the european medicines agency says it will begin assessing russia's sputnik the vaccine with the block seeking to speed up its vaccination program some e.u. countries have already started receiving the shot and we've heard from the head of the russian fund that backs the vaccine. so little if the major you want to believe there is there should be. some of the standards of the gene you search would reach or between russia and europe although it's called. a chinese professor in the u.k. is attacked by 4 men while out jogging in what is believed to be the latest case in a growing number of racially motivated assaults the victim told us asian people have become targets due to the corona virus. is no surprise because you know

because of the pandemic the tax evasion to go to the people in the case is increased dramatically i don't feel i don't feel see if i say i use tools. and the u.s. government watchdog reveals washington has squandered billions of dollars in afghanistan on maintenance. world news headlines for this hour i'll be back with more in just about 60 minutes and i. will continue so if you're. going to be many. of you are healthy and to talk about this i'm joined by david sinclair national. director of a call and biology of aging at howard. david

sinclair professor of genetics and co-director of the pole s. glenn center for the balance of aging at harvard medical school great to have you with us one more time maybe not been wanting to talk to you always but especially ever since to call it out great look the precedents of aging has been the focus of your work for a long time and as does condemn it showed old age dramatically increases one's chances to die of copied do you have an explanation why a c. or e. why does this iris target people of old age disproportionately. well you have to there are a number of theories one of them is that our immune system overreacts as we get older. we have a lot more what's called inflammation inflammation generally in our body.

we have just processes that our metabolic and metabolic changes during the body can make immune cells go crazy and one of the leading theories actually is that there's a myth metabolite a small molecule that our bodies make and we met i make less of it as we get older this is one of the things i work on it's called an 80 and because we have less of it we become more prone to infection and the crazy thing is that code 1000 the sars kovi to one of its ways of attacking the body is to deplete the body even more of that chemical which we need to fight infections and that may be one of the reasons why older people just cannot get rid of the virus quickly and many of them will succumb to it here's how about in the a later but well there is the idea that elderly people are more vulnerable to delay

because there are immune systems are weaker as well. but we also know that people's immune systems young people react to the virus so vigorously that they start to cause damage to their host and then in order to treat their infection in their immune systems have to be weakened does that mean that the weaker immune systems in older people may actually be helpful in color treatments how does it work yeah well immunology is an extremely complicated field that's one of the reasons. you know i prefer to work on muscle it's just simpler. because you need different types of immune reactions depending on the type of infection and the phase of the infection and so early on you want to have a really robust attack on the virus which young people generally are good at.

but then you don't want to go too crazy too aggressive and you need to be out there shut that down again once the virus starts to go away instead what seems to happen in the elderly is they don't have a strong initial response. and the virus starts to multiply and then when the old older person's immune system does finally ramp up it starts to attack parts of the body that it shouldn't you get senescent cells which are part of aging itself and then it doesn't switch off very well and so you can have the body doing more damage to itself even than the virus does and why the body doesn't fully turn this off we can get into the details of why i think it might be but it is a fact and that's why treatment with these anti-inflammatory steroids is one of the things that they do for the elderly trying to tell the body calm down it's not that

bad but let's not about treating what i'm teaching pill sovaldi a huge risk that ever caught it should elderly people with masks social distancing other measures take some kind of entire aging pills which what was their defenses. well i don't make recommendations i'm just a ph d. studying mice but i can talk about the science the science says that if we were to reduce the age of the body it should function. like a young person there's no reason why that shouldn't be possible and there have been molecules one of which for example is called up in mice and that in low doses. was shown to boost the they're all the people's immune system and there are other ways of doing that the molecule that i work on called any day when you replenish that it's thought to improve the body's immune system and make it younger and in fact i

work on my spare i also work with a company that i co-founded that is doing clinical trials across the united states in more than 28 hospitals trying to see if rejuvenating immune system making it younger through raising an 80 this molecule will help in. not just eliminating eliminating the virus but preventing that overreaction to it but what kind of attack times and her talking about i mean the anti-aging supplements that you were researching that you're promoting which are so far not being certain that is that isn't that they surely don't work overnight right unlike mass or social distancing i mean how long before we can prove the definite connection between i take supplements and human resistance to cough it. well so most of the treatments that we have or even the theoretical treatments which are

