What if you could cheat death and live forever? To people in the radical life extension movement, immortality is a real possibility. Leah Green spends a long weekend at RAADfest, a meeting of scientists, activists and ordinary people who want to extend the human lifespan. So is reversing your age a real possibility? And what’s behind this wish to live forever? This is the first episode in our Death Land series, with a new episode every Thursday at 12pm. Subscribe here so you don’t miss the next installment ► http://is.gd/subscribeguardian
Understanding the economic implications of changing demographics is essential for investors, said Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist speaking at the Fiduciary Investors’ Symposium at Harvard University. De Grey, who is also the chief science officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based biomedical research charity, warned gathered delegates that they need to urgently position for people living much longer.
“The implications will change your outlook on the future. You need to understand and believe the actual logic of what is coming,” he said.
He noted that medical advancement has eliminated many of the problems that used to kill people when they were young. For example, better hygiene saves lives the world over. In contrast, health problems in later life are still killing many of us in an enduring ageing process. Simply defined, this sees our metabolism generate damage over the years that cause accumulative changes over time. We can only tolerate so much change; inevitably we go down hill until we die, he said. Today the majority of medical effort is concentrated on geriatric medicine and managing the consequences of this ageing process. Yet attacking the consequences of something that is accumulating is the wrong way to approach the problem.
Human-animal hybrids are set to be developed at the University of Tokyo after the Japanese government recently lifted a ban on the controversial stem-cell research.
Hiromitsu Nakauchi—director for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Tokyo and team leader at Stanford’s Nakauchi Lab—is the first to receive approval for the questionable experiments which will attempt to grow human cells in rat and mouse embryos before being brought to term in a surrogate animal.
Despite many feeling that such studies are the equivalent of playing God, scientists say that the objective is far from sinister. It’s theorized that developing animals with organs constructed from human cells will create organs that can then be used for transplants in humans, cutting the long organ donation waitlists.
This episode will take you through Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s Seven Pillars of aging, the research that he’s currently doing, his opinion on biological age, AGEs and the different sources, and the impact of growth hormone on biological age.
Who is Dr. Aubrey de Grey?
Aubrey de Grey is an English author and biomedical gerontologist. He is the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation and VP of New Technology Discovery at AgeX Therapeutics, Inc. He is the editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research, author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging and co-author of Ending Aging. He is known for his view that medical technology may enable human beings alive today not to die from age-related causes.
He is also an amateur mathematician who has contributed to the study of the Hadwiger–Nelson problem. His research focuses on whether regenerative medicine can prevent the aging process. He works on the development of what he calls “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” (SENS), a collection of proposed techniques to rejuvenate the human body and stop aging.
To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes. SENS is a proposed panel of therapies designed to repair this damage. De Grey is an international adjunct professor of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, the American Aging Association, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
He has been interviewed in recent years in a number of news sources, including CBS 60 Minutes, the BBC, The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, The Washington Post, TED, Popular Science, The Colbert Report, Time, the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, and The Joe Rogan Experience. He is also a member of Flooved advisory board.
This sounds like a roundabout way of saying that the uploaded minds might be seen as superhuman, even though, as Minerva and Rorheim observe, “it’s not clear whether you would survive in any meaningful sense if you were copied several times over.” If you didn’t, something that used to be you might exist and be cognitively superior to the common run of humanity but the “you-ness” is gone.
The authors also warn, “We can be pretty certain, for instance, that rejuvenation would widen the gap between the rich and poor, and would eventually force us to make decisive calls about resource use, whether to limit the rate of growth of the population, and so forth.”
