a scottish politician calls for the assets of journalists working for russia's news agency to be seized. comes off published leaked documents and just the u.k. is funding a think tank aiming into. russian sentiment across europe. and also the sell the scandal deepens over award winning drama reporter whose stories were exposed us by . you stole readers donations collected on behalf of the people featured in his articles. the latest all those stories had. in the meantime no scientists working on aging medical technology is the guest on sophie and co.

sophie shevardnadze its founding of the us is still just a dream or does help spring eternal when it comes to beating the curse. having haunted us for centuries as a solution is finally within our grasp of breda gray and anti-aging pierre and the chief science officer and co-founder of research foundation that's my guest today. through the ages human self strife story. mortality and president a technological leaps we might finally have a chance at the longevity of biblical growth it's. science achieved the seemingly impossible will everlasting life only be available to the rich. creating

a permanent population divide that could change in nature's cycle of life and death lead to catastrophic and unexpected consequences. dr operate a great anti aging pioneer chief science officer and co-founder of sayer search research foundation welcome to the show great to have you with us so what you propose in order to reverse aging claiming the organism of all the junk that accumulates tear on a cellular level so tell me the gist of it why will that stop the wearing of time on my organs. well it's not quite that simple what we propose is we keep people healthy later in life but i repair in all of the damage that the body does to itself throughout life in the course of its normal operation and some of that damage is of the thought that you just described essentially the accumulation of weisbrod both inside cells and also in the spaces between fellow

but some of the not quite like that for example from time simply we have too many of a particular bad type of all those not misbehaving or in other cases we don't have enough of a particular good time cells and they're not necessarily replaced automatically by the division of other cells furthermore of damage to. the structure the kind of lattice of proteins that holds the bodies ago that would have called extracellular matrix. so as you can see there are many different types of damage and we have to fix them all now i work at sense research foundation is exactly that we are focusing on many of these things because we know that they all need to be developed and applied to the pit people all the same time in due course and in a few cases the rest of the world is already understanding this and focusing well on them so for example of course there's a huge amount of stem cell research going on worldwide but the reason we created

the foundation was because there are plenty of other areas which were very neglected luckily we've made lots of progress in that so now everyone's getting much more excited about it and this is like a very general description of what you do what you strive for a better one how does this look technically like what do you do is it like a potion that you and jeff to yourself or what is this that you're working on. well let me answer that in two ways from the point of view of the person who's going to be receiving these therapies and also from the point of view of people like us the researchers who are developing them from the point of view of the person who's going to be receiving them they will just look like that you like no medicines delivered by injections or perhaps with bells in some cases the maybe surgery involved. into the what is being injected or introduced however it's going to be very very complicated lots of different components to it will be doing stem cell

therapies will still be doing gene therapy is where we introduce engineer viruses into the body that modify the the the the d.n.a. of ourselves there will also be immunotherapy for stimulating the i mean fifth them to do things to repair things that it's normally isn't doing and also simple you know pharmaceuticals now in terms of developing these things it gets pretty complicated so for example one way in which we addressing the problem of waste brought out of the accumulation of stuff inside for. of the folks i'm working is we are identifying bacteria that have the ability to break with things down and then we identify the dreams that they have the give them out ability and having done that we then modify those gains so that we can put them into human self and they still work and we've succeeded in this regard in relation to some very important aspects of aging that a caused by the accumulation of westborough one of

them is atherosclerosis the number one killer in the western world another one is macular degeneration which is the number one cause of blindness in the elderly so i think that gives you an idea all right so at this point have you had one big hit a defining moment whether it's a successful drug test or surgery trial or anything else that gives proof that this is all within grasp that this is actually working. we've had a number of big hits but not quite of that kind because we work on the early stages of this research when we get to the point where therapy prospective therapy is anywhere near going to into the clinic to be actually used on human beings it's kind of no longer our problem by that time we have already maybe created a spin out company and transferred the intellectual property into the company so that it can attract investment from women from from wealthy people around the world and they're the people who take it forward to clinical trials for the moment so