sold as supplements work through mechanisms of slowing down aging turning on the body's natural defenses against disease which is still a big deal we've only been able to do that for the last 15 years in animals and in humans we think we can do it up somewhat there's not a lot of evidence but this does retrospective studies of people taking a drug for example called metformin for diabetes which looks promising a slowing aging. but to work rapidly we need something that will reverse aspects of ageing and it looks actually like drugs like rep meissen and potentially these in a very sting molecules i mean they won't make you look 20 tomorrow that that's not going to happen but they can target parts of the body such as the main system or the the lining of blood vessels and make those cells but behave as though they are very quickly just to give you an example when we treat mice that are old

with a molecule that raises an 80. just in a minute is about a week or 2 those animals are now as fit and can run on a treadmill as far as fast and as far as a young animal. we think that with covered we can have benefits within days that's so far what the early results say ultimately we want an age reversal injection or pill that's of course what the ultimate dream would be we recently had a paper it was on the cover of nature magazine in december that showed the 1st evidence that you can rewind the clock the body's epigenetic clock called the d.n.a. methylation clock sometimes known as the whole of a clock you can rewind that back. just very quickly within a matter of oh week or 2 as well and that might be

a permanent reset and then you just aging out again and keep doing that reset to be fair we did in mice we did it in the eye and skin we haven't done it in the immune system but we're hoping to try that too so you before we go out with call because i'm a girl and to ask you to actually see me with your own eyes that in a week's time some once again can rejuvenate and the rebind it we wind it back into like yeah. you know i wish that were true then you know we can rewind skin cells that we grow and we're now doing what are called skin organo aids which are models for skin and then we'll move on if that all works to turn back the clock in the skin as well so you are living right now it so happens. yeah well

we need to figure out a better way of doing it right now it's a gene therapy and i think a gene therapy for beauty would be extreme. but the biology will principles are still there that the body has a memory of youth that we can tap into by turning on a combination of just 3 genes and it should be possible to do that with. small molecules that you could put into a cream one day wonderful i hope it happens before i get a lot of wrinkles. all right back to code it so in terms of current situation right wouldn't it be easier for people to just get in that scene and forget about the trouble that you know that go to those they'd flanks of adding $100.00 a month of their pill bill and spending that on something that won't give results right away what like. if you 'd are faced with a choice right now today well we choose. according to him i

would get a vaccine for sure. vaccines are proven to work and within a week or 2 you have some immunity so that that to me is the best i don't understand. anybody who thinks that vaccines are not worth it the technologies some of them are new but knowing the biology as i do there are the risk of anything being negative is it you know you could be hit by lightning or. die from a plane crash far far more easily. and the risk of getting covered long term symptoms is that is a real one as i mentioned you can have senescent cells in mice this is been shown that the virus viruses will exacerbate senescence in the body and the cells that senescence are well established in animals and i think it's fairly well accepted in humans these drive aspects of aging when you don't want them to accumulate in your

body but the virus will do that and this might be why there is there are a lot of people who don't recover from coated symptoms. even a year later they get a short break right now we're back with entities often to david sinclair of the us or of genetics and co-director of the policy and center for the biology of aging at harvard medical school we're talking about how could 19 has in many many ways changed the way we view our health stay with us.