Such considerations as limiting the “rate of growth” of the population may relate to a controversy in 2012 involving a paper written by Dr. Minerva and Dr. Alberto Giubilini:
It has long been understood, and by cultures too various to list, that salamanders have something of the supernatural about them. Their name is thought to derive from an ancient Persian vocable meaning ‘fire within’, and for at least 2,000 years they were believed to be impervious to flames, or even capable of extinguishing them on contact. Aristotle recorded this exceptional characteristic, as did Leonardo da Vinci. The Talmud advises that smearing salamander blood on your skin will confer inflammability. Not so. But the intuition that salamanders possess fantastical powers is not unfounded.
Like earthbound immortals, salamanders regenerate. If you cut off a salamander’s tail, or its arm, or its leg, or portions of any of these, it will not form a stump or a scar but will instead replace the lost appendage with a perfect new one, an intricacy of muscle, nerve, bone and the rest. It will sprout like a sapling. Science has been chopping up salamanders for more than 200 years with the aim of simply understanding the mechanics of their marvels, but more recently with the additional aim of someday replicating those marvels in ourselves. Might salamanders be the great hope of regenerative medicine?
The salamander in which regeneration is most often studied is an odd and endearingly unattractive Mexican species known as the axolotl. In addition to its limbs and extremities, the axolotl is known to regrow its lower jaw, its retinae, ovaries, kidneys, heart, rudimentary lungs, spinal cord, and large chunks of its brain. It heals all sorts of wounds without scarring. The axolotl also integrates the body parts of its fellows as if they were its own, without the usual immune response, and this peculiar trait has facilitated some of the more grotesque disfigurements it’s endured in the name of science. In experiments after the Second World War, East German scientists grafted small axolotls crosswise through the backs of larger ones. The animals’ circulatory systems came to be linked, and the researchers hailed the conjoined mutants as triumphs of collectivism.
Thank you for watching this powerful interview with Dave Asprey! Check out the show notes here: https://www.lewishowes.com/860
Dave Asprey is the creator of the widely-popular Bulletproof Coffee, host of the podcast Bulletproof Radio, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Bulletproof Diet.
Dave was described by Men’s Health as a “lifestyle guru” and his body-hacking gym, Upgrade Labs, has more than 15 different technologies dedicated to improving mental and physical performance and recovery. His new book Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever is out on everywhere books are sold online.
So get ready to learn how to biohack your health and energy as you age on Episode 860.
Regular fasting is associated with lower rates of heart failure and a longer life span, according to two new studies.
Researchers sought to shed new light on the centuries-old debate about how fasting affects health. Recent studies have shown it contributes to reductions in blood pressure, “bad” LDL cholesterol and insulin resistance, a condition that can raise blood sugar. A 2017 study showed alternate-day fasting was as effective as daily calorie restriction for losing weight and keeping the pounds off.
The new studies focused on data from patients evaluated for heart disease in Utah and other Rocky Mountain states. The research included hundreds of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormons, who typically fast one Sunday each month, for up to 24 hours.
Boosting brain function is key to staving off the effects of aging. And if there was one thing every person should consider doing right now to keep their brain young, it is to add extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) to their diet, according to research by scientists at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM). EVOO is a superfood, rich in cell-protecting antioxidants and known for its multiple health benefits, including helping put the brakes on diseases linked to aging, most notably cardiovascular disease. Previous LKSOM research on mice also showed that EVOO preserves memory and protects the brain against Alzheimer’s disease.
In a new study in mice published online in the journal Aging Cell, LKSOM scientists show that yet another group of aging-related diseases can be added to that list—tauopathies, which are characterized by the gradual buildup of an abnormal form of a protein called tau in the brain. This process leads to a decline in mental function, or dementia. The findings are the first to suggest that EVOO can defend against a specific type of mental decline linked to tauopathy known as frontotemporal dementia.
Alzheimer’s disease is itself one form of dementia. It primarily affects the hippocampus—the memory storage center in the brain. Frontotemporal dementia affects the areas of the brain near the forehead and ears. Symptoms typically emerge between ages 40 and 65 and include changes in personality and behavior, difficulties with language and writing, and eventual deterioration of memory and ability to learn from prior experience.
