently acquiescing standing by their man were actually secretly in panic about the danger he was putting the country in during the black lives matter protests, during the pandemic that marched across the country and then finally in the riot to that he helped insight at the capital that put lawmakers and his vice president in the crosshairs an actual mortal danger. to watch the rest of this program visit booktv.org, search for carol or philip rucker using the box at the top of the page. in the computational biology as

he worked out to the institute using machine learning to decode our dna and predict the records. he's a full-time writer and presenter based in london and has appeared on discovery and the bbc. tonight he will be guiding us on a journey to understand and combat the cause of the suffering aging itself. while we come to expect the physical and mental deterioration is inevitable, not all of these decline with age in the same way that we do. he introduces us to the scientists attempting to understand why that may be and to develop the biological processes responsible for our own age-based frailties. a fascinating, stimulating practical guide to the science of aging and how they might be able to improve our health and andrew scott says these issues can be more important for the

future than ensuring that we age as well as possible it explains the achievements of the process of scientific research around longevity. we are prepared to think differently about the future. we are so pleased to be hosting you hear tonight and without further ado, the podium is yours, andrea. >> hello, everyone. thank you for the introduction andit for having me. for this issue with aging ended up taking the segue through the computational biology and did that for about five years before deciding aging was so important even within biology. the thesis of the book it is the

single greatest humanitarian challenge of our time. that might sound like a strange claim to make so i will talk about it in the next half hour or so and also about the fact we think aging is inevitable, and unavoidable side effect and we get older and wrinkly and our pets seem to follow a similar trajectory of decline but actually we know that isn't universal around the animal kingdom at all and we have these experiments going on in labs all around the world with dozens of ways to slow down and even reverse the process of biological aging which is an exciting development and it's as combination of things. there's an enormous challenge on the one hand and on the other we've got the biology and science to rise to that challenge. what this means is we will end up having the biggest revolution in the way we deliver medical care since the discovery of antibiotics.

i changed my career from a physicist to a biologist and therend are reasons i often tell people it is because of a graph so i will start by showing you this graph to convince you of the importance of the topic. it's surprisingly simple in some ways it's got your age at the bottom but your risk of death in that year. just how much more likely shocked me so let's have a little look at what that curve looks like. there you go. you can see it's quite fsurprising how it ascends. to make sense wee have to go through the numbers. let's start on the left-hand. when you're born you are zero and have about .5% chance of not making your first birthday if you are born in an average country in the developed world because you could be born with various genetic issues but if you are lucky to make it through the first year of life, your risk carries on going down through your childhood until you reach the age of about ten.

current ten-year-olds have a fantastically important distinction. they are the human beings in the history of humanity that have got less than one in 10,000 chance of not making their 11th birthday which is quite amazing if you think about it. it's incredibly likely to survive but in this graph you can see it'sthth all downhill fm there. 181 and 3,000 chance of not making it and if you are in your 30s your risk of death is somewhere in the ballpark of one and a thousand per year. it's worth just transposing those numbers into your life and thinking about what that means. if i could continue that throughout my life that would mean i would live into my thousands average and based on how old do you expect people to live and also based on this graph that is and what happens. when you are in adult your risk doubles about every seven or eight years that means there's an exponential growth and in the last year or so we have seen a huge power that can start out

very small and get very big very quickly. what that means is doubling in the thousands but you accelerate through those years by the time you reach 65 you have a 1% chance and again that is in that that if you are 65 it continues. by that .1% is a fairly significant chance and you can start to make some significant progress. if you are lucky to make it to 80 you have a one in 20 chance and if you are fortunate enough to make it to your 90s at the top of the graph you have lots of death and about one in six per year, life or death at the role of the dice and while there are two ways to look at this the first of which human being and this is quite terrifying because i've got this mortality racing towards me as i advanced but as a scientist you look at the graph and think this is fascinating because it is a

sudden increase based on where you draw the line. what is it that causes the synchronized change that makes itit so much more at once. what is aging when we think about aging we think about a varietyy of affects and the cosmetic but also huge effects on our health and what's going on inside of us. the scarier things are the increased risk of diseases, heart disease, cancer, stroke and dementia. these are diseases we characterized biologically as being caused by the aging process, the single risk factor is just getting older. that's actually quite a scary thing. we've also got changes that have been some of which are disease and some aren't.t. in various things like loss of

