2023-07-19 - Talk Dr. David Sinclair - BIOHACK 2.0 - How To Live LONGER & AGE BETTER: Difference between revisions
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== Transcript == | == Transcript == |
Revision as of 22:54, 13 September 2023
- Length: 1:46:07
- Interviewee: Dr. David Sinclair
Transcript
0:03 | foreign |
0:13 | Ron White I'm I'm Ron White tonight |
0:19 | and uh and you you have the the fortune of uh of having me with wine in my hands so whatever you ask is gonna |
0:27 | give you a big truthful answer right how do I live longer that's a good |
0:32 | question but I don't know if you know me for uh for the red wine story that was uh |
0:39 | about 12 13 years ago but when we found that red wine in particular a molecule |
0:45 | in red wine called Resveratrol would it would basically make animals resistant to the effects of a western |
0:52 | high fat diet and live just as long as an animal that was thin and healthy |
0:57 | uh we published that and that that was some of the the media that I first was |
1:03 | exposed to that was the Barbara Walters interview in 60 minutes but sales of red wine went up 30 percent |
1:10 | yeah right so uh so I've since learned invest in things that are going to go up |
1:17 | in price no um but that we've come a long way since then a long long way |
1:22 | um and I'm fortunate you all have a copy of my first book which uh is a |
1:28 | description of really why we should think about our lives very |
1:34 | differently most people are going through their lives right now not realizing that |
1:39 | they're going to live a lot longer than they think a lot longer we look at our grandparents |
1:44 | and sometimes our parents and think okay that's how long we're going to live but the truth is that our generations |
1:51 | and even more so our children's generation and you know we can talk about our |
1:57 | grandkids what's going to happen is that we're going to continue to live longer and longer |
2:02 | but the real question what's most important to me is are we going to live healthier because there's no point in |
2:09 | keeping the body alive which is what modern quote unquote medicine is doing |
2:14 | if it's going to keep our brains the same age right and that's what we've been doing we haven't been very good at |
2:20 | keeping our brains Young so my goal is really to first of all understand why do we age |
2:26 | how do we slow it down is it reversible and can we keep the whole body younger |
2:32 | and I believe we can and that's what I'm going to tell you about tonight so uh |
2:38 | uh no I'm actually 75. well that that's a joke but I'm in my |
2:43 | 50s now so it's it's getting more and more personal but I started off this project when I |
2:49 | was four years old I know it's hard to believe but you'll read about the story that my grandmother |
2:55 | who raised me um in part she was a very young grandmother she had my father she gave |
3:01 | birth to my father when she was 15. so to me she wasn't a grandmother she was more like a friend |
3:07 | and she wasn't just young she wasn't just in her 40s when I was a kid but she was young at heart she was so immature |
3:14 | and irresponsible it was excellent and my mother really didn't appreciate that at all but I was raised essentially by |
3:21 | my grandmother who taught me a few things in life which is the reason I'm here today talking to you |
3:26 | the first was adults screw up everything and she had lived through World War II |
3:31 | and the aftermath and she thought wow humans really can do a lot of bad things |
3:37 | so she said to you know a little four-year-old David you have to do really good things and show Humanity |
3:43 | the best that they can be stay young six is the youngest the best age it's |
3:49 | it's uh so if you ask my wife I'm definitely still a kid in my mind |
3:55 | um she's the one that makes sure everything runs on time and the kids actually get to school but it's been great for my career |
4:02 | because I'm a scientist and scientists succeed typically if they stay young and |
4:07 | why is that helpful well it's not the immaturity and the irresponsibility that's that's helpful it's the Curiosity |
4:15 | The Wonder of life and I've managed to keep that and I struggle to keep it because the world is |
4:22 | a a scary and sad Place many times but what I try to do my The Secret of My |
4:28 | success as a scientist to share that with you is the following I try to imagine what life would look |
4:37 | like to an alien what I mean by that I mean that if we |
4:42 | can get rid of every preconceived idea we've never watched a movie we've never delved into politics there's no |
4:49 | tradition and we just looked at Humanity from above and said how do they score are we a one out of |
4:57 | five or they have five out of five I think we're kind of a two out of five at |
5:02 | this point and we can do a lot better and one of the things that aliens would do when they looked at us they would say |
5:08 | well great they figured out Pi the debt that the uh |
5:15 | the numero numeral pi to a million decimal places great get a gold star for |
5:20 | that they figured out equals mc squared that's pretty good kind of advancing |
5:26 | what else would be good well they've traveled to a rock that's floating around their Planet good stuff guys |
5:31 | but they'd say well what about medicine and we'd say well |
5:37 | we're tackling this heart disease it's really bad and then there's diabetes we've got to solve that and they'd say |
5:45 | that's great but you know what causes all those things I might say uh not sure what they'd say |
5:51 | aging aging is your problem and we would right now in our civilization we'd say |
5:57 | aging isn't that just natural isn't shouldn't we just deal with that and they said the aliens would say |
6:04 | guys and ladies aging |
6:09 | is just as natural as cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer's why are you focusing on all those things that kill |
6:16 | you while ignoring all the things that cause those things in the first place |
6:21 | so my argument is why are we focusing on what causes us to fall off the cliff without even talking about let alone |
6:28 | working on in a big way what drives us to that edge of the cliff in the first place |
6:34 | and so my mother she died a few years ago from lung cancer and I'll be the first person to say lung cancer and |
6:40 | cancer in general is a great pursuit to solve cancer but we spend I think it's about five |
6:46 | billion dollars a year just on Research alone on cancer |
6:52 | but cancer is only part of the story if you smoke like my mother did your chance |
6:58 | of getting cancer lung cancer goes up by about five-fold which is really bad right so we try not |
7:04 | to smoke and there's big government campaigns to try and prevent it but if you go from 20 to 70 your chances |
7:13 | of getting lung cancer go up by 500 fold and nobody's even talking about it so what's the major killer it's aging so my |
7:20 | goal with my research at Harvard Medical School which I've been doing at Harvard for 20 years and |
7:26 | five years over the road at MIT is to figure out |
7:32 | why do we age I mean does any does anyone anyone have a clue why we age does anyone really and do any of you |
7:38 | think about it probably not right because even doctors who treat aging the gerontologists |
7:45 | they don't think about it either it's as though we're we're we've evolved to not even think about it and I think the |
7:51 | reason is that it's too painful to think about mortality I mean let's do a little |
7:56 | experiment I've never done this before this is off the cuff uh think about your parents if they're |
8:03 | still alive that's great if they're not imagine that they're still with you |
8:08 | what would you give for an extra month with with them to be able to talk to them spend time with them show them |
8:14 | what you've been doing spend time with the grandkids all right |
8:20 | those those are the important things in life and we we don't even think about our own |
8:25 | mortality typically um it's really quite painful right to think that one day literally none of |
8:33 | this will be around for us and we'll be we'll be out of here that's scary stuff right you've got the whole whole uh what |
8:39 | about 100 religions to help us with that but my book is is not a negative message |
8:46 | it's not oh let's all freak out because we're gonna die it's more let's focus on what's going |
8:54 | wrong during aging and try and keep all of us our parents ourselves healthier until 90 or 100 or Beyond |
9:02 | and the good news is the science which I'll tell you about tonight says that it's not about extending |
9:07 | lifespan even though that's the title of the book it's about extending Health span so that |
9:13 | you don't have to be sick when you're 70 or 80. and I'll show you that it's very possible with things that we can do |
9:20 | today with our lives and I I'm quite happy that I heard some of the right things tonight about what you should be |
9:27 | doing the other great message and um |
9:32 | inspiring fact is that only 20 of your life span and health in old age |
9:39 | 20 is genetic and we know that because we've studied Twins and twins there's |
9:45 | always a good good twin and a bad twin right and the bad twin who goes in the sun who smokes who doesn't exercise who |
9:52 | eats a lot of food that twin will age rapidly not just be sick but but |
9:57 | literally you can measure aging now I'll tell you about the clock in our bodies |
10:02 | so we know that 80 percent of our existence and our health is in our own hands that's great that's really my |
10:10 | message and one of the reasons I wrote the book is that don't be afraid of Aging take action because you really can |
10:16 | have a big impact on your own life um and spread the word because there's really a lot we can do fairly simple |
10:23 | things to live longer and healthier all right so that's |
10:31 | let's see if we can get this |
10:38 | all right okay so this is a a picture of a young person an old |
10:44 | person and when I ask you how long do you want to live which I will do think about that |
10:49 | I want you to imagine that some of the technologies that I'm going to talk about tonight |
10:54 | and the things you can do will actually work okay so you might have an extra five years ten years |
11:00 | so my question to you is it's a multiple choice question but you get to get to |
11:06 | vote once um who of you wants to live just to 80 |
11:11 | and then and then uh you know pass away is 80 |
11:17 | enough for you you are the first audience who has zero |
11:22 | at 80. fantastic what that means is uh either I've convinced you but I think |
11:28 | what more importantly what it says is that you're an audience who's really enjoying life |
11:34 | why not why if you love life why would you want it to end of course not as long as you're healthy |
11:40 | and enjoying what you're doing nobody wants to die if I actually told you you're all |
11:46 | 110 and that you know imagine we go up to City Hall in Cambridge and there's a |
11:52 | someone at the desk and they made a mistake on your birth certificate turns out you're actually 110 you didn't know it |
11:59 | do you suddenly want to kill yourself no of course right just being a certain age doesn't mean |
12:05 | you want to die it's how you feel um how about uh let's let's pick another |
12:11 | number who who would like to live beyond a hundred well that's where I'm going |
12:18 | all right no no that's okay but you still got to vote and then we'll come back |
12:26 | all right well let's Jump Ahead what about 150 does that sound attractive 150 |
12:31 | okay so it does depend so that's where we're going what about immortality |
12:36 | yeah so you must really love what you you're doing all right so so here's the catch most people and and you're You're |
12:44 | A Cut Above uh most audiences I speak to I can tell already most people say 80 or |
