well welcome to visionaries well they say. but can we grow personally and mature while staying young and healthy and aging be cured just like any other disease well i asked davidson claire professor of genetics at harvard medical school. denison claire welcome to the show it's great to have you with us with lots to talk about so you suggest that aging may be looked at as a disease that can be treated what makes you think that age is a medical condition rather than the natural course of things. well think so if you will aging is just like every other condition that causes us to be sick and

eventually die we like to think it's natural because it happens to most people but in 100 years ago cancer heart disease frailty these are things that that if you lived long enough you would get it and eventually we learned how to treat those things we understood what the basis was and we're at the same stage with aging we know of for the 1st time a fundamental understanding of what causes aging how to slow down and even potentially how to treat it and reverse the process and my argument about why we should focus on it is that aging is the major cause of all of the diseases that we try to stop and sort of trying to whack them on the head one of the time as they emerge when we try to stop us getting to the edge of the cliff in the 1st place before we drop off so if you're right about age being sort of disease why is today's medicine treating all kinds of diseases that appear in old age and not addressing the old age itself which may actually be the underlying cause of having

a bunch of illnesses when you 70 plus. while it's completely historical the medical profession has built itself up to treat things that are already occurring we call these things diseases but the only difference between a disease and aging is that it is easy happens to less than 50 percent and aging happens to 50 percent or more and i think that's just we know that's a completely arbitrary distinction so it's historical and in 30 years from now i'm certain that we'll look back at today and think why did we ignore this major problem on the planet and why didn't we work on this sooner. well you have your experimenting with an 80 plus that's a molecule i guess takes care of preserving cells cut me from wrong here and will lose that molecule as we age right so if we take it as

a pill we will stop aging what's going to happen and we haven't gotten this right. well we don't know that much yet what we've been doing as a field is publishing in the world's leading journals about what's driving aging but we've also discovered that there are genes in our bodies that protect us from aging we call these longevity genes and there's a set of genes that we work on in my lab at harvard called the search to ns and for those to work effectively to slow aging and prevent us from getting diseases they need a molecule called an 80 and you can take supplements that will raise in 80 levels in the body but we only know so far that they work really effectively in animal studies to slow down aging and give. the benefits of exercise and diet without actually having to do that but we're right in the middle of clinical trials some of being run at hospitals at harvard some around the world and we're hopeful in the next year or so we'll have some 1st true evidence not just that it's safe which we

know already so far but that it actually helps to do some of those things that we see in those male studies so it's a very exciting time and there's this hundreds of studies around the world looking at molecules in people to see if we can actually slow down the aging process well why hasn't this anti-aging drug of yours been adopted in mass produce yet i mean. i know that you're you know taken it your family has taken it nevertheless it's not approved by the f.d.a. yet are there dangers to it and that still need to be addressed. well just to be clear i'm not taking anything that isn't available. to the general public these are supplements but supplements have a drawback which is. primarily we don't know if they work yet and this is the problem and so that's why i'm working on these clinical trials that would eventually produce a drug that

a doctor could prescribe knowing that in most people or at least a number. people it's proven to work and initially it'll be prescribed for treating diseases because aging is not yet prescribe a ball condition but why hasn't the world adopted this yet well because we need to prove that these things work and right now because things look very promising many of us including my family have decided to take the risk that if we don't do anything that's even worse we think but it's still a risk there's still a chance that they could be side effects that we haven't seen yet so how long have you been taking it for if i may ask and how old are you so i want to see if it's working. right well i'm 103 take if you want honestly. i just turned i wish so i just turned 50 and so you can be the judge i don't have any grey hair which is

a utility amazing for my father is 80 and doing very well. oh thanks i appreciate that i look even more amazing considering i grew up in sydney australia sunbathing and getting really burnt and i really should be totally wrinkled so so far so good but that's not proof that this is working that said i'm not an athlete i don't do a lot of exercise i wish i had time for that but my physiology as far as doctors can tell is like an athlete so what i can tell so far is ok i'm not going well taken this isn't hurting us this. yeah well depends there's a cocktail of a few things that we've been taking based on my labs research and some many others around the world and but the booster molecule i've been taking for a few years now i want to take it i want you to prescribe me what you're taking because i like the way it's looking so it has like no side effects so far or it hasn't been looked into or an off time hasn't passed for us to really understand.