hearing or muscle or vision. there is an umbrella for a lot of this loss of independence tbecause as you get older you e less able to get around the house and play with your grandkids and socialize with your friends because these eat away your independence and ability to do the things you like to do. finally we have things that are not directly related but nonetheless are significantly worse when you get to an older age and that's things like infections and injuries, so imagine you are in your 20s and you break a bone, that probably means it will rapidly heal but if you are in your 70s or 80s and break a bone it's common to break a hip at that age, that could mean an extended stay in the hospital and then you are stuck in a bed for weeks and weeks and experiencend muscle waste. ..

>> and those diseases cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia , they move a similar exponentially looking risk with their rapid increase because as i said they were caused by the underlying process. it isn't directly caused representing chest infections deep into your lungs and as you can see the still a reasonable chance one or

2 percent even at the lowest risk to get this infection any point in your life but if you are young and your immune system is naïve and it starts to decline you are much more likely to get a disease. that is why your flu shot is important as you get older because you are protecting yourself but one thing over the last year or so actually it is the coronavirus has a terrifying exponential increase if you catch coronavirus in your twenties hundreds of times less likely to die than if they get covid in their nineties a lot of 80 -year-olds are vaccinated now. but nonetheless it shows a huge impact the aging process has to fight off infections. so there is a myth you just die of old age and then one

night you pass away peacefully with no suffering. the vast majority gets diseases it can advance and then the treatment is hard and then whether it robs your independence when you are sick and then you become so serious you die from it sometimes there are multiple diseases at once the average 80 -year-old has five different diagnosis. so it is serious affecting quality of life overall. that is why there is so much suffering that thinking about this my favorite graph he might be thinking whisking of diseases but this is something re- in —- we in the rich world we can live long enough to experience a terrible effects

of. aging so in the pre-'s you moral what do you think global life expectancy is for every country in the world? a lot of people predicted quite significantly younger than is the case. a lot of us taught in school of the developing world for healthcare systems, poor access to sanitation. that means is have a shorter lifespan but there has been a huge acceleration of living standard so the global life expectancy is caught up over the last 50 years will double life expectancy was 72.six years. this is a double edge sword

that longer healthier lives that is fantastic news but also most people and most countries are living long enough to experience a significant number of side effects of growing old and causes of death. so what this means is 150,000 people die but over 100,000 of those that were caused by aging. with those humanitarian challenges. and then suck your quality of life and those can reduce your independence so there is this enormous tsunami is something we should be looking as a global community.

so one more time back to the graph it doubles every seven or eight years the other animals this is a particularly striking examples it is a hydra of fresh water animal it is very small but it first came to the attention of the scientific communityib with incredible read generators powers you can chop off any part it will grow intoo a second fully functioning hydra it has incredible powers a generation but the risk of death doesn't do what humans do look something more like this. it is completely flat actually they don't grow old they are more likely to die they just carry on throughout the years we haven't done this

experience because no lab looks at these long enough but if the risk of death one —- risk of death really into the indefinite future? they would still be alive after 1000 years which is incredible for what is most amazing is a modality that the risk of death does not change as they get older cisco so how do we learn and say how can we learn to apply this has human beings there are creatures this beautiful beast is a galápagos tortoise living to 177 years oldgo and again they are a lot closer to humans and hydra also they don't lose any of their powers to heal or reproductive capacities and there's a story about jonathan

with a slight difference the oldest known tortoise in the world coming up on his 190th birthday and he still likes to get it on with the ladies very much enjoying life to the end but tortoises are not particularly quick actually this is a naked mole rat maybe mice live two or three or four years this can live intuit's thirties and loss of capacity with age but it sees fit and healthy until very late in their life we thought they were completely immune to cancer until just a few years ago in a big colony there were a handful of tumors but they get old without becoming elderly so how do we learn from that biology or adaption