12:51 | 100 that's enough because they've seen what it looks like to get old but because I think I prepped you and I |
12:57 | think because you think more deeply than most we're talking about being a hundred and still being |
13:03 | able to play tennis and hang out with the great grandkids and live a life like we do today |
13:09 | without losing your mind and that's what we're we're talking about with the things that I can tell you today and the |
13:16 | technologies that are coming very soon so let's uh let me ask you again okay I'm certain none of you want have |
13:22 | changed your mind about 80 but what about a hundred anybody wanna die at 100 even if you're feeling the |
13:29 | same way as you do today it's enough you get you get bored with life out of |
13:35 | here okay that's fair enough everyone's choice and I |
13:45 | yeah living in yeah well so what one of the the points I make in my book is that |
13:52 | we should have the choice to die when we want to as well right that's just as important to choosing how long you can |
13:58 | live so 100 how about let's go to 150. yeah |
14:04 | Maybe somewhere in between 120 what what makes you feel that way |
14:15 | yeah I I pity your parents |
14:21 | well you well I'm going to say that at 150 you you look and feel the same |
14:29 | way you do today and so do all your family and friends |
14:34 | so nothing's changed just just the number of candles you have to put on your birthday cake is there a date where you don't want to |
14:40 | live anymore |
14:52 | [Music] |
15:00 | if it takes |
15:07 | so we can get into the laws of thermodynamics I'm prepared for that |
15:13 | psychologically though so here's what I'm trying to get at if |
15:18 | if you don't feel any different and you've got a great career and you're surrounded by family |
15:24 | and friends is there a date when you want to die |
15:29 | is there a point in life where you just get bored I've seen every movie I've |
15:35 | done everything I want to do my bucket list is full I want to die bang is there a date sounds like yes |
15:42 | that's fair that's totally fine that's that's some people so what about immortality under these conditions of |
15:49 | continuing nope |
15:58 | would you um |
16:08 | now that's a good question |
16:18 | yeah right do we only enjoy life and have agency because we know that there's an |
16:25 | expiry date very Protestant of you |
16:32 | yeah no it's it's a fair point but we don't know what it's like to live without fear of death |
16:59 | when you have that's right but I what I what I've discovered in my lab which most people |
17:05 | don't know unless they've read the book is we've found that there's a backup hard drive of Youth in ourselves in our |
17:11 | body that we can tap into and reset the system and we've res we've reset it once we we |
17:17 | maybe can reset it 100 times Maybe |
17:24 | uh let's talk about that let's talk about that we've only done it in mice but we can reset a mouse pretty quickly |
17:29 | and pretty easily and send their age way back I'll show you how that works |
17:38 | exactly so I just got off a plane yesterday from um was it Bottega Marine labs I think |
17:47 | I'm messing up the name but it is north of LA and I was there collecting jellyfish |
17:53 | because we're studying jellyfish in the lab because I think just like you've |
17:59 | proposed that the secret of reversing aging continually |
18:06 | was solved by jellyfish it was sold by a lot of life forms trees do it they can |
18:11 | spawn new offspring our bodies have forgotten how to do that but what you'll you'll read about |
18:17 | hopefully you'll get into the book is that we figured out that there are three genes in the body that if you turn them |
18:23 | on again because they get Switched Off When We're Young turn them on again in an old animal |
18:29 | and probably ourselves I would guess we get to experience what it's like to be a |
18:34 | jellyfish |
18:43 | let me show you the mouse because a mouse doesn't have to be in water I promise |
18:51 | to tell you the clicker is not working but um let's plug it in and see if it works |
19:02 | all right this is the only graph I'm going to show you all right but it's a really cool graph |
19:08 | it's a graph of the longest lived |
19:13 | countries in the world versus the 19th and 20th Century |
19:19 | yeah see if we can get that to work so this is 1840 so the life expectancy |
19:25 | average life expectancy in the best country in the world right which is |
19:30 | light blue which is probably your hero is Sweden |
19:37 | cool |
19:42 | I'm jinxed there we go we'll get there all right so |
19:48 | in 1840 the best you could do was in Sweden and you're at 45 years |
19:54 | 1840 cholera you could die from a splinter horrible all right into the |
20:01 | kind of the modern times 1940 right it's still pretty pathetic average life expectancy the best you |
20:08 | could do in the world was about 70 years and this is when we expected to retire |
20:15 | at 65 and live another five years and drop off that's not the world we live in |
20:21 | and it's certainly not going to be the world we live in when we're older and when when we're |
20:27 | um in our late late retirement but I want to point out two things one |
20:34 | is that this is this is very linear right that even though we've had advances in |
20:40 | vaccines and uh and antibiotics and all of the wonderful medicine it's it's |
20:47 | almost unbelievable how linear this is and uh the second thing I want to point |
20:53 | out in this slide is that what these little things are you can't read them but these are estimates of the maximum |
21:01 | human average lifespan so for instance this study here |
21:07 | in 1921 said that that's where we're going to stop that that'll be the plateau and people won't live longer |
21:14 | than that and every time these Studies have come out saying we've reached our maximum |
21:20 | they've been wrong so that's the good news and we keep breaking it and you can see |
21:26 | the predictions that everyone says we're going to slow down no it's true in the U.S that we're we're not going up |
21:32 | dramatically currently but that's not because of educated people with Access to Health |
21:39 | Care it's because there are you know the it's offset by people who are addicted to |
21:44 | opioids um and other issues um not to mention obesity being an |
21:50 | epidemic but that's not most of most of the people in in this town |
21:56 | really um and I do get to in in the book I talk about how there's a disparity especially |
22:02 | in the U.S between those who know what to do to be healthy and live longer and those |
22:09 | who are trapped in a cycle where their lifespans are you know basically down here and that's why the U.S lifespan is |
22:16 | what it is but that's the average and not everybody is average most people are not average yeah |
22:41 | well it could but we're not we're no longer at the whim of |
22:46 | Evolution we innovate okay what about this room is natural give me one thing |
22:56 | the wood there's a plant cool all right |
23:01 | so yeah we we probably have a natural maximum yeah |
23:07 | yeah there's nothing natural seriously I was once on a plane uh with a guy who |
23:13 | was flying with me to Tokyo and I told him that we're working on aging and uh |
23:19 | trying to make people live healthier for longer and he goes I don't know that doesn't sound natural |
23:25 | that's it are you kidding me we're drinking gin and tonics we're texting our partners we're watching |
23:30 | movies ten thousand feet above the ground don't give me what's natural um so the point is that we can we can |
23:37 | engineer our way out of things and we're already way beyond our natural lifespan |
23:42 | right the minute we we killed off all the wild animals in this town that's a good start |
23:55 | infinite brutality rage |
24:10 | uh yeah so my understanding of this graph is that this is life expectancy not average lifespan so that it it |
24:18 | discounts Early Childhood death but it's a good point which is that initially |
24:24 | most of the gains in average lifespan were at the lower end of life and we've |
24:31 | basically most of us can expect to live if we're lucky enough to get through our 40s 50s and 60s |
24:37 | so we're we're coming up against the limit which is aging okay so that you |
24:43 | know we can we can study childhood diseases a lot and I think that's Worthy |
24:49 | but most of us now get to be old and that's what the problem the biggest problem on the planet so right now as of |
24:56 | last year there are more people on Earth who are over 65 than under the age of |
25:02 | five and that's the first time ever in human history and it's only going to continue to widen so our problem as a |
25:09 | species is what are we going to do with all the people who are frail and cannot |
25:14 | work and have to go to a nursing home that's a lot of money we already spend |
25:19 | in the US 17 of our GDP taking care mostly of the sick and the elderly and |
25:25 | it's only going to get worse unless we do something about it so we really have two Futures one is let's just forget |
25:31 | about aging and we'll just deal with a lot of sick people who spend more and more of their percent of their lives |
25:37 | being looked after or we can say this is a problem let's figure it out and let's |
25:43 | fix it which is what we've done for everything that's why we we wear clothes and we |
25:48 | we're indoors in a heated building um so yeah so hopefully I've convinced you at least you've seen my argument |
25:54 | that it's natural therefore acceptable that argument should be thrown out the window |
26:00 | we've never as a species accepted things that have caused us pain or difficulty |
26:07 | just because they're natural |
26:13 | I'm also going to tell you that there's no one solution to aging you might read about it it's not true |
26:20 | I'm one of the world's leading scientists in the study of longevity |
26:25 | we don't call it anti-aging uh because that's that's a bad word because a lot of |
26:31 | people out there saying I've got your anti-aging treatment um what we're trying to figure out is |
26:38 | are there genes that control the aging process and are there things we could do to turn them on in our daily lives and |
26:44 | eventually with medicines and there are actually some medicines some things that I take right now |
26:49 | which when you go home you can skip to page 304 and read all about that's the cheat sheet but those things we've |
26:57 | learned through really hardcore World leading science so you may not know that that there have |
27:03 | been at least one you could argue two Nobel prizes awarded for aging research already one was the telum the telomeres |
27:12 | you know about telomeres the ends of chromosomes how those get extended and the other one is about protein misfolding called autophagy the |
27:19 | clearance of these bad proteins those two things led to a Nobel Prize and I'm sure there's going to be more |
27:25 | Nobel prizes awarded for other aspects of Aging |
27:32 | all right so this is the anti-aging if you go online you will be completely depressed and why |
27:40 | do I say that because you don't know what to believe people are saying take this pill take |
27:46 | that pill this pill works David Sinclair says so it's all wrong I don't say |
27:52 | any product works um but you know that this is the world we live |
27:58 | in we have a world of pharmaceuticals which are essentially proven to work and a world |
28:03 | of supplements which are not proven to work but there's some some academics like me |
28:09 | that have maybe treated a mouse so it looks looks kind of interesting and what's Difficult about the world |
28:15 | that I'm in is that I'm trying to do the the hardcore research and make medicines |
28:20 | uh but every day but understandably I'm asked by people well that's great about |
28:26 | medicines but I'm getting old right now what can I do now and so I I've written |