and we're back with david sinclair professor of genetics and co director of the paul ask len center for the biology of aging at harvard medical school david i absolutely think a lot of the an a plus molecule last and spoke about it in detail that's not a cure all that boosts arlan djibouti genes and protects us from aging so tell me

is is just taking any class going to help me with the back to structure process a scalper style of health they dowdy or do i still need to cut down that habits exercise it healthy me you know a laborious stuff. while so the scientific answer is we don't know. the answer to that but i do is i do a combination of those things. we do know that exercise and fasting are beneficial to the human body so if you want to place bets on longevity though those are good ones even though they're boring and sometimes painful. and then the supplements were right what i think is that they they enhance that i mean very few people do. perfect exercise or perfect fasting and these could enhance

that on there's a little bit of data from my lab where we did it the n.a.v. boosting in combination with exercise and they added to each other the benefits. and risks are probably is the same if you do research on its own versus fasting they both have health benefits if you do them together we saw a life spent tension quite deep on in old meissen so again i think that all points to the combination being the best bet. he's unthinking i've only ever him right if you cut down on bad habits and only just simple as an exercise and never soak in never dreaming i mean. just that it's sort of a cone perhaps that you know would allow me to live long and look great and i won't probably need any pills ifs if a person is able to stick to that all their lives do you know what i mean want to it's a good start there if you just don't do the 5 things that doctors well you do the 5

things that doctors tell you to do bridges well and you can ask me that he did my recollection is obviously don't smoke not going to be obese ok get exercise eat the right types of food which would be mostly focusing on vegetables and not. not trans fats all that bad stuff and then i think the last one was mental health i can't remember if it was good sleep or or a lack of stress but in any case just the things that you are you know you read about on the internet are in newspapers those are pretty basic things those alone if you do those you'll extend your life on average by 13 years which is a big deal so it's not that hard to live longer. for most people but we also know that people who live those healthy lives still will die in the ninety's it doesn't

give you the longevity of john coleman who who in france made it 122 so if you're looking for longer life the ninety's and healthy life which is the one thing alone and healthy is to kick as i mean you can live till you're 90 but if you're in a well chair really have alzheimer's i mean if they don't see the point living that long you know what i mean. well yeah not only do i know what you mean it's what i live for it's what i do with my life it's my career is to reduce mobility reduce disease and it turns out if you're not sick. you rarely die and so longevity goes along with the health i'm not the other way around typically typically medicine as it's practiced today in my view does things the wrong way around i will treat. a what we call a disease a process that goes wrong they treat it after it happens rather than before and

then we treat that one disease rather than try to protect the entire body and so you know as a result we have more and more patients with dementia because we can keep the heart and a kind of vessel system healthy these days much better than we used to but the brain still ages. but i realize maybe this is probably too early to tell but i can't feel baskin is there any evidence at this point about the impact of coal it allegedly phrases like it's known that it causes the most is right the creation of black clouds which is best for the heart what not in the long term. well you know in our studies you know it does look like it's exhilarating aging process these senescent cells i mention. but i don't know if that long term affects your longevity it really wouldn't surprise me at all we see oil

scientists and doctors see probably lasting problems in kidneys and in the heart so it could if you have a very bad case of that mouton clear it we call it long covert it could could reduce your lifespan i haven't seen data on that yet. though i mean that to state the obvious that even if you don't have to look at that data and just look at lifespan in the u.s. it declined by a year in 2020 the main concern is of course about the scenes which after all those months of hope and expectations can turn out to be ineffective because of the new strains and new variants yet i've heard through many health professionals that there is no evidence for this so far if you tell me can this current of errors mutate to a point where the on to that is from a scene or past disease will not protect you. there of course that's the worry and that it's this is an arms race but what happens it

seems is that in people who have the inability to clear the infection and can be sick for months in fact this is a a breeding ground and evolution inside the body that leads to these new strains because you know the viruses mutating within a person's body and if you can't get rid of it it will keep you taking and then all you have to do is have that person with a cocktail of mutants in their body to to give it to a nurse and then it spreads and you know we're seeing this in south african strains and. breed in britain and it's going to continue. you know a lot of people when when i 1st wrote on social media and i get a video on instagram that people looked at i said we should watch out for these mutations it's mutating i'm i'm concerned what happens a year from now