take these ideas to turn them into medicine as human beings so what is aging they are cheats they are not very helpful for two different reasons the first is these are very large categories every single one tens of hundreds of different kinds of cancer talk about memory loss there so many different ways have very different levels for our biology also we tend to treat them one at a time you have cancer has the oncologist chemotherapy or surgery but they largely ignore if you have heart disease is treated by a separate doctor in a separate building. we treat them that is the end cause if youse have muscle loss we are trying to improve the state of the muscles by giving you while walking stick their

the end stages there are loads of them and return to treat them in a very silent way very separately so i will * in a slightly different ways of your skin aging biologist why he is aging this and be the ten hallmarks of aging you have to read every single one of them. i will do every single one but there is a variety of different ways it's much more exciting than the slide i just showed you. these are fundamental cellularke and molecular reasons why we age most could be chalked up to a variety so the idea is if we go after these changes we potentially slow down or reverse everything from wrinkles and gray hair to muscle loss and dementia. and the reason i talked about this is because you can go after one of the hallmarks hit

several or all of those at the same time i don't have time to go through the whole list but first is number two in the reason i talk about that that's one of the most common you get when you say you're writing about aging biology's yes but it is complicated. some explain how so it is a beautiful florescence in a microscope one additional microscope with theow dna genetic material and what you see here is this blue stuff putting fluorescent dye on the dna the red and green dots the start and the end. so if you would zoom in on the tele means it would look like this it is a stream of

repeated dna over and over again. so that atc g tt aa ggg on and on thousands of times. so why do our chromosomes in incredibly detailed instructions have the strings of repeated numbers at the end?d? they have been constructed to solve some ridiculous problems. the first they protect the ends of our chromosomes if that dna is just flailing around in your sale on —- cell that means it has been damaged so your cell would fuse that together to fix the damage we don't want our chromosomes fused together so they say don't worry this is what it should look like but they also

correct for a very strange mistake when it comes to reproducing so than a copy all of the dna for a full repertoire but the problem is that when a duplicate that the enzymatic duplication can't quite make it all the way to the end it's every time the cell divides if it was chopping off critical dna and that said then every time yourself divides you would lose very important dna then they slowly lose their function so you have these tele means this repeated nonsense which means they can chop off the end and nothing gets lost butor that is a temporary reprieve is 60000 on the end of every time a cell divides that means eventually you get down to the important

dna which is not a long-term solution that this you can see why it could be a problem in one of the causes of aging and that means that telomeres gets gradually shorter. but those that are up that they are measured in their blood is not the greatest trend in the world telomeres could h has those as long as 30 -year-olds. otherwise they may have been wolverine. [laughter] so youou can see the average decrease is something like 20 basis every year of your life

so there is a gradual increase but not the best prediction of the world but it does seem it is a cause of aging and if you look people with short telomeres for their age have worse health. so clearly there. is something going on. it could be quite depressing. we could use the this enzyme discovered in the eighties and then to add of those to repeat. and it's actually deactivated most adults now so can we turn the telomeres to keep dividing and replacing old cells.

and thenn to propel for all of us. it might seem bizarre evolution has not done this but that is because it is a cancer defense mechanism cancer is what happens when the cell can divide infinite number of times it carries on dividing and dividing and then it keeps doing that and definitely it can grow big enough and that's how it goes on to kill you and then the first experiment in mice given the telomeres they were told to carry on more than they reduce to on —- do so naturally so when this is done the first experiments done in the late nineties and early 2000's basically a bus so basically saying it was the telomerase but they don't

automatically create cancer but it meanswa they already have a way that helps them divide a number of times echo so to burst the bubble in my cynical narrative it's more complicated. and then away when mice were given an extra copy not only telomerase with the increasing enzyme. i will go into the details exactly that the anticancer gene that maybe they commit suicide so that point being to longer raise in these cancer genes in combination with

40 percent longer than had been given a genetic modification g but then that doesn't work but then it does seem to improve with a longer healthier life. and in a more recent experiment for the rest of us to be modified for birth with extra genes inside they were injected with the telomerase four and a extended period of time and then they live 20 percent longer so if you convert the ages and whenever that higher bone density. >> and we have these have a slightly nuanced approach.