28:32 | the book which covers both angles what are the medicines that are in the pipeline what are the medicines you |
28:37 | could get prescribed right now that with slow aging we think but also what can |
28:42 | you do in your daily lives that you don't need a doctor uh to to do I want to bring up |
28:48 | antioxidants so you know I hope I don't get sued for saying this but antioxidants have been |
28:54 | extremely disappointing in the Aging field longevity not anti-aging film why is |
29:01 | that because there's a lot of things going wrong in the body besides free radical damage it was a good story it |
29:08 | made some sense and all fables are built on things that make sense but doesn't mean they're true |
29:14 | and antioxidants actually have been a large failure in the Aging field |
29:20 | we haven't had a lot of success treating animals with antioxidants and making |
29:25 | them live healthier or longer and even antioxidants are healthy for you |
29:31 | uh yeah all right |
29:37 | all right so we we've we've figured out that the molecules that |
29:43 | some companies I won't name say are fantastic for you are actually working for a different |
29:50 | mechanism which I'll tell you about all right |
29:56 | I definitely believe in in the plant molecules and that's a whole story |
30:02 | but I'll get to it and if I don't ask me at the end yep but antioxidants unfortunately not the |
30:08 | cure to aging right or we'll be living 150 at this point or at least some of us |
30:14 | who are eating a lot of blueberries and drinking pom wonderful every day |
30:20 | um you know I'm not saying they're bad for you but I'm reminding you that that we we know a lot more but people don't |
30:26 | know about it yet yeah I'll leave it there but I'll come back |
30:32 | so this is what scientists scientists believe are the main causes of Aging |
30:40 | these are called the Hallmarks of aging and there are eight or nine depending on which continent you come from |
30:47 | and some of these you've probably heard of right they make it into the Public's um |
30:53 | [Music] um perception of what we work on there is well let's see cellulose in |
31:01 | essence how many of you have heard of senescence before a few yeah so what this is is that cells |
31:07 | will become old and and lose their identity and they'll check out and they'll just |
31:13 | sit there and that that would be not so bad if it wasn't for the fact that these senescent cells or sometimes we call |
31:20 | them the zombie cells they start putting out all these other signals in the cell or outside of the cell that make other |
31:27 | cells sick so that even though if you don't have a lot of senescent cells in your body even if it's only a few |
31:33 | percent uh they will basically cause the rest of your body to become inflamed and aged as |
31:40 | well and we know that mostly from Mouse experiments where you put a few senescent cells A little dab of |
31:45 | senescent cells in the animal and the whole animal gets old so they're horrible so we don't want zombie cells |
31:52 | we don't want to run out of stem cells um DNA damage genome instability so that's |
31:58 | picture of DNA we've known about for many years telomeres the ends of chromosomes gets |
32:04 | shorter and you know it goes on and on and on but here's the point |
32:10 | this was 10 years ago and the field of Aging research we felt pretty good about ourselves we |
32:16 | said yeah we figured this out put a flag in the ground we've done this we figured out what causes aging and everyone with |
32:23 | very few exception has started or done uh focused their lab on this one or that |
32:29 | you know there's a purple lab and there's a green lab and there's a red lab but I I've always believed that you can |
32:35 | simplify everything I'm a reductionist and I think eventually we can reduce |
32:40 | aging down to a single equation and I could even write it out for you if I had a whiteboard |
32:47 | and I'll tell you what that is aging is essentially what's driving all of these things |
32:56 | is a loss of information okay we live in an Information Age we |
33:02 | know what happens when you lose information we used to lose emails we don't anymore and I'll I'll explain why |
33:10 | but uh information is key and when we're born we have all this |
33:15 | great information that we got from our parents and what we what we ate what we absorbed |
33:21 | in the womb and how our mother was eating and feeling that's information and what we've discovered in my lab is |
33:28 | that over time what's happening to cause all of those things on that pie chart |
33:34 | is just one major thing and that's the loss of information in the cell |
33:41 | so what kind of information I'm glad you asked I'll tell you so there are two types of information in |
33:48 | biology the one you all know about is DNA genetic information it's a great way to |
33:55 | store information in fact you can get information out of a fossil I can go to a mummy and see that mommy's |
34:02 | DNA that's a very robust way to store information it's way better than a compact disc |
34:08 | or hard drive they wouldn't last thousands of years would they so DNA is |
34:14 | a great storage information and the reason it's particularly impressive |
34:19 | in terms of the biological system is that it's one of the few things in our body that's digital |
34:26 | and we all know digital is better the reason we converted from analog in the first place |
34:31 | we don't use cassette tapes anymore for a good reason because analog information sucks anyone who's had you know is old |
34:39 | enough to have cassette tapes or record player records knows that you can lose information pretty easily if it's stored |
34:45 | in analog but DNA is digital a TCG that's a that's a digital code it's not |
34:51 | binary it's quaternary so what is it about the body's information that gets lost over time |
34:58 | turns out we used to think it was the digital information that we lost all right how many of you |
35:04 | I'm sure all of you have heard I won't even ask you we've all heard that mutations Drive aging we're losing |
35:11 | genetic information as we get older the problem with that is that you can delete a lot of genetic information in |
35:19 | animals and they don't age it's also true that very little uh very |
35:25 | few mutations can be found in our our old bodies The Smoking Gun just isn't there |
35:31 | and what happened to the field a few years ago was we had no clue what was driving |
35:38 | aging at the fundamental level because the old idea of free radical |
35:43 | damage and mutations was out the window we had nothing to replace it with |
35:48 | and so what I've proposed in the book and in some recent Publications that and some that are just |
35:55 | about to come out as a radical new Theory that the other type of information is |
36:01 | what we lose over time it's the analog information in the body |
36:06 | and that's not very stable at all so what's the analog information |
36:11 | it's this green stuff this is the DNA the digital and the |
36:16 | packaging of the genome is the analog form of information but we need analog |
36:22 | information because the analog system tells the cell which genes to read and |
36:28 | without knowing which genes to read a cell is basically a tumor at best or |
36:33 | dead we need to have these structures that say read this Gene |
36:39 | but bundle up all these others so you don't read those genes all cells read every Gene a nerve cell |
36:47 | wouldn't be a nerve cell and a skin cell wouldn't be a skin cell you need to be able to tell it only read |
36:53 | those 10 of genes and turn off those others and what we've found during aging |
36:58 | is that these structures that control how the DNA is packaged the analog |
37:04 | information which we call the epigenetic information or epigenome is what gets |
37:10 | screwed up with time does that make sense it certainly made a lot of sense uh to |
37:18 | the people in my lab but just making sense as I warned you isn't proof of anything |
37:24 | right most things that make sense are wrong um you know like |
37:29 | well I won't get into religion but there's a lot of things that we we believe that probably are not not true |
37:36 | so what what do you do to test this hypothesis okay what do you do you have to say well |
37:42 | if I disrupt the analog information if I accelerate that process |
37:48 | what should happen well we should get aging we should accelerate that process the converse should be true if I can |
37:55 | regain the epigenome the app the analog information we should get younger |
38:02 | and that's what we've been doing for 10 years in my lab but most of the world doesn't know about |
38:07 | it yet because we haven't published it but it will come out next year so you get a sneak preview and I was also fortunate I was writing a |
38:14 | book while we made these discoveries so I said screw it it's gone in the book so for the first time probably since you know a |
38:21 | long time a scientist's biggest Discovery is in a in a book that you can read about before |
38:26 | scientists have actually had a chance to have it published |
38:31 | all right so there's that another analogy that I think is |
38:38 | appropriate here is a compact disc now when I teach high school students I have |
38:44 | to tell them what a compact disc is we used to put music and and movies on |
38:49 | these things but it's a it's the best analogy I can give you so our genome is that is the music |
38:56 | that's encoded in these ones and zeros and as we get older we're getting scratched up so the the music becomes |
39:03 | it's skipping and the cell by this analogy is not reading the right songs at the right time and this If This Were |
39:11 | a cell this cell would not be behaving well it would be losing its identity if it was a |
39:17 | nerve cell it might be thinking that it's more like a skin cell liver cell isn't behaving cardiovascular |
39:24 | system is forgetting to how to how to be a cardiovascular system and that's why we get sick as we get |
39:31 | older I I believe and all of these symptoms of Aging and these diseases that we we try to |
39:38 | treat but too late I think it because our cells have lost their ability to read the genes at the |
39:44 | right time in the right place and that we essentially had really good evidence for for the last seven years in |
39:52 | my lab and I'll show you that data but what if we could remove those |
39:58 | scratches wouldn't that be amazing what if the cell could now go back and read the right genes we didn't know that that was |
40:05 | possible until recently but turns out as I said there's a backup |
40:10 | of these of of this original state so we can polish |
40:19 | all right I have a movie to show you |
40:24 | so one of the things that happens on the chromosome that disrupts the cell's identity and |
40:30 | the ability to read the genes is a broken chromosome okay wherever you |
40:37 | see that flash the chromosome is being broken and when you break a chromosome a cell |
40:44 | gets really nervous because it it's actually the worst thing you can do to a cell because if a cell doesn't repair a |
40:51 | chromosome it'll it'll die or it'll become a tumor you've got to fix it no |
40:56 | question you cannot live with broken chromosomes so what I showed you in that video |
41:02 | those balls are proteins in the cell that we've discovered when I was over at |
41:07 | MIT and now in and more recently in my lab these proteins are what we call |
41:13 | Longevity enzymes they're encoded by longevity genes |
41:19 | and when we turn them on the animal is very healthy they're great we have mice that live longer and we think in our |
41:25 | bodies they keep us Young but they Unfortunately they have two functions the first function is really |
41:33 | important it's to maintain the structure of of the the epigenome to keep us Young |
41:40 | so that's great when when we're young these proteins are in the right place |