through such foundation has existed for more than a decade we've been doing this research but just in the past few years maybe two or three years we have been taking several of our projects through out to the private sector in the way i just described start up companies and those companies are not yet in clinical trials but in general they're only one or two years away from that point so the big hits that we've had in terms of allowing this to be seen as a feasible idea previously the approaches that we have pursued ten years ago they were just viewed i was completely impossible everyone of the officially given up on these areas and we showed that they should have given up and you just need to try a bit harder so it doesn't seem that your research went down too well with the scientific community where sense is branded by some as i said a science do you feel this accounts hold water i mean learning from peer reviews

and criticism is a major part of any research do you feel the negative impact has been helpful. the mistake that you have made in that analysis is you haven't looked at the dates of the various reactions to what we say there was indeed a great deal of skepticism and opposition on the denigration of this work when i first started putting it forward ten fifteen years ago people didn't really understand what i was and as you say they often thought that it was just on scientific but i was able to engage my colleagues and careful scientific debate on these areas back in the mid two thousand and the result was basically i was convincing i was able to demonstrate that actually the only reason why my colleagues had been skeptical was because they didn't really understand what i would say and now this decade we're in a very different position in fact it's so good that people are reinventing the

concept and pretending it's the new one and actually getting you know this is not completely mainstream papers being written use of the official or the touchstone of the field as a kind of description of what the field is supposed to be doing and identically what i said a decade earlier so yes that fun to figure out what has been completely factual there are very very few people now who would say that this is unfair and if it so you've been saying that that one of the major problems your research is facing is money why is that i mean don't reach people want to live forever don't we all want to cure disease. unfortunately the way to persuade someone that they ought to support this financially does not only confess of getting scientific legitimacy yes with me their will to show that this is a sensible way to proceed but that doesn't say that it's going to succeed any time

soon it could take a long long time and of course people don't like to get their hopes up you know people like to kind of put aging out of a mind and you know get on with their lives and kind of not be preoccupied by this terrible thing that's going to happen to them and wildly research remains a relatively early stage that the timeframe before it becomes really available is still very speculative but you know it's kind of not surprising that people are a little reluctant to get heavily involved that is changing now because things are far enough along as i mentioned that they can be invested in so people can actually make money out of this which kind of distract them from getting too emotionally invested in whether they're going to be able to benefit themselves in terms of the therapy and so that's that's all working out quite nicely but there are so many other irrational reasons especially in the west why people don't get involved in

this they'll say you know that it's because their wife doesn't want them to or it's because they think their shareholders are going to fail that they're. putting money into science fiction and that price of that company will go down or you know the the the they'll think that for example. philanthropy doesn't work you know crazy reasons like that but this is gradually changing over time i will say however that in russia when i come to russia i never have this problem whenever i speak whenever i come to russia i love it because everyone's really sensible about it they really want. who actually see this yeah and i bet they trust you because you look like dostoyevsky so. they probably see you and they're like oh he's trustable. well some people say i look like rasputin for it doesn't

necessarily work. so tell us on the what is your ultimate end and again do you want to prolong life or do you just want to eliminate death altogether well neither of those things really what i do is a medical research so i'm interested in keeping people healthy however long ago there were books that's all now of course most people die from being unhealthy for basic and certainly most people least in the developed world when they get sick it's because they will go a long time ago it's because they're old so that means that if we fix that if we keep people healthy when they're old. on average they will probably live a lot longer than they currently do you know that's a side effect it's a really nice side effect so i think you know life is valuable life is good but the fact is it's still a side effect so we shouldn't really be thinking in terms of longevity let alone you know immortality the goal here the goal is simply to keep people healthy same

as it is for the whole of the rest of medicine all right we're going to take a short break right now and when we're back we'll continue talking to operate a brain anti-aging researcher a chief science officer and co-founder of sense research foundation discussing rejuvenation sarah face and the promise of everlasting genes stay with us. so we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy confrontation

let it be an arms. spearing dramatic development only mostly i'm going to resist i don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical time to sit down and talk. to greek riots occupy wall street arab spring these are the beginnings. of the protest across europe today it was all connected it's all based on the exact same concept of bankers printing too much money creating this wealth and income gap and it's a delayed or deferred riot and you know it's true that the violence was baked into the cake and now leaders like that are getting their just desserts. my son doing drugs my nephew was still in drugs my sister just with doing drugs it