with those human therapies. 's and i said i would talk about a couple of things. so in the course of talk about the telomeres. but when those telomeres get to short the means it stops dividing. so in essence it is a biological word meaning old. so i mean we accumulate more and one of the reasons i mentioneded because the cells they are divided a suspicious number of times and then the cell stops dividing. and then it looks like it may be coming cancer seven cell cannot continue dividing that unfortunately the cells don't

just thatt they are not dividing in the cellular community so a toxic molecule. so to tell the immune system they don't need them in their bodies but unfortunately the immune system we have more ways to acquire them and that telomeres are getting shorter so that means they accumulate. and so we have drugs to kill the cells believe the other cells but then it was done about five years ago but then they took mice 24 months old

so then it makes the mice biologically younger. and then with the disease point of view not disease or dying and then to go biologically younger and then to be more similar. and then even have better for her. so if those telomeres are targeting cells and then to be living longer and all health but to improve for the rest of their life.

so we actually have 20 or 30 companies and so then the first human trial start back in 2018 so the way this pans out the first treatments have particular diseases or things like arthritis or lung fibrosis and then if it proves most important then we start thinking about giving that preventative lee in the fifties or sixties and we don't have any particular disease to diagnose but just born a long time ago. and by clearing them out we can prevent those people in the first place. so that what can slow down or reverse aging and stop us from

becoming ill. so the way to end the talk should we cure aging? if i had just given a talk about cancer research nobody would ask me q&a in the end if we care all these people with cancer the men of a certain increase of population on our hands and that means dealing with the environment. but then get these questions at the end of talks. with a certain and moral and ethical category. opens a can of ethical worms. imagine we live in an ageless civilization that did not to

degenerate. and then where we live on 20 billion people. and with those environmental catastrophe would you condemn them to slow degeneration of suffering and then to alleviate those environmental challenges. and then to make things greener. and then the only thing we can do is that we really suggest the option certainly would not do it like to degenerate and slowly over years and years so

that applies to all the different questions whatever the problem is will you with a dictator i don't thank you ever wanted. with a certain civilization to provide medical assertion for what it accomplishes. so i really went to raise the profile of this area of research so the cost of chronic diseases in the us. heart disease stroke costing hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

and right close to $1 trillion soso to have the cost of aging and then it comes to enormous. compared to researching aging. there's a national institute of aging. they get three.$5 billion per year. so just to emphasize in proportion to the scale there is a tiny amount compared to the $4 trillion per year less than 1000 so it's actually worse than that there is a running joke doesn't stand and ia is national institute of alzheimer's because the significant bulk goes to the neuroscience division. basically alzheimer's.

that is $350 million per year. so why do we age how we can stop it. that's a huge cost of aging to society. so to raise the profile so i want people to read the book i went scientists and doctors to realize a huge importance of this and then to reduce the enormous cost of society. and went then to talk about pubs ande bars.

they don't get enough about aging and the education to understand how important it is. so if you're interested you could go to the harvard bookstore. follow me on twitter to find this out. and now we have time for a few questions. >> thank you so much for the informative talk. so i will just honor for this question so what things you

currently do? >> there is actually a chapter of health advice how to live long enough to live longer so if in can live long enough in good health ior could be alive in time for the treatments to be developed. that's what compels me. it compels me to have that health advice. some of that is surprisingly obvious with a variety of foods to get that kind of sleep and that kind of thing. and then to experience some of these treatments but second so when she would understand the biology of aging this health advice slows down the aging process so why it is these things work. it's not like exercise of beneficial muscle but the whole aging process. the brainpower in the slow cognitive decline.

so it is incredible. so i highly recommend it. i know it sounds boring but the other thing is there are less conventional to understand that aging that brushing your teeth we now understand if you have good dental hygiene that can slow down then aging process because a lot of aging is driven by chronic inflammation. that is the normal process that we heal wounds in the way that they call the side of injury or infection and then to solve the problem. and in young people so it is not as we get older constant

paranoia that's why it actively accelerates a whole aging process. you gum disease and tooth decay and that drawing inflammation with the link between poor dental hygiene and heart health this is the first evidence starting to come in and might be a decline in dementia but somehow brushing your teeth could potentially reduce your risk of dementia to make sure that we religiously brush my teeth and foss every day. to lowern my risk is much as possible. >> so now i will move on to this question.