41:46 | they're sitting on the right genes and so the genes that should be on or on and the genes that should be off or off |
41:54 | but as I showed you in this video their other role is that they get distracted by Broken DNA |
42:01 | okay if you go out in the sun and you get sunburned you broke a lot of DNA unfortunately so these proteins are |
42:08 | moving from where they should be in a panic to try and repair the DNA there's a reason for that I think that |
42:15 | it's that they're moving because they're they're telling the cell there's an emergency you've got to fight you got to |
42:20 | survive but if you keep doing that as I showed so this is an acceleration of of |
42:26 | what I think happens during aging let's have a look again these proteins are perfect perfectly |
42:31 | aligned then they get distracted by the break they go back to where they came from they go to the break |
42:38 | they go back to where they came from they go to the break whoops didn't go back |
42:44 | whoops didn't go back so this is aging I believe and we can test this we can |
42:49 | create this in the lab in an animal and ask what happens |
42:55 | and we've done that it's taken us 10 years I'll tell you a little bit about these guys |
43:09 | and without them we're in real trouble you've got to regulate our genes well and we don't prepare broken DNA very |
43:16 | well so people who don't have some tuits essentially die when they're going on |
43:22 | oh did everyone uh on the video lose what I said |
43:29 | so these genes are called sirtuins that we've worked on and uh it's pretty interesting |
43:35 | um when you think about why they're called sirtuins and you probably don't know |
43:41 | the first three letters of sotuin is s-i-r and that stands for |
43:47 | silent which means turn the genes off silence them information regulator |
43:54 | okay so it in the name of these genes has been the answer all along I believe information regulation is the key to |
44:03 | longevity but breaking DNA is one of the things that accelerates aging because it |
44:08 | distracts them and eventually like opening and re-gifting a present a thousand times it's going to be pretty |
44:15 | ugly by that point but the question that I've been asking myself in the lab for the last |
44:20 | few years is is there a treatment you can give to a cell or an old animal or |
44:28 | eventually an old person that can go from there back to frame one and get |
44:33 | them to go back to where they came from so that the cell reads the right genes to be a neuron a young healthy neuron or |
44:40 | a young skin cell and I think we found that |
44:45 | so here's the experiment in the lab where we scratched the DVD scratch the CD |
44:51 | this is a control mouse that's at this point it would be 16 months old |
44:57 | and we took one of its brothers or sisters and we scratch this DVD what we actually |
45:03 | did was we cut the chromosome in a few places distracted the proteins and they ended up getting |
45:09 | older okay and you might say well that looks like a sick Mouse but David how |
45:15 | how do you know it's old well it suddenly looks old it's got gray hair |
45:22 | it's got wrinkled skin it's lost its hair hair loss mice lose their hair when they get older but that's not proof of |
45:29 | anything you know anybody can create a mouse looking like this you know maybe if you microwave a mouse they look like |
45:35 | that I don't know don't do that at home I'm joking so what we did was we we studied these |
45:42 | mice for years to find out how much do they look like real aging and they they look like real aging we've sent uh mice |
45:49 | to hundreds of researchers around the world to experts on the kidney on the |
45:55 | skin on the bone on the eyesight on the hearing and they look at the tissues and they say yeah that's old |
46:02 | and I have to say they're not old we've given them aging but there's |
46:07 | really been a breakthrough in the last few years in our ability to really know if that Mouse is older or not |
46:13 | just by looking at it but by measuring its age and we no longer in my field |
46:18 | count age by candles we can actually count the age |
46:23 | biologically because there's a clock that ticks over in mice in Wales in bats and in our own body |
46:31 | which we can measure in fact if I took your blood back to my lab within a few days and you know a fair bit of money I |
46:39 | could um tell you exactly how old you are biologically and predict within a |
46:44 | matter of months when you're going to die using this clock but don't freak out because we can we |
46:49 | can change the trajectory we can slow it down so here's the clock |
46:55 | this is the DNA right there's the uh the A C T C so C chemicals in DNA the cytosines |
47:03 | they get Modified by a chemical called a methyl and a methyl is just carbon |
47:09 | hydrogen hydrogen hydrogens nothing spectacular but it's like a it's like crust on uh |
47:16 | well I think it's probably better analogy would be the plaque on your teeth it's accumulating and it does so |
47:21 | with very predictable way over time in our lifetime so I can measure your |
47:26 | methylation pattern with the DNA sequencer for a few hundred bucks and I could say |
47:34 | you're older or younger for your age by this much and we know that if you smoke if you |
47:40 | don't exercise if you eat the wrong things you will be older than the average human and vice versa right so this is a new |
47:48 | world and it's all we could do with these mice is we could measure their actual biological Age and what you can |
47:54 | see from this Okay I lied I have another graph but it's not a very complicated one obviously the one that looks old is |
48:00 | older based on this um objective measure |
48:06 | it's called the DNA methylation clock it's also sometimes called the Horvath clock named after my friend and |
48:13 | colleague Stephen Horvath uh who actually helped us with with this study now I'm going to tell you something |
48:19 | you're a smartphone so I can tell you something um really interesting but a little bit technical so stick with me |
48:26 | there are enzymes that remove the plaque off your DNA called tets |
48:34 | and they're very important when we're young that they're what allows the nerve cell to become a nerve cell and a skin |
48:40 | cell to be a skin cell and I think a jellyfish to regenerate okay these are on when |
48:46 | we're young but they you don't want these genes on when you're old it's not a good thing if they're |
48:53 | deregulated but it is possible to to remove these |
48:58 | um and so I'll get back to that because it's I think it's part of the understanding of how we can remove those |
49:04 | scratches on the CD and reverse aging so here's where things get really |
49:10 | interesting can we take that older Mouse and make it young again |
49:15 | if we're right about this we should be able to remove those methyl DNA |
49:21 | plaques and it might actually not just make the mouse appear younger |
49:27 | in the lab when you read it but maybe it would actually behave like it was young that was the idea |
49:34 | so how do you do that how do you get the clock to go backwards |
49:40 | well I'll tell you that but first of all I wanted to tell you about why we chose the nervous system |
49:46 | to regenerate to reverse aging in because we could have chosen the skin could have chosen the liver to reverse |
49:52 | aging but nerve cells become old very quickly as soon as we're |
49:58 | you know three years old if we damage our eye or we break our back our spine |
50:03 | we're not going to walk again we're not going to see again we know that right it's because nerve cells become old very |
50:10 | quickly and they don't act like they were when we were embryos |
50:15 | and so this shows an embryonic nerve growing in the dish |
50:21 | that's great but as we're as we turn into adults if you put one of our nerves in a dish |
50:27 | it'll just sit there it'll try its best to try and grow but it really won't grow very well |
50:33 | so we thought what if you could take adult nerve cells damage them |
50:39 | or even just old nerve cells in the eye and turn their age back to when they |
50:45 | were young would they grow and function like they were young again so how did we |
50:50 | decide to do that well there was a Nobel Prize awarded to shinya yamanaka from |
50:56 | Japan for the discovery that there are a set of four genes called the yamanaka factors |
51:02 | that can take an adult cell and turn it into a stem cell |
51:08 | so quite simply any high school student could take one of your skin cells in your mouth take it back to my lab or |
51:14 | even to the high school lab put in these four genes from yamanaka |
51:20 | which we call osk and M for short and those cells many of them would become |
51:26 | stem cells not just normal stem cells but pluripotent stem cells meaning they could become any type you want we could |
51:32 | regrow we could grow a little mini brain in the dish you can now do that pretty freaky will grow your own mini |
51:39 | brain in the dish I don't think they're conscious thank goodness but we could |
51:44 | build any tissue and that that was well worked well worthy of a Nobel Prize right so we wondered could we use some aspect |
51:52 | of this discovery to reverse aging so we don't want to take them all the way back to being an |
51:58 | embryo or to a stem cell you know if we did that we'd all end up with the world's biggest tumors in our bodies we |
52:05 | wanted to know if we could do partial reversal and just take off the right methyls pick |
52:11 | off just the right plaque on the teeth without taking all your teeth off which is what yamanaka did |
52:17 | so we didn't know if it would work we had some clue because there's a scientist at the Salk Institute that a |
52:23 | couple of years ago showed that if you turn on all four of these genes in a mouse it lives 40 percent longer |
52:31 | but that but that sounds great until I tell you that every three days if they didn't stop the |
52:38 | treatment the mice would die so that I think he may get The Nobel |
52:43 | Prize for this discovery but it wasn't perfect because those poor mice were hit with these factors |
52:50 | and they would almost die and then they'd let them recover for another five days and they'd hit them again this is |
52:56 | not going to be a medicine anytime soon but it sure is an interesting proof of principle that you can turn on these |
53:01 | things and make an animal live longer now it was a short-lived Mouse so we still have to show that this happens in |
53:08 | a a regular Mouse but I'll show you what happens in regular mice when you |
53:13 | when you put these factors in right so what I'm I'm showing you for |
53:18 | the first time is what it was like to make a discovery of a lifetime this was the discovery of |
53:24 | my lifetime these are conversations with my student Ryan who made this discovery |
53:30 | he put the yamanaka factors not all four of them he found that three were safe and |
53:37 | effective the you know the one at the end of M Mick he left that off because that causes cancer that's known to be a |
53:43 | problem but osk put into the back of the eye regenerated the the optic nerve in these |
53:51 | mice and so what you're seeing are pictures for the first time that he was sending me of regenerating optic nerves |
53:58 | in mice so we had damaged the back of the eye and here we have |
54:03 | hit the regrowth of something that should has no business regrowing in an adult Mouse |
54:09 | but it's it was you know one of those things where you know we're kind of celebrating that |
54:14 | we've we've made a big Discovery and I mention it also because when you read |
54:20 | the book you'll get a sense of what it was like to experience such a discovery foreign |
54:27 | so this is it this is um a regular optic nerve that's |
54:33 | been damaged it's been pinched and the nerves have died off towards the brain |