a lot of people thought that that was you know scare mongering fear mongering and here we are where a lot of the news is about these emerging strains and probability. and i think eventually the likelihood that it will get around the vaccine and will become endemic meaning it will never leave this planet and will have to continuously continually make new vaccines every 2 or 3 years like we do for the flu but the dixie rollout makes you have to misstate right that the worst is behind us i mean it seems to be working already in israel united kingdom right oh sure i'm very optimistic. a year from now we may not be talking about covert but to eliminate it from the entire planet i think is dreaming. there are just so many people infected around the world now and it will continue to mutate in the

background and eventually it will break out again and so we'll just have to be ready get better ready next time since quote it was such a surprise and he all over the world medical professionals they couldn't provide clear guidelines and how to deal with it right away because no one really knew and in the confusion it seems that the trust in doctors in general. through this thing just isn't there anymore you know what i mean you know one hand we have you know the nurses and people who are at lake on the frontlines and we see them as heroes but that the doctors themselves putting having answers and we know the reasons why it seems like people don't really trust them anymore why. well that sounds like a shame. it's the doctors and the scientists who supply them with medicines that are saving the planet. so at least in my circles but you know i i i tend to hang

out with doctors and scientists i have a bias or you know selective view of the world if people are angry at doctors i would say that's unfair you know we had the worst pandemic in 100 years and they were. very quickly trying to figure out the best way to treat it and i thought it did a very good job of figuring out how to do that the ventilators at 1st and then. putting people pronate facedown these are things you learn along the way it's not like we have. as doctors an answer to everything. we're all human and as a planet i think we did well when we didn't do well was politically particularly in the us it was disorganized misinformation and some of that was a shame. but doctors i think in general not all of them some of them didn't know what they were talking about either and through the media and social media confused

things but it's only the doctors that i know and so on not reputable t.v. programs did a great job. you know what i hear a lot like less learning a lesson less ferment the next day i met were names have been ignored before but after such a lashing intrudes of 19 to think the demi dooms day attract a lot more attention and reaction do you think we're actually going to take this seriously and you know be prepared is something next is up or will everyone just forget about the whole endeavor once you know we are x. scenes and everything comes down well let's hope that we learned our lesson because the next one could be much worse. yet something that comes out from. the forests of africa that will could potentially kill 10 percent of people and be

just as effect infective. is not really just a possibility if it's going to happen at some point we have to be ready we have to now i'm optimistic because southeast asia or asia or in general was much more prepared for sars than we were over here in the u.s. and i would say most of the rest of the world because they had experience with that they feared that the population knew it was very serious and that's one of the reasons they did better. and yes hopefully we do learn and that we'll be prepared and we'll have stockpiles and we'll we'll know how to ramp up industries that we need again and we'll have better technologies that can track by iris is that emerge early. and be able to test for them and follow the much better this is part of our problem here is that trying to get testing up and going was was also not done very efficiently what is it is being done right now to prepare for in perhaps prevent

the next demick in your pain. well so i can speak with some of the already on that . in this case so there are number of programs to track viruses in the environment and in the population. and not just where it is and how often it occurs but what type of virus and even down to the strain level we need to know that if it's mutating and potentially becoming. it can start our immune system and our our vaccines so one of the things that i've done actually started about. 7 years ago. is a virus tracking company in fact it tracks all pathogens not just viruses you can take a swab of the mouth or a blood sample and they can tell you every thing that's not human in the body which

is i think the way microbiology in medicine has to be practiced in the future and so companies like that one that one's called our bio there's other ones will so there's a surveillance in the united states i think i would hope that the world has a a much better global surveillance of viruses so that we can be forewarned and not play catch up so much next time. it's always so wonderful to talk to you alone what you're doing and i'm actually asked so much faith in you thanks a lot for this wonderful inside what you think is called it and whatever is going on and what we're doing or not doing to be prepared in the future and i really hope that we get to do this again soon and good luck with it and. thanks good to see thank you bye bye.

bye. russia e.u. relations right an impasse the kremlin has me clear it will no longer tolerate the e.u. lecturing about values and so-called international norms and the russians of any number be used interference in russia's internal politics he refuses to treat russia as an equal partner until this changes this bilateral relationship appears to be on hold. hey folks next up reggie watts i know you're saying. reggie is a bad leader on the james core.