i don'ttm think they well. there's always certain health conditions that they are so many different options on the table. the things that will happen in the next few years. and then in the next few years. and then there's another drug called net foreman which is a diabetes drug we think the slow down the aging process more globally. a trial process was supposed to start but has been delayed because of covid which is targeting aging with metformin

so they try to use this to slow down the aging process. so this is commonly prescribed drug giving out since the 19 fifties with a huge safety record. if that trial works out we could roll that out instantly and immediately so that would be for many people. and then if you are on deaths door. >> . >> that addresses the other questions. and then not chloride.

and then there are various studies to improve muscle function or in particular with these compounds is the mitochondriaia which is a bit of a cliché of a powerhouse of the cell. and then to perform that appearance there is intervention testing program. with the research labs in the us with those protocols i think and and and where is a pre- course on —- precursor

but we just don't have the solid data yet and then with that health of mice. and then hopefully we will know soon because the trials are ongoing. >> . >> . >> that the good news is that in most countries around the world the y lifespan continues to increase. but then the flatlining

lifespan it has been declining and then with those in middle-age it is incredibly complicated picture and another being headwind for increasing lifespan and there is some good evidence it is a primary effects with those tiny particulates. but actually they do cause to see one —- to have information to accelerate the aging process so alongside developing antiaging messages and clearly to have a negative effect and then it does

increase the negative aging. but thankfully for now we should try everything we can with a healthy lifespan. >> because it is aging intentional from evolutionary perspective? and then to hold somebody back. >> that's a great question. i think it is intentional that's the wrong word but clearly is not an accident a lot of species age but why it evolves but that is why. so then looking at aging this is the process of deterioration about becoming frail and slower. so the fact is in the wild

animals die of all kinds of other things so look at species like mice so that even death from exposure if it's really cold and he has these tiny bodies to keep themselves warm they could just die on a cold night like that. which means there's loads of different things that could cause on mouse and therefore what evolution has done instead to make the mice grow up quickly. and then help the mouse can be one —- can become productive. so that means the evolution doesn't care if the mice in

the wild are long dead before they get to their age. and another of similar size like thel. naked moment. so there's much less risk. and so what that means we had the opportunity to mature. because then they get more rocket still be alive at three so they invest much more. and this is a trend you find throughout the animal kingdom. so then to have that

intrinsic. with the aging process. so imagine you are a mouse and there is a low food supply so the best thing to do and they will starve themselves. and then to maintain the body of the animal. and then to put the brakes on aging so i answered your question.es

>> it is almost universally needed with data-driven science so obviously imagine a shrink with the liquids on additional of cells. and were with a computational biologist is dna sequencing data that cost billions of dollars if you want to sequence the human genome one year later but the genome is for less than a thousand

dollarsin that the whole genomes of animals and people which genes are used in which cells and marks all over the dna. so what that means is we need confrontational analyst to analyze. the great news is that the computing power is outpaced by the share growth but nonetheless we got to the point to dig into the data and really that is the crucial thing because there's no use hiding from thosebe and that what thatde means if you have computational programming skills you can help interpret some of this data. fascinating breakthrough for

about a decade and this is what happens if you look all over the dna which genes have turned on and off in the cells in the thought there must be some relation and they couldn't find anyone to give him any funding so what he did was took advantage of the fact that biological data was put out he downloaded methylation which determines which machines are turned on and downloaded those of the data completely unrelated experiments from developmental abnormalities to cancer and dozens of different tissues around the body but the only is the marker and millions of

sites scattered across the genome he could take 350 of them to determine the age of that person to within four years absolutely incredible in fact it is so incredible it took a while to get published because nobody believed it but now these epigenetic clocks if you have accelerated ages it's like the candles on your birthday cake that means you are more likely to die that's a breakthrough but because of the culture of open data it just shows the sheer power to find signals if we did not know there would be any or not. >> the next question talks about bio hacking but talked

about the role bio hacking with ordinary people? >> i'm fascinated by this because there is a real continuum of self experimentation. if you google this there are quite a few people on the line that will take metformin even though they are not diabetic they hope it will so there aging then they take more wacky cocktails where we have no human data but they are basing that on the results so to actually go to a clinic abroad and has those told him raise gene therapy. but the whole spectrum of people taking the friday of different approaches metformin will not kill you although