54:39 | so the brain is out that way and the eye is over here and this mouse has lost a |
54:44 | lot of its nerves and it's never going to see again but in this mouse in the in the mouse |
54:50 | I'll show you down here we've reprogrammed its eye to the young again we've put those three yamanaka factors |
54:56 | in turn them on with just an antibiotic called doxycycline now it doesn't have to be an antibiotic |
55:02 | sometimes people say what's so good about the antibiotic we've just engineered the system so that the antibiotic is the switch so that we can |
55:10 | turn it on and off it's an easy way you just give the mice an injection of antibiotic or put it in their water |
55:15 | supply so if we ever have a drug like this it may be that we get treated with the the virus which is the delivery |
55:22 | vehicle and then we take an antibiotic to turn it on and off at will so we get reset multiple times anyway let me show |
55:30 | you this this was the result that most of the nerves here have survived |
55:36 | the problem and they started to grow towards the brain we don't know how they know where the brain is they're not |
55:42 | growing up that way they're growing towards the brain that's a mystery but then we did a really cool experiment |
55:47 | which was if it can make these damaged neurons survive |
55:52 | what about if we give it to just regular healthy but old mice what happens to |
55:57 | their vision and I don't know about you but you know I'm now in my 50s and I'm starting to become like old mice we lose |
56:04 | our ability to see so here's an experiment and I need to |
56:10 | give credit to um the lab of Bruce and Meredith Cassandra they are at a Mass Eye and Ear here in |
56:17 | Boston and what they do is they ignore ignore the feces this is irrelevant to the |
56:23 | experiment I think if if we were handled by giant things we'd be pretty upset to but |
56:30 | anyway what they're doing is so he's standing on the platform and this mouse is a year old so those |
56:35 | mice actually have become blind and you we know this because when these these |
56:41 | lines move they don't watch the lines it's called the optimotal response so if |
56:46 | I play this for you you'll see that it's not moving its head it's |
56:52 | really not not looking anywhere and we can videotape this for from you know half an hour it's not going to see |
56:59 | the lines but you know if we see moving lines we're going to move our head that's just |
57:05 | the natural response so we took uh mice of the same age we gave them a virus |
57:12 | that carried the three genes into the eye and the virus infected the nerves at the |
57:17 | back of the eye in the retina and they sat there until we gave them the antibiotic antibiotic doxycycline to |
57:24 | turn on those genes three weeks later after reprogramming their eyes and making them |
57:30 | young again and by the way we've measured the age of the eye they do get younger based on the clock |
57:36 | the question was does it work or does the clock change but that's just like a clock on the wall |
57:42 | you don't really go back in time if you move the hands or if you move the hands does time really go backwards |
57:49 | so this was a really good experiment and it was a really good day for for Bruce |
57:57 | so what Bruce called me about |
58:02 | and we get this started so it was 10 pm at night it was about a year ago and he |
58:08 | calls me and he says I'm sorry it's late but I have to tell you we just had a really amazing result |
58:15 | and this was the video that he sent me |
58:23 | for the first time in history we've got mice that have been cured of blindness |
58:30 | that's a mouse they can see and we've done this on dozens of mice this isn't just a fluke every mouse that gets our |
58:36 | treatment gets their Vision back and we can measure the the neuronal activity at the back of the eye |
58:42 | and we can see that those nerves before the treatment have no electrical activity but after reprogramming them we |
58:49 | get the blips back they work again and we can read the pattern of genes which |
58:54 | are switched on and off and genes that went off during aging come back on with treatment and genes that went on by |
59:02 | accident the scratches come back to normal so we're truly resetting the |
59:07 | epigenome so that cells can be young again and mice that shouldn't be seeing |
59:12 | you can see again and we've done this also in glaucoma most people have somebody they know friends or family |
59:18 | with glaucoma pressure in the eye damaging the retina we've tested mice with that disease and we can restore |
59:25 | their Vision as well so our first drug if all goes well will be a drug to treat and restore Vision in |
59:32 | glaucoma patients all right I'm now going to switch |
59:39 | to more of a practical thing because we're not likely to be treated with a virus anytime soon it might happen in |
59:46 | our lifetimes let's hope we're working on pills as well that can reset cells so it'll be easier than gene therapy but |
59:53 | I'm going to talk about some take-home messages for all all of you |
59:58 | because I'm asked this every day hundreds of emails what can I do now right don't show me mice show me what I |
1:00:05 | can do and these this is um a cheat sheet there's more of it in the book page 304 |
1:00:11 | and I'm going to go into each of these uh in detail in a second but the summary is |
1:00:17 | our three meals a day that's that's craziness I really don't think we were |
1:00:22 | we've evolved E3 three full meals a day certainly not when we're over the age of say 30. |
1:00:27 | so I've started to I've always skipped breakfast I'm starting to skip lunch when I can and |
1:00:33 | I'm not too stressed so that that sounds pretty brutal right but if you drink coffee tea is fine you |
1:00:40 | can actually be hungry and it's it's not so bad uh lose your breath you wanna |
1:00:47 | yeah I do |
1:00:54 | I do I'll tell you why I'll come back to it yep yep um so lose your breath you want to get |
1:01:01 | on a treadmill or walk up some stairs um just move |
1:01:06 | get a standing desk our lifestyles today are just atrocious for |
1:01:12 | particularly this region right we're atrophying around here |
1:01:18 | I know what you're thinking no our muscles our muscles are atrophy most |
1:01:24 | human beings these days in Western in the Western World in the developed world we have we end up cramping up here our |
1:01:30 | muscles are pathetic it's it's amazing we can even stand upright after sitting for so long so there are exercises that |
1:01:37 | that I do that I'll highly recommend because every 19 minutes someone in |
1:01:42 | America will fall over and die from it and mostly the elderly of course but if |
1:01:48 | if you've got the strength in your hips and the flexibility uh you're more less likely to to die |
1:01:54 | from a fall um and so the the kind of exercise I I do are I focus on are hip hinge |
1:02:02 | exercises I'll talk about that in a second I think we need feedback because |
1:02:07 | everyone gives up on diets if they don't see it working or they don't know if it's working |
1:02:12 | same with supplements same with sleep so what I'm recommending and what I do with my life is that I I look for feedback |
1:02:19 | you can't change what you don't measure basically and so for over 12 years now I've been |
1:02:26 | measuring various aspects of my life it used to be crazy to measure yourself with blood tests and and other things |
1:02:36 | you know people would say David you're too worried about stuff but actually we now live in a world where it's very easy |
1:02:41 | to monitor things for a few hundred bucks you can get one of these anyone has an aura ring on them |
1:02:49 | they're great I do recommend these I don't own any of this company so I can tell you they're |
1:02:55 | great this will measure your heart rate your temperature your movement and be a |
1:03:01 | very good feedback about how you're sleeping so if you're wondering why do I feel |
1:03:07 | terrible in the morning this will tell you exactly what happened and for |
1:03:13 | instance you can look at your heart rate and on a bad night my heart rate will stay high and then drop down about 5 A.M |
1:03:20 | and that's if I drink more than a glass of alcohol and I have a heavy meal with a steak so I've |
1:03:27 | learned to try to avoid those things if I want to have a decent day the next day but if you don't measure it |
1:03:34 | you don't get the feedback the other thing that I do is I have a patch under here |
1:03:40 | okay it's becoming more and more common for non-diabetics to to measure their |
1:03:46 | blood sugar levels so blood sugar is a very good predictor of your longevity the higher the worse it is of course you |
1:03:53 | can become diabetic but even without being diabetic it's still bad so for the last couple of months I've |
1:03:59 | stuck a patch on here there's a tiny little needle it doesn't hurt you stick it on there and so on my phone I can |
1:04:05 | scan it but I can tell you what my blood sugar is |
1:04:10 | I wasn't going to do this but let's try so it's called the Libra link |
1:04:17 | and uh let's try so it says ready to scan anyone have has seen one of these |
1:04:23 | before okay so I stick this here |
1:04:29 | and that's my blood sugar so I'm it's in the green zone I'm happy uh you can see that lunch caused can you |
1:04:36 | see the graph lunch caused a big spike uh the food that I ate earlier |
1:04:42 | good to go |
1:04:48 | it's as it's as good as a glucose monitor so it's it most diabetics are |
1:04:54 | moving away from a finger prick now to just putting one of these on |
1:05:01 | oh yeah |
1:05:07 | yeah it's been in Europe for many many years in the US about two years but I do it also because |
1:05:14 | I I want to be a role model I want to be on the Forefront of this stuff but I've learned a lot of things that I didn't |
1:05:20 | realize and I've also become much more aware of what I stick in my mouth |
1:05:26 | like most of us I would just shove stuff in my mouth and forget about it my this was a trash can |
1:05:31 | but if you see it on your phone you know then then you're thinking about what's going in |
1:05:37 | and that that alone is fantastic makes you much more cognizant about what you |
1:05:43 | eat and as I mentioned what you what you do for sleep so measure it yeah you keep |
1:05:48 | that in when you work out I never take it out it's stuck there in showers in saunas in |
1:05:54 | swimming yeah it doesn't come off unless you rip it off it's stuck there |
1:06:00 | that's great uh for two weeks well you can get one from every Pharmacy |
1:06:06 | it's just that you need a doctor to write your prescription so if you |
1:06:13 | this one isn't in the book because I've only been doing it for a little while but Libra link there are a couple of |
1:06:20 | brands Libra link yeah yeah I mean email me if you want |
1:06:33 | ah so I I honestly I don't have any expectations |
1:06:38 | um but I do know that people who who follow these type of |
1:06:44 | recommendations uh live an average of 14 years longer than those who don't |
1:06:51 | all right hormesis um did I get through all of those points |
1:06:57 | oh we got through sleep and this is big Beacon 10. um I think |
1:07:03 | being uh meditative is good my role in life is don't lie because it's just too |
1:07:09 | stressful you just got to live life being happy with who you are so I think that's the those are the |
1:07:15 | things hormesis is what doesn't kill you makes you stronger unfortunately we do have to push our |
1:07:21 | bodies or they become complacent and what we've learned through my lab's research and others is that these |
1:07:27 | longevity genes these sirtuins they're only activated hyperactivated when your |
1:07:33 | body thinks that it's going to die doesn't mean you have to go to the brink of death but you do need to get out of |
1:07:39 | the chair you do need to be hungry you do need to sometimes have fewer approach |