was like an epidemic of drug abuse america's public enemy number one in the united states is drug abuse the sort of the users in the prison population who are we started treating sick people people who are addicted to these drugs like criminals while i was on the hill. the war on drugs. there are a number of people who are in prison for. for. minor offenders in the drug trade it's a lot watching your children grow up and miss you in wave and say by day as you're walking out of a business it's just it doesn't get easier. more

bad when dr operate a grave at aging activists seven researcher chief science officer and co-founder at sands research foundation talking about human when germany and italy germany should take knowledge of all classes for the show so some are saying. silver tsunami of ageing people is set to hit the global economy by two thousand and fifty do you see any major rejuvenation solutions available by that time i will go further i would say absolutely this rejuvenation biotechnology is the only way that we are going to keep very ageing of the population from completely crippling the global economy already we're in a hugely problematic situation of course the difficulty is that the reason why we have so many people who are. elderly now is because number one we

are preventing them from dying young because we're really good now curing infectious diseases and so on but also because the the types of thing that people get sick from later in life are slowly progressive chronic problem so people don't die out once the way they do from typical infections the world continues to go gradually sicker and sicker and sicker and more and more expensive over time and so if everyone is doing that then of course the economic burden is absolutely astronomical and yes absolutely the only way we're going to be able to fix this is with rejuvenation technologies as a result of which we will have of course far more older people crew logically old but far fewer sick people and therefore we will save a huge amount of money so will poor people be able to get access to this rejuvenation therapy will it be affordable. oh yes and it will be affordable precisely because of my previous answer from the point of view of the government in

any country you are look at whatever the political whatever whatever kind of country it any country it will be far more expensive to let people get sick just because they can't afford these therapies than to keep people healthy in other words they for peace will pay for themselves exactly exact mechanism of how this is done of course will vary from one country to another depending on whether they have private health care depending on whether you know it's a democracy or not but the ultimate logic will apply across the board the ferry piece will be enormously economically valuable and therefore it will be economically absolutely imperative for any country to ensure that everybody rich everybody who is old enough to need them gets them even if they can't afford to pay for them themselves so let's say those in positions of power whether it's

politicians or business models ghosts or rejuvenation therapy every couple of decades i mean they could just stay there forever never letting anyone new in their circle well that number seriously what will the absence of the great equalizer do to the way our society is functioning. so of course i don't know precisely how the world is going to develop once we don't have aging anymore you know the world will be very different and a whole lot of ways because of people living longer people not getting sick people you know just being able to carry on contributing wealth to society maybe we will develop ways to incentivize people to step down and have new careers you know just make them pay higher taxes the longer they stay in the same job things like that you know there are a million ways to solve these problems we just another detail yet but we don't need to know. so you don't think about how that's going to affect humanity in our societies coming up with something so groundbreaking as anti-aging medicine.

let me be clear i certainly think about these things but i also recognize that i'm not an economist i'm not a politician i'm not a theologian you know i'm a biologist so all i'm doing is telling the people who are professional economists and so on what's going to happen and roughly how soon it's going to happen so they can do the job of figuring out how society should now the guy that transition so like a real running out of space on this planet already they this earth is overpopulated where will we all leave and how will we sustain ourselves i mean if we assume it won't be just a chosen few like you say and there will be enough for juvenile people to make an impact. right so we have to look at what other technologies are coming along at the moment you're quite right we already have a problem of other population that's why we have climate change but the solution to

that is not necessarily to have fewer people but rather to reduce the amount of pollution that people generate whether it's by. moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy or whether it's with artificial meats or whether it's with large scale desalination you know there are lots and lots of technologies that are already coming along and coming along even without the society having really woken up to the problem of climate change just coming along because the proving to be cheaper. original alternative and those technologies are going to increase the carrying capacity of the planet they're going to mean that we can have a lot more people on the planet with less environmental impact than we have today. that's the way we need to think about this already the problem is being solved and if you ask questions like how rapidly will the population rise as a result of the end of ageing the actual arithmetic is not particularly scary you

know the moment we've got seven and a half billion people people think by twenty fifty we might have nine billion or ten billion we certainly won't have more than eleven or twelve billion even if we completely eliminate ageing tomorrow. so do you see people who know they will leave longer having fewer kids are a possibility that we're production could be less important in future will of course we're certainly saying today it's pretty much universal i think the only exception in the history of civilization is israel almost universally well and the country reaches a certain level of prosperity and female emancipation and education then the photos he writes goes down dramatically and there's a big thing that we need to take into account which is that. not only do women on average have fewer kids but also they tend to have them later than they otherwise than they previously you. know because it's only