with that gene therapy and everything in between so because of the fact ideology is so much more open source that bio hackers will have more power so i'm fascinated potentially how we can make use of some of that data i talk about this in the final chapter of the book because i some of these are brave not ready for experimental gene therapy but maybe someone who is less risk-averse but what i really hope for makes you feel like we can pull together this community of people wanting to do these experiments. we have to make sure they understand what the risks are in the potential benefits how much is known or unknown you want them to do dangerous experience on themselves because what we want is

thousand and bio hackers and not surep what they have got with a different technique someone and so forth so they could do so to allow us to get that information that's what they think they have got. they try to do some useful trials so it will be a fascinating time not just for those who are bio hacking but for all of us because as we do more studies with all of the different things with the aging process so when is the evidence good enough tovi take the plunge? the ideal scenario going into the year 2500 decades or centuries of people take these different medications are whole lifetime. they have no idea of the

effect of the lifeline that would be the perfect experiment that i have time to wait 70 years for the perfect experiment so we have to take these drugs and treatments with good or bad evidence that will be a real challenge in the scientific community amongst bio hackers so it is a can of forms because it is a fascinating area. >> so then to ask how we see these treatments in our lifetime or how we do that for humans quick. >> that means it's very hard to tie me down. but what i can say is that i

genuinely think the treatments should be available for most people alive today. so the first thing is these similar treatments already in human trials it f will be a few years it could potentially be five or ten years to give us a ballpark metformin we will know the answer in five years and then they will start handing it out to people gene therapy and stem cell therapy that we are already doing some gene therapies we have some extreme situations they are used in hospitals as i get more used to do these so those that have severe diseases or mild diseases so safe to give to the general public so five or ten or 15 years away it is decades not centuries and the other thing to talk about all

of the data and biology talk about the computational revolution and so to summarize that so we need to understand how those interrelate we want to do something more subtle to improve biology and stabilize us to stop us to grow old. i thought that sounded crazy why am i even and speculating in this way but if you think about it that could easily happen if you n look at the last 50 years with a competing power so that is a poor back and if you are middle-aged you

could expect get the telomerase gene therapy so on and so on but what that means is you could potentially expect i'm in my thirties to live intoo my eighties even if nothing happens and science standstill so whatever the first treatments are maybe that gives me five or ten extra years of health i can scientist more time to develop more treatments so it does sound like it's 50 years a way that is longer for most of the people who are alive today were their only lifespan extend but it will be extended further by the first generation of these therapies because we'll definitely see the first of the ideation drugs the next ten years depending on how much they improve lifespan we can potentially see a much bigger increase if that process continues fast enough and what

you can have in the future. >> thank you so much for taking the time. go to harvard.com at the nharvard bookstore and the harvard library here in massachusetts keep reading. thank you so much. >> goodbye

>> this is a sack and this is what i started when i was inspired to work on the book that i named all that she carried this tote in carryall

bag is has an impact for life although on the surface looks to be quite plain. the fact with the name by the curators which is the first search on —- that we know one of and to describe in the following way the very first description of it. charleston south carolina circa 1850. 1921. plain weave cotton ground embroidery floss embroidery. with 16 and three quarter inches. so with those examples from

the 18 forties with the industrial sewing machine and those that were produced by the machine so that is the work of the mary edwin sullivan. as well as her partner and that is the person with the artifact. so with the past march at the smithsonian museum african-american history and culture currently taking place on a plantation a national historic landmark that was

part of charleston's wealthiest families and then it was smithsonian. with a new charleston african-american. this has taken so many twists and turns along at 70 through the various sites in our country. one of the pivotal moments of the saks history took place when the fleamarket shopper looking through bins in tennessee and combing through rags and came across a sack as

a unit with other rags around the price of $20. and then to discover it was not at all what it seemed because in fact even more compelling of the twist and turns that were taken about enslaved black women's lives or textile and craftwork or black families or inheritances. or love. daughters often passed down treasures from previous generations that bring to mind lost loved ones it is a common family practice and one i have

been fortunate enough to engage in as well there's a number of items given to me from my mother from my grandmother and my great aunt. recipe books, photographs, those that we have received so with that tradition it also stands apart