1:07:44 | amounts of protein because that's what switches on these defensive genes |
1:07:50 | and it's worse if you become obese and it's worse as you get older their activity goes down and down and down |
1:07:56 | until basically you're at the whim of entropy second law of thermodynamics |
1:08:01 | your toast but we can turn on our bodies natural defenses and the way to do that is is |
1:08:09 | basically give yourself a little bit of adversity that may feel uncomfortable sure being |
1:08:15 | out of breath is not great being cold and in a sauna not that comfortable but |
1:08:21 | what it does is it triggers these defensive responses if you go too much of course if you freeze or you burn or |
1:08:28 | you starve you're not going to live longer but a little bit goes a long way |
1:08:33 | and we know this from many studies even plants respond to hormesis you spray herbicide on a plant a little bit and it |
1:08:40 | will grow better because it turns on these defenses and we didn't know these defenses existed until just about 20 years ago |
1:08:49 | so I'll get to the antioxidants because that's an important point |
1:08:58 | [Music] s it decreases your metabolism |
1:09:06 | well calorie restriction which is the the old term for uh for intermittent |
1:09:13 | fasting is known to actually speed up metabolism it's act it actually what happens is |
1:09:19 | your body goes into this defensive State when it's really hungry particularly for prolonged periods of |
1:09:25 | hunger maybe not missing a snack but for a day or two what happens is the body starts to burn |
1:09:32 | energy so it'll deplete the fat and it'll rev up your mitochondria |
1:09:38 | so mitochondria the battery packs the power packs of the cell animals that are hungry have more of |
1:09:44 | those than less so actually you burn more |
1:09:49 | when you're hungry it's it's interesting we always thought you became tired mythology it's not true and what we |
1:09:56 | think is going on is that the body thinks that it's under threat and it gives you more energy to survive so |
1:10:03 | that's repair your body have more energy to go find food run away from a saber-toothed tiger that might be |
1:10:09 | attacking you right but unfortunately Modern Life all of the |
1:10:14 | the companies whose job is to to make us feel better have done a great job of |
1:10:20 | making us feel better we feel great at the expense of our longevity |
1:10:26 | commercially available no |
1:10:33 | there isn't unfortunately you've got a feel it yeah well this will tell you |
1:10:38 | that you're hungry but you don't need that to tell you that um |
1:10:44 | no unfortunately there isn't um that would be amazing that we should work on |
1:10:50 | there might be a patch that senses things in the blood that can see when things are perfect because it right to |
1:10:56 | get this right we don't know the perfect mix the things I told you are my my best |
1:11:03 | estimate based on the science and personal experience and epidemiological but the question is if |
1:11:09 | you exercise a lot do you then take the supplement or should you be hungry on the days you |
1:11:16 | don't exercise we don't know the combinations yet so we have to figure that out |
1:11:21 | yeah yeah it's complex we're just at the point of understanding what works but |
1:11:27 | not necessarily in combination all right so this is where things get |
1:11:32 | scientific and where I bring in the free radical stuff these are the three main defenses that |
1:11:38 | you can turn on in your body to live longer the sirtuins are the ones that we work on and they require a molecule called |
1:11:46 | NAD to work those enzymes there are seven I mentioned in the body |
1:11:51 | so you can turn them on a few ways you can raise your NAD Levels by exercising |
1:11:56 | being hungry or taking molecules that raise NAD the one that I'm taking |
1:12:03 | page 304 is called nmn not to be confused with M M's do not well you can |
1:12:09 | eat M M's you just won't live longer it might be 66 is a drug that we're |
1:12:15 | developing for diseases such as Frailty there are what are called the |
1:12:21 | accelerators these are the fuel these are the accelerators we call these sirtuin activating compounds whereas |
1:12:28 | virtual the red wine molecule is a cert-1 activator so that's why when we gave this molecule |
1:12:34 | to mice they were resistant to obesity because the the mice the bodies of the |
1:12:39 | mice thought that they were hungry thought that they were exercised but they weren't we just tricked them using |
1:12:45 | the red wine molecule but we've made some much better molecules we've actually made 14 000 versions since for his virtual one |
1:12:53 | of these has gone into humans and actually was in a small group of people effective in psoriasis which is in an |
1:13:00 | inflammatory skin condition so you know we've come a long way we know if we feed these molecules to mice |
1:13:06 | they live longer this one even um works on mice the synthetic one |
1:13:12 | so that's the sirtuins again exercise being hungry we'll turn these on NAD boosters we'll turn them on |
1:13:19 | ampk that's the middle leg to the stool this is the one that metformin will |
1:13:24 | activate metformin is a drug for type 2 diabetes it's probably used by oh at |
1:13:30 | least 50 million people around the world probably more It's relatively safe as drugs go |
1:13:35 | the worst complaint typically is an upset stomach which you can usually mitigate with food |
1:13:40 | or a coated pill and it turns on this pathway which is combining with the sorts these are talking to each other |
1:13:47 | this evolved to sense the levels of energy in the body and when you didn't have enough energy in the body let's say |
1:13:53 | you were really hungry it would turn on so these are protective Pathways the |
1:14:00 | last one the third major one is called mtor which was discovered by David sabatini at MIT and it senses how much |
1:14:08 | protein you're taking in and when you have low amounts of protein it will defend your body because it thinks that |
1:14:13 | you're running out of food so these are all hormesis sensors bad stuff's happening |
1:14:19 | these genes get turned on and they protect you from disease and aging |
1:14:25 | so what do you want to do you want to not overload yourself with a ton of proteins so carnivores I'm sorry it |
1:14:33 | doesn't it's not backed up by the data because you're not going to invoke this guy here mtor |
1:14:39 | doesn't mean you you have to avoid meat completely but it does mean that I think constantly eating meat isn't the right |
1:14:46 | thing to do besides what I like about eating vegetables you can eat a lot more of |
1:14:52 | them so you're not hungry this one you can activate by actually |
1:14:57 | not eating as much food regularly eat less often you've got less glucose |
1:15:02 | as you can tell I'm monitoring that and then this one exercise also being |
1:15:08 | hungry and you can boost your NAD with a pill now do we know this is all going to make |
1:15:14 | us live 30 years longer no that's why I showed you the slide that you know we |
1:15:19 | don't know if this is true or not but it's it's been basically done in in |
1:15:24 | hundreds of labs there's thousands of scientific papers and it's all we've got right now you |
1:15:30 | know those of us who are born in the 20th century wasn't our fault you know probably you'd be better to be |
1:15:36 | born now if you wanted the best of medicine but we have to go with what we've got and this is the best we've got |
1:15:41 | right now based on all the science that we've got |
1:15:53 | non-diabetics I take it and I'm not diabetic I'm not |
1:16:00 | waiting around till I get diabetic my father is taking metformin he's |
1:16:05 | borderline diabetic yeah you do so but type 2 diabetics |
1:16:13 | right so the the data as as you'll read in the book is really compelling |
1:16:19 | type 2 diabetics that go on Metformin people have monitored their other rates |
1:16:24 | of diseases what happens to the rate of heart or frequency of heart disease |
1:16:29 | Alzheimer's Frailty and cancer and some cancers are reduced by 40 |
1:16:36 | percent by this one medicine and those type 2 diabetics are more |
1:16:42 | are healthier than people that don't even have diabetes and that's in 100 |
1:16:48 | over 100 000 patients so it I take 500 in the morning |
1:16:55 | and 500 at night if I yeah so typical diabetic would take two grams |
1:17:01 | is that what you recommend for your patients um so I take half that |
1:17:07 | and my father takes double that |
1:17:18 | yeah right so there were the blue there were the blue zones where people are known to |
1:17:25 | typically live a long time and one of those places is Okinawa the island of Okinawa in Japan |
1:17:32 | and they do all the right things they're mostly plant-based they have a little bit of protein you need protein so they |
1:17:38 | have a bit of fish but mostly it's plants they're very active so they're exercising a lot raising their NAD |
1:17:46 | and they only eat till they're 70 full and they stop that's their habit and |
1:17:52 | they're not exposed to Western hamburger type food but the okinawans |
1:17:57 | who moved to Hawaii they don't live long it's definitely what they're doing as a lifestyle so |
1:18:04 | yeah you you it this all makes sense that we've got this convergence of people who study lifestyle and have said |
1:18:11 | these things make you live longer and those of us who have studied yeast cells and worms and flies and mice and we've |
1:18:17 | come to the same conclusion that there are genes that protect us so |
1:18:23 | what about food I'll go quickly because I'm sure you've got questions uh |
1:18:29 | I think eating three meals a day is not the right thing I mentioned that earlier but if you are hungry in the morning |
1:18:36 | by all means have breakfast but try to find a meal that you can go without |
1:18:41 | for me it's breakfast and I actually know that now because I've measured my glucose levels |
1:18:47 | and my body starts to produce a lot of sugar just as I wake up not everybody but some people I sent my data when it |
1:18:54 | first happened I said what's happening I'm glucose overloaded in my body and I'm not eating anything so I sent him a |
1:19:01 | picture of that graph and he said either you're liver is making glucose you're |
1:19:06 | one of the people that does that or you've just had sex |
1:19:12 | so I said does it count if you dream about it uh anyway so it's obvious that uh that |
1:19:18 | my body's making glucose so I don't need to eat breakfast I've never felt hungry at breakfast so for me to have breakfast on top of my body making sugar makes no |
1:19:25 | sense at all I often miss lunch because I'm so busy today I had a vegetable soup |
1:19:31 | just because I was stressed out but that's my lifestyle I eat normal dinner |
1:19:37 | if anything I eat too much at dinner but I haven't I really like that |
1:19:42 | I do drink red wine one glass of wine a day is not going to hurt anybody except |
1:19:47 | for the calories but still worth it in my view how much red wine would you need to drink to be like these mice that |
1:19:53 | lived longer the bad news is that you'd need to drink about 300 400 glasses a day |
1:20:00 | so don't do that um yeah well some people think that's |
1:20:06 | really good news but um the the take-home message is that I |
1:20:12 | think that taking or drinking a glass of red wine for 30 years |
1:20:18 | can have cumulative effects and it's not just Resveratrol it's in red wine there are other molecules that are beneficial |
1:20:24 | as well so probably the combination is helpful and very long-lived people often |
1:20:29 | admit to drinking red wine more than more than the rest |
1:20:35 | why I'm not sure why they choose to well the |
1:20:43 | oh but why is red one better oh that's that's easy to answer yeah because the |