well every molecule we put in our bodies even food is has a risk you know there are pesticides in food so it's on a scale of risk and we think that these are on the low end of the risk scale because the molecule that i take in my father takes is naturally occurring our bodies make it and route really we're just aiming to supplement what we're losing over time and get us back up to a useful level and the sort of levels that you see in athletes and people who don't eat 3 meals a day which we think is also very helpful. a lot of people right now are very big on hormone therapy and they're taking this thing called the growth hormone i don't know how you look in that ad but this it had like the sort of same effect from what i can tell because elder people after what like 45 started take it and they start look younger but it does have like bad side effects if you're prone to cancer and

all that but is this is like a similar thing to use to to the growth hormone. well it's actually the opposite what we're talking about is turning on the body's natural defenses against diseases and aging and this is a long term effect so that we know that if you calorie restrict or have intermittent fasting. many studies around the world in people and mostly in animals prevents aging and so you can either do that or you can take these molecules but the growth hormone does the opposite it actually speeds up your body's growth at the expense of we think at the expense of. turning on longevity part ways that we study so in my view growth hormone while it has some great short term benefits you will get stronger you'll have less chance of falling which is great for the old early in the long run which is what i'm looking at here in my research it's like

growth hormone would be like burning the candle at both ends instead of putting energy into a long lasting body what another road you're actually exploring as this partial solar reprogramming and that's when once again correct me if i'm wrong you sort of tell old cells in your body that they're young they're young selous and they actually start behaving like young cells how feasible is this math and tie aging science. well it's very new it's similar to when the wright brothers discovered how to build a glider and we're just they're just struggling on the engines to see how this thing flies it's only been around for a couple of years now but we've learnt that we can reprogram the body to really be young again not just temporarily but we think. a true reset we found a backup hard drive of usefulness in cells and we use

a gene therapy currently and in mice which is fields go to organism we can do things like reprogram the we can put a 3 genes into the eye and turn them on for a few weeks and those old mice will regain their vision but we don't know the long term consequences but it is exciting at least in principle that we found that there is a backup copy of youth that we can turn on and reset the function of something as complicated as an eye ball ok i get you so let's say in principle if this were a problem make tank turns out to work are we saying that aging is really just a program built into us a program we can actually recruit. well yes we are so that what i think is causing aging and i've proposed in a book that i just wrote is that aging is a loss of information not the genetic information but the information that tells us so how to read the genetic information in the same way a d.v.d.

would have the information about genome but it gets scratched as we get older and what this reprogramming does is it polishes the d.v.d. so we can read the genes correctly and that's what we're doing and we see that the cells you know in our older bodies at least in the old mice the those still still have the information to be young again we just need to tell them how to read it again. all right we're going to take a short break right now but when we are back we'll continue talking with david sinclair a professor of genetic. that harvard medical school discussing the causes of aging and how we can effectively tackle them stay with us.

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a 1000000. and we're back with david sinclair professor of genetics at harvard medical school discussing whether external use it is a. pipe dream or in knowledge so distant future so. david reprogramming our cells raising the level of a and 80 plus molecule that will help reset the aging clock fine allowing a 60 year old to feel like 50 a 40 year old like 30 and i cetera but is it possible to actually stop aging completely or only slow down. well if you asked me that just 2 years

ago i would have said there's no way we can stop aging and we still don't know how to do that but we do know know how to reprogram cells to be very young again and take the age at least of them else was i all the way back from one year of age which is an old i back to being just a couple of months so now when you ask me that i have to say in theory it's possible that we could reset the body multiple times now we've reset and i once but we're now testing if we could do it twice 3 times and maybe we can reset 100 times we don't know just yet but that's a very exciting prospect that we will be able to have multiple resets within our lifetime. so i mean i know you're not actually promise again internal life with your to knowledge but for how long will it be able to extend to humans lifespan. yeah so i'm a scientist. and hopefully

a respected one and my colleagues get very angry when i say things like one day we could live to 150 now you can't just prove that but what i can say with some reliability is that we've been on a trend as a species for the last few 100 years a very linear trend of greatly extending our lifespan our average lifespan and if we continue just on that line without any breakthroughs a child born over here in the us today can expect to live to 104 on average and in japan it's 10809 so that's very exciting but what i'm really excited about is if these breakthroughs happen that i'm talking about today then those numbers could be even greater and we know that there are many species on the planet whales for example that can live 100 years longer than else so there's no doubt law that says we have to old diet 80 or 90 and i know that one day we'll

figure this out what about you i mean how long would you want to leave if they were completely absent you. well a lot of people think that i'm trying to do this research to save myself which is not not true at all anyone who's seen me drive a car knows that i'm not that worried about my own mortality but i am trying to leave the world a better place than i found it my grandmother told me that she said humans are capable of terrible things your job is to do great things and so that's why i work hard i mean i'm in no rush to leave the planet i don't want to i so certainly don't want my family members to be in nursing homes and have to be spoon fed and bathe with spawn's that's you don't want that even for your enemies well maybe you do but . what i'm trying to do is to allow people to live longer in a healthy a way and the longer i can live in a healthy way you know i wouldn't say no to that well but here's the way i