a little bit lighter moment because very little pause exists in other words there's only so late you can go before you can have kids a tool and people want to have kids at some point but menopause is one of the things that's going to go away we're going to be able to make it safe. kids at any age so the first reaction to that may be that means that the average woman is going to have more kids in the top in their entire life because they're going to carry on having them but if we take into account this delay that we're seeing we can ask well ok this delay happened because women choosing to do other things with their life before they do this terribly time consuming thing of having kids. if they come but it's likely that on average they're going to do having their first kid by another decade another decade or so actually we may even further reduce the rate of childbirth overall in the population so you've said that once this therapy has been

made comprehensive you'll be able to choose your own age live like your biological fifty or like your twenty who will choose to be old that are old people going to disappear altogether. i certainly don't expect very many people will choose to be biologically old for obeying biologically old means your body isn't working for also means your mind isn't working for well so i believe that indeed we will have pretty much no biologically old people even though of course we will have a much greater number of chronologically old people. aging maybe it came to it is easy as you put it but it also is a personal experience and we would trust older people because they know what it's like to be frail to see things past their wiser less careless what absence of aging take away all that from society like a big part of it actually. this intended goal i don't see why people

would. i don't see why people would become any less wise as a result of being healthier you know a hundred year old person who is still able to think of as they could when they would say is pro-drug going to be more able to make the most of their wisdom than one hundred year old who is of the kind that we see today so what will renewing yourselves do to our memories our experiences i mean will those be flushed out or damaged as you clear the pathways of the brain of deaths else. certainly not in fact we can produce so the opposite of what we see dimentia today in alzheimer's disease is of course a loss of the ability to remember things and to recall things. but there is good evidence that the main reason for this is not that the memories are gone but rather the system for retrieving memories is damaged so actually we may end up being able

to have older people we have more memory of past than later today. you're also working on a technology. preservation that will give people the option to have their bodies frozen in liquid nitrogen until the technology is there to bring them back to life how is this supposed to work i mean will this be like waking up after a really long sleep will the person's still with same. so first of all just to correct a little bit i don't actually don't actually work on that it sounds research foundation but certainly i'm a strong supporter of quality. so yes it will be very much like being in a deep sleep or a coma for a long time. the whole idea is simply that. we revive somebody we will do so at a point where we can repair the damage that caused them to become legally dead in the first place over i'm sure you know the definition of death the legal definition

of death has had to train. as medicine has improved and we have become able to repair and revive people who were previously thought to be on revival and this is just the next step in that process oh boy oh well let's just wait and see thank you very much for this interesting insights into the prospects of immortality and longevity it was really interesting talking to you. we were talking to dr outbreak decree anti-aging repair near am paint chips science officer and co-founder of sands research foundation but his vision a world where he says everlasting that's it for this edition of so i think i'll see next time.

i had a great education a good job and a family that loved me. i never had to worry about how i would eat somewhere i would sleep. i'm facing christmas alone out on the streets of london. well you looked. up. the glory like. you know the sun let me go still give out food for the homeless.

as you don't really feel like a human being in that. and then. the guy just came over to me saw me and gave me a change of this book. greetings and salutation. before stoneman douglas before the march for our lives before newtown vegas sandy hook or even columbine there was port are for the events of april twenty eighth one thousand nine hundred six in the historic town of port arthur tasmania for ever changed the course of history here in australia both

politically and culturally because it was on the day of the tourist attraction and historical site that thirty five souls lost their lives to a gunman's madness and while the tragedy itself shook the world it was also australia's response to the violence that brought not only many nods of approval but a few raised eyebrows in concert you see the port arthur massacre was the catalyst for the australian government to enact massive and sweeping changes to their laws regarding the ownership buying and selling of firearms forever changing the culture of guns here in the land down under since that tragic day many around the world now point to australia as a shining example of how a society and government should respond to gun violence and mass shootings with the united states currently under an epidemic of mass shootings and gun related violence and split between two internal political ideologies.