1:20:49 | Skins like the Skins have the Resveratrol and uh pulls it out with the |
1:20:54 | alcohol actually most of it is in the in the actual stem but we throw that away |
1:21:01 | in terms of supplements I have a newsletter if you want to subscribe I write about this stuff you |
1:21:09 | can sign up on my on the website it's called lifespanbook.com |
1:21:14 | but um often people say well where do I get Resveratrol if it's not red wine and |
1:21:19 | I have to be careful because I'm a professor at Harvard Medical School |
1:21:25 | I'm not a supplement maker I'm not a supplement seller and I don't recommend supplements but I think it's unfair for |
1:21:32 | me to say this is what the sign says you're on your own that's not fair either so what I can say is that there |
1:21:37 | are companies that make Resveratrol uh most of them are fine they're look |
1:21:43 | for the really pure ones if you're going to try it you can get 98 Pure or 100 pure |
1:21:50 | Resveratrol and that that should be fine I would just recommend don't keep it out |
1:21:55 | in the light um I store mine in the fridge I store all my supplements in the fridge |
1:22:02 | particularly those NAD boosters the anime that I mentioned it's a little known fact but it's |
1:22:08 | actually quite unstable if you keep it on the shelf for long for over a few months uh but yeah so that I I can't mention |
1:22:15 | companies um unless you grab me on the side whatever but there are a lot of legitimate |
1:22:23 | companies that are making pure Resveratrol it doesn't come from red wine they purify it from Japanese |
1:22:28 | knotweed which is everywhere it's on the on the |
1:22:34 | roads here on the side of the road here in in Boston all right so that's food we can get into |
1:22:39 | more things about food later what about the antioxidant yes I'll I'll tell you about that |
1:22:47 | um nope I'll tell you in a minute I've got a few more things what to do um move walk everybody says this but |
1:22:54 | it's really really true but it's also more important to to lose your breath becoming hypoxic we'll turn on this |
1:23:01 | returns yes very expensive |
1:23:10 | what's wrong with it well so what we think is that |
1:23:16 | when your body has low blood sugar it will turn on those Pathways now if |
1:23:22 | you're eating a snack which probably has sugar in it or carbohydrate |
1:23:27 | you'll you'll basically stop your body from turning on the defenses |
1:23:34 | yeah so think of your body as something that only protects itself when it needs to and |
1:23:40 | when it doesn't need to it puts on fat instead for a rainy day which Never Comes so what we want to do is to do the |
1:23:48 | opposite which is be hungry and in in those periods of hunger your body will actually be |
1:23:54 | repairing itself yeah unfortunately the recommendation from nutritionists which I disagree with |
1:24:01 | is that you should never feel hungry lots of little snacks throughout the day which is based on the idea that you |
1:24:08 | don't want to hurt your pancreas but actually being hungry if you're not |
1:24:13 | sick is very helpful yeah now I I skipped a meal or two a day |
1:24:20 | there are some people who go for three days and some people who go for a week without eating and I would do that if I |
1:24:26 | could it's pretty painful though has anyone tried intermittent fasting have you yeah |
1:24:33 | is it okay can you do it yeah not a week now |
1:24:41 | yeah yeah it's hard I mean we want to be full we don't want to be hungry |
1:24:47 | um it does so there's a Doctor Peter attia |
1:24:55 | have you heard of him he's an expert in New York he does a week and I don't know how we can do that |
1:25:02 | probably because three million people are watching him |
1:25:07 | he does a week fast every quarter |
1:25:17 | yeah he does intermittent fasting but he's he's using his body as an experiment so |
1:25:24 | he's mixing it up sometimes he'll just go Keto sometimes he'll do protein and he's |
1:25:31 | monitoring with uh fingerprints what's happening to him so of course he has one of these but he's |
1:25:36 | also got you know you can measure ketos in your blood yeah yeah |
1:25:42 | so he's done all that um and he's he's trying to come up with the right algorithm of what the right |
1:25:48 | combination is because it if we waited for clinical trials |
1:25:54 | we'll all be dead it's it's expensive and slow so there are these people on the frontier I'm kind of on the frontier |
1:26:00 | but he's he's one of the major ones who's really pushing it so that that's food if you want we can |
1:26:08 | come back this is the the hip exercises that I like to do |
1:26:14 | it's uh you don't want to just bend your back you've got to keep it straight like a rod and you stick your butt out |
1:26:20 | and then you lift dumbbells like that it's it's pretty annoying but it it's very |
1:26:26 | good what happened to me writing this book was that I end up with a permanent cramp |
1:26:31 | in my butt the piriformis muscle which is that one there uh was seized up |
1:26:39 | and I couldn't walk it was permanently painful and these exercises were the only thing that fixed me and that's |
1:26:45 | apparently very common with our modern lifestyles and I think it's going to be great when I get older |
1:26:52 | that I'll have full movement and back exercises too so you don't end up with |
1:26:58 | uh kyphosis like my mother who was walking around like that what else can you do well this is one of |
1:27:04 | the enjoyable things actually I really do like the sauna and when I was writing the book my editor said what about cold |
1:27:10 | therapy what about heat therapy and I said that's not true that doesn't work how can that possibly work |
1:27:16 | but I researched it and it turns out there's good evidence that saunas are |
1:27:21 | good for you and increasing evidence that cold plunges are also good for you and a lot of the evidence is written |
1:27:29 | into the book so in the back you'll find there's a lot of endnotes references that you can look up |
1:27:34 | a lot of people read the book two or three times because it's got a lot of information but I do this every weekend |
1:27:39 | with my son as we were talking about before and it's bonding with my 12 year old son it's |
1:27:46 | good for the both of us and especially in winter it's nothing better than going through this and feeling refreshed like |
1:27:52 | you've just been out at the beach so I spend about 15 minutes in the sauna it's been found that people who do that |
1:28:00 | have lower rates of cardiovascular disease for example um though I do point out that |
1:28:07 | one caveat with those studies that I cite is that if you're in hospital or you're in the nursing home you're |
1:28:13 | probably not going to go to the gym or to the sauna but that's caveat I think it's probably |
1:28:18 | working to turn on those longevity genes now cold plungers this is all the rage |
1:28:24 | now right you can go cryotherapy Iceman Hof is a superstar on the internet |
1:28:30 | um some of the research that we've done has actually shown that cold therapy is good it turns on some of the sirtuins |
1:28:37 | the sirtuin genes number three produces an enzyme that protects the mitochondria |
1:28:44 | free radical damage so when you're revving up metabolism by being cold you're actually helping the cell rid |
1:28:52 | itself of free radicals but you're also building up what's called Brown fat and if you haven't heard of brown fat |
1:28:58 | it's because it's a relatively new discovery so babies have a lot of brown fat and beige fat |
1:29:05 | but we thought that adults didn't have ground fat but it turns out |
1:29:10 | we do and the colder we are and the more cold we are when we walk outside the more Brown fat we'll have because it's |
1:29:17 | our thermogenic or heat producing fat and it's very healthy to have it |
1:29:24 | um so I I spend more time in the cold these days than I want to and Boston's a pretty good place to be |
1:29:29 | cold the other thing that I learned in terms of a biohack is don't always bundle up and the best |
1:29:36 | place to lose weight and to to get to burn energy is while you sleep |
1:29:42 | super easy just don't have such thick covers on your bed have a sheet I mean |
1:29:48 | don't shiver you've got to get a good night's sleep but being a little cold has actually really been helpful to me |
1:29:53 | and I think I'm burning off you know a few hundred calories maybe at least 100 calories just by having to be a little |
1:30:00 | cool at night so that's an easy easy life hack uh this one's a little harder |
1:30:06 | we jump my son and I we jump from the sauna into a four degree Celsius Celsius |
1:30:11 | water bath which feels extremely painful it's does anyone do ice plunges cold Plunge |
1:30:20 | tell you what if it doesn't make me live longer it sure sure does make me feel grateful to be alive |
1:30:28 | my son actually Benjamin he's he's going for the for the world record at least |
1:30:33 | he's on record I can spend a minute before my my body aches and he's in |
1:30:38 | there for 15 minutes says what's the problem dad I don't know he was born in New England |
1:30:43 | that's why all right metformin we covered so I won't go into too much detail you do |
1:30:49 | need a prescription unless you go to Bangkok or somewhere where you can just buy it in a pharmacy it comes from a a |
1:30:56 | plant that you find throughout Europe it's just a weed it's a version of a weed molecule called quantity |
1:31:02 | guanoid and Metformin Works does multiple things |
1:31:08 | remember I said it it's important to have mtor modulated it does that |
1:31:13 | it controls your glucose it lowers it that's why you're prescribing it but it also has anti-inflammatory action it |
1:31:20 | inhibits DNA damage prevents free radicals um it stops cancer so it's a remarkable |
1:31:26 | molecule now it wasn't developed to be an anti-aging drug oops I should say longevity molecule but |
1:31:34 | it sure looks like it is one so that's your best bet I think besides all the other things in life that you can do |
1:31:40 | now you might say well gosh how am I going to get it I don't have diabetes yet I'm gonna have to |
1:31:45 | I'm gonna have to talk to my doctor about that so more and more doctors are learning about this the sales of or |
1:31:52 | prescriptions from metformin have gone up uh 20 in the last few years |
1:31:57 | and uh brilliant I didn't even have a doctor that gives me metformin |
1:32:04 | uh though I uh anyway it's it's a it I I'm not |
1:32:11 | recommending it but I'm telling you that the future is here now and there are options |
1:32:17 | all right this is the one I've been wanting to get to because it gets back to antioxidants everybody that I talked |
1:32:24 | to thinks that red Wine's good for you and blueberries are good for you because of antioxidants that's why we've been |
1:32:31 | taught it's a huge marketing campaign and it makes sense the only problem is it's not true |
1:32:37 | the major benefits of Resveratrol are not its antioxidant properties it's |
1:32:42 | actually not a very good antioxidant in the first place a lot better ones what it is |
1:32:49 | this chemical here Resveratrol it's actually sensed by our body I |
1:32:54 | believe our bodies have evolved to sense the Plant World and what we eat is turning on our |
1:33:01 | defenses so why would the body respond to plant molecules besides food |
1:33:08 | well if you're running out of food let's say your crops are dehydrated or the |
1:33:14 | berries that you're picking are have a terrible infestation of |
1:33:19 | caterpillars now we can see that but for most of the |
1:33:25 | evolution of of animals they didn't have much of a brain they couldn't tell that time was going to get tough so they |
1:33:31 | needed a way to sense when food was going to be scarce and the best way was to sense the chemicals of plants |
1:33:39 | when they're stressed so what is Resveratrol it's actually a |