see that today's medicine you can take care of organs in your body that grow older frail like lungs liver and kidneys and even the heart but at the end of the day it is the brain and it's a brain failure that is the worst part of aging not wrinkles right so is to sell therapy you're researching going to keep the brain young and fit for much longer than we're used to. yeah that's the most important question if it didn't protect if this research didn't protect the brain i wouldn't work on it the good news is that everything that my lab and hundreds of other labs around the world have shown is that our approach to medicine to drugs is to treat the whole body to turn on the body's defenses whether it's in the skin to prevent wrinkles or in the brain to prevent dementia and so the good news is that this is one of the 1st approaches to

medicine they keeps the entire body young so that we won't end up with a situation that we're heading towards where we just increasing the number of people with dementia in nursing homes while their hearts beat and here's another thing to be honest like i very much doubt that the entire aging treatment you're talking about will ever be widely used by the general public because even now the rejuvenation industry caters mostly to rich and the famous when the definite anti-aging treatment is there will of the general public be able to afford all these things. yeah it's a real problem and i'm spending a lot of my time talking to world leaders and other members of the industry here to to make sure that doesn't happen because we could end up with a world where a 1000000 isn't the 1000000000 is have access to this technology already they have more access than most people but we cannot have a world like that we could end up with a world

a dystopia where rich people's children and even their pets live longer than the other people on the planet but there are drugs that some of which are already on the market for diseases like diabetes there's a drug we call metformin or glucophage which has signs of longevity and aging properties and this drug only costs a few cents per pill and really if we were to call aging a disease today like the world health organization has declared. old age as a medical condition then doctors could prescribe medicine like metformin to their patients for very little money and potentially extend their healthy lifespan by 5 or 10 years so it's happening right now it's just a matter of knowledge and the regulations so you feel like the anti-aging research has a social responsibility to make sure everyone has access to it. oh yeah absolutely that's that's very important to me so it's prolonging life of many people at once.

maybe in some way dangerous proposition i mean city or outnumbering other generations is already a problem for a lot of countries like iran lives to a 100 the pension systems all over the world will just crash one day while we every generation when we've come up with new medicines people have worried about what's going to happen if we keep people alive longer and there's no way we would go back to the 1920 s. where mothers and children would die from it and infected splinter and so i project and i've done the calculations and written about this that population is not going to be a problem with stabilizing a population and the healthier people or the fewer children they have specially in developing countries and also the retirement age. what we're going to be doing is shifting the retirement age but in a way that people have the ability to start new careers and take on hobbies and

things in community work that they've always wanted to do and it's a trade off you can have longer life and healthy life without still contributing to society you can't expect young people to pay for it so we will have to adjust but we've been adjusting for the last 100 or so years in a way that i think we never go back to the old ways but no doubt things will change but i think change for the better because what we're heading towards is a world where if we don't do this we're just going to have a huge burden on our economies already japan and china increasingly western and eastern europe are suffering under a burden of sick elderly so why not work to make them healthy elderly and then the research says that those old elite people will die much more quickly and someone for example who lives over 100 years old dies within a few weeks and only costs one 3rd the medical costs of someone who lives in an average lifespan. well also human outlook on life is rooted in mortality i mean we

strive to achieve certain things and live our mark on the world make children because we're afraid of dying and living this world without a trace right like wind or sand that it's going to and so we have so many things to do. what happens if you take away that fear well at least mitigate it well let's again look at history when when people live to 60 instead of to 80 or 90 . where their lives better than elves did they have a more fulfilled life or do we have a better life i would argue that the healthy longer lives that we live mean that we have a much better time on this planet and that's what future generations will have and the look back at our lives with pity and the actually loft it such a thought that we needed to die young and be fearful of of death for us to have meaningful lives that's a very protestant and christian way of looking at the world and life goes by very quickly we're not going to live forever and if even if we lived 220 years that

would go by very quickly and so you know i reject that notion that we need to worry about dying to make life meaningful in fact most of us don't even think about dying until it's too late so jeanne calment the longest ever living person on earth she died at 22 and her relatives are also known to live longer than average but at the end of the day is long life also a genetic thing something that we are it. it is partially so people who live over 100 typically have a good set of genes a good set of longevity genes but we actually know that only 20 percent of our longevity is genetically pre-determined and the rest is up to us which is enormously power empowering we can live our life with exercise with a bit of hunger in our day is a good thing and perhaps these supplements will give us the boost so we can all

look forward to living over 100 and perhaps one day many of us will make it to that age of 110 perhaps even. live long enough to see that happen thank you so much for that interview was wonderful good luck with your future endeavors we were talking to david sinclair professor of genetics at harvard medical school discovering the causes of aging and prospects. that's it for this edition of so fake. as he should be. one of the force of the beyond what because.

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