1:33:45 | plant stress survival molecule when plants are dehydrated or hit with ultraviolet light too much sun infected |
1:33:52 | by Fungus they make a ton of Resveratrol because they're trying to turn on their |
1:33:57 | sotoan survival defenses plants have sorts right and I think we've evolved to sense that |
1:34:04 | and we've just lucked out that we produce a product that concentrates it and preserves it keeps it away from |
1:34:11 | light keeps it cool and keeps out the oxygen pretty good luck it tastes good too but it's also healthy and most of |
1:34:18 | the longest lived people in the world uh drink this stuff so it's probably good |
1:34:24 | but we can do better we can make molecules that are a thousand times more effective than Resveratrol |
1:34:30 | this is not an antioxidant but it does the same thing as Resveratrol because it activates the sort one enzyme to defend |
1:34:38 | the body what does sort one do remember I said that it's moving around trying to repair DNA and protect the genome |
1:34:44 | and and stop the scratches I think that by drinking these these |
1:34:50 | molecules and giving those enzymes more activity we're actually keeping the cell |
1:34:55 | from becoming scratched and We Know It Works in a very accurate way these molecules |
1:35:01 | bind to the blue region of the enzyme so an enzyme it's just a protein that's doing reactions in the cell this this |
1:35:09 | enzyme will go and tell this Gene to be off and while leaving the other one on right remember it's a silent information |
1:35:15 | regulator what it does is remember the the original slide where I |
1:35:20 | showed the DNA and then there was that green blob that green blob is a histone and |
1:35:29 | that's what wraps up the DNA and if you're observant you would have seen that that green thing had little |
1:35:34 | tails swimming off it those are called histone tails and what this enzyme does |
1:35:40 | is that it controls the chemicals that attach to those Tails telling a gene to |
1:35:46 | be silent or a gene to be switched on and when you don't have enough of this |
1:35:51 | enzyme around you're old you're not drinking or eating the right things your genes will come on when they shouldn't |
1:35:57 | and that's aging and so it works by binding here these molecules bind here and the enzyme does |
1:36:04 | this and when it's in this act in this position it's much more active and it does its job quicker |
1:36:11 | all right we're almost done this is the nmn the NAD booster these are the |
1:36:18 | crystals of it that we're turning into a drug and this uh this molecule when you feed |
1:36:24 | it to mice that are old they can run in some cases twice as far at least 50 |
1:36:30 | further we had some ice that outran the young mice and one actually |
1:36:36 | ran over three kilometers and the treadmill stopped we have little treadmills in the lab and the treadmill |
1:36:43 | stopped and and my the postdoc in the lab called me up and said we've got a problem the training wheel's broken the |
1:36:49 | experiment screwed up and uh turns out it was just that the software was never written for a mouse to run that far so |
1:36:56 | we had to rewrite software so that's we're hoping that in clinical trials |
1:37:01 | we'll see that we can treat a variety of diseases I mentioned Frailty but it could be a whole bunch of |
1:37:08 | things related to aging that we end up treating it's in clinical trials we we've tested it for two years and people |
1:37:14 | seems to be very safe I apologize for black mice on a black |
1:37:19 | treadmill there's the mouse there's the mouse do you see it can you see a tail |
1:37:24 | so that's the one on Animan and that's the one that didn't get any we just put in their drinking water they drink it for a few weeks and four weeks and they |
1:37:32 | become fit so why are they running further you might ask well they have more energy |
1:37:37 | but they also have more blood flow it's as though they've been exercising because that's what happens when you |
1:37:43 | exercise better blood flow more energy and then finally I just want to just |
1:37:50 | have a glimpse into what the future might look like I told you we can we have a gene therapy |
1:37:56 | that can reverse aging in a mouse's eye but what if it works in people what if |
1:38:01 | it works in the whole body to reset the age of somebody I just chose Bill Murray |
1:38:06 | um because I like gomari but you know he's he's aged right like everybody but |
1:38:12 | imagine if if when we're young we get this injection of the gene therapy so now we're genetically modified but the |
1:38:19 | genes are not turned on yet they're just like in our mice they're switched off they're not doing any harm |
1:38:25 | and then you get to this age I don't know how old is Bill Murray now would he be 60 or something maybe even more |
1:38:31 | anyway you get you get to a certain age and your doctor says I've just measured your biological age |
1:38:36 | you're actually 85 you're not doing so well Mr Sinclair |
1:38:41 | but I've got something for you fortunately you've got these three yamanaka factors in your body I'll give you a course of Doxycycline to turn on |
1:38:49 | the genes so you get sent home with basically an antibiotic for Lyme disease not not a |
1:38:55 | problem take it for three weeks and imagine you know you start to see better you don't have to see them hold the menu |
1:39:02 | so far away you can think better you're fit and you even look younger that's the |
1:39:07 | kind of future that this technology says could be possible and then I just want to give you an |
1:39:14 | example this is uh exhibit a in my family we are |
1:39:19 | a group of at least on my Hungarian side a group of Ashkenazi Jews that uh change their |
1:39:27 | religion in World War II but we couldn't change our genetics we have terrible genes |
1:39:32 | uh you probably know ashkenazis are not the healthiest people on the planet and I'm carrying a bunch of mutations so |
1:39:38 | I'm not predicted to live a long time in fact most men in our family diet in their 70s my grandmother had a stroke in |
1:39:45 | her 30s super high cholesterol right I'm on I'm on huge amounts of of Lipitor just to |
1:39:53 | keep my cholesterol down so we are not a healthy bunch so my grandmother she became |
1:39:58 | she was she remember she was a young at heart vivacious woman Rebel |
1:40:04 | I watched her get old at age 70 she didn't want to go out of the house and she spent 20 years basically in a state |
1:40:11 | of vegetative kind of state that is something that a lot of people |
1:40:17 | uh expect in their lives it's pretty normal for us to spend 10 years |
1:40:22 | not wanting to live anymore her son my father |
1:40:28 | was born 1939 yeah people always get confused about |
1:40:34 | those dates that how can they be so close but I've told you I think she was pregnant at 14 but in any case |
1:40:40 | my dad um he wasn't expecting to live beyond 70 |
1:40:45 | in a healthy way just like his mum he retired at 67 |
1:40:52 | he thought that he would um uh probably end up in a wheelchair like |
1:40:58 | his Grand his mom and he wasn't very happy he was quite a depressed guy he's like uh Winnie the |
1:41:05 | Pooh in uh no so he's like Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh so he's not a very um optimistic guy |
1:41:14 | if if he was here he'd probably say uh you know the temperature's not very good and and why are we wasting our time |
1:41:21 | we're all gonna die anyway that kind of attitude in life and I was there like no no this is great we can do this so |
1:41:28 | anyway he's a scientist he was a bike he's a biochemist and he saw the research and he saw that I was still |
1:41:34 | alive after taking a few of these things and he decided to take it as well so |
1:41:40 | he's been now on the same regimen as me um not just those three things but a few |
1:41:47 | other things as well including a lot of exercise don't get me wrong there's other things going on |
1:41:53 | but I'll tell you what he's um he's now 80. uh he started us a new career he's |
1:41:58 | gone back to work he just ordered his dream car uh he just got it last week at Tesla Model 3. and |
1:42:06 | he's optimistic I can't believe it I mean he's looking forward to another 10 20 years of life so I'm not saying that |
1:42:12 | this is proof of anything but I am holding him up as a role model a Beacon of Hope |
1:42:18 | for us and I'll show you some photos from the last 12 months of his life |
1:42:23 | right this is not a typical 80 year old he's doing everything he always wanted we just got back here he is he led the |
1:42:30 | way up the rainforest in Uganda he took his five grandkids up to see the gorillas |
1:42:36 | and it almost brings a tear to my eye to think about how special that day was that he got to do that with his |
1:42:43 | grandkids and my my kids got to do that with their grandfather that's what this is all about this isn't about us living |
1:42:49 | forever it's about spending quality time with your family instead of being in a nursing home |
1:42:56 | um so we're very proud of of him we hope he continues we hope it goes well and then uh I just want to finish by |
1:43:03 | saying uh thank you for getting a copy of the book I hope you like it it was a lot of work I have a co-author |
1:43:10 | we were we spent over a year brainstorming how to put this all together there's philosophy there's art there's |
1:43:17 | history there's science all in there so he gets a lot of credit uh and uh |
1:43:24 | I drew some cast of characters so they're in the back too I actually was trying to use photos of |
1:43:31 | people and the publisher said uh David you've only got four weeks before this |
1:43:36 | has to be done and none of those photos are allowable because they're they're |
1:43:41 | copyright protected and I said well what if I what if I talk to people online and get their |
1:43:48 | permission no because you have to track down who took the photo I mean I don't know who took the photo |
1:43:54 | right so I had to draw a Lisa most people don't know but that's one of those inside secrets that I had to draw |
1:44:00 | all these and I only had a month to draw them so it was one every day for a month |
1:44:05 | and there are a lot of really cool people this is the guy that trained me at MIT this is the woman who figured out |
1:44:12 | that you could double A worms lifespan by changing one gene that's probably a Nobel Prize worthy Discovery my friend |
1:44:18 | Rafa de Cabo we spent Thanksgiving with he's the world's expert in calorie restriction |
1:44:24 | nearby is the world's expert in metformin for aging he's down in New |
1:44:29 | York and shinamai discovered that NAD is important and in a man are important |
1:44:34 | for this return so these are all really cool people some people are really ancient so let's see we've got some |
1:44:41 | historical figures up here this is this is Mr yamanaka yamanaka |
1:44:47 | factors uh Eileen crimin studies human epidemile demiology anyway this is uh so |
1:44:54 | there are illustrations in the book did you have a chance to flick through there are actual illustrations drawn by Katie |
1:44:59 | Delphia she's a brilliant artist examples of her drawings |
1:45:04 | my childhood in Australia my grandmother me at MIT |
1:45:09 | Benjamin gompertz who showed the rate of uh population decay |
1:45:17 | why we age how it evolved the CD analogy with the cell I didn't get into this but |
1:45:24 | you can imagine the epigenome as a landscape of balls Landing in valleys |
1:45:29 | and aging is that the balls move into the wrong valleys and then met Foreman |
1:45:34 | Resveratrol NAD rapamycin does anyone know where rapamycin comes from |
1:45:40 | ah can you see those heads up there you know where they're from |
1:45:46 | what's the name of Easter Island the other name |
1:45:52 | rapanui rapamycin so it comes from Easter Island there was bacteria that |
1:45:57 | were found on Easter Island so I'm done thank you so much excellent |
1:46:06 | [Applause] |