what is aging is it possible for us to affect it how much more can we do these are big questions they're going to take us to answers that are going to be illuminating to mankind as a whole aging has become a hot topic we are right now at a point where we can already develop strategies [Music] injections stimulation methods personal programs pills we're in the midst of a seismic shift that will open up possibilities for more healthy aging there's something in the air and we can feel it and plenty of people who already show you gold nuggets you know and say there is gold here you know right now we're seeing a huge gold rush once the proof of concept is established in longevity it will go viral [Music] the person who will live to 150 has probably already been born that's highly likely yes [Music] [Music] [Music] so i'm 15 right now how old do i think i will be i think that you know i do want to live a full and healthy life so i think whatever number i can live until at that time that guarantees me to have a very healthy life i'd love that number [Music] i go to bed early i wake up early just because this is important for my health to do this so i do it it's really good to be consistent in your sleep schedule it's easy for me to be consistent with waking up at five because it's sort of some nice quiet time and yeah i mean it's it's it's so i do it's that out of consistency because that's a really important thing for your circadian rhythms [Music] nina cara first became interested in longevity research when she was 12. now the teenager is one of the scene's rising stars nina stands for a generation that takes a new view of aging that wants to see aging eradicated [Music] when she's not in school nina holds talks around the world she's launched a small startup with a couple of friends the group searches for scientific clues on how to crack the aging code yeah but yeah i can work on that one of our proteins is probably involved with that process in some way so we could weigh how much that protein is involved in that process and try to give an estimate even if we're not adding a whole new protein involved with that process yeah i think that definitely is something that we could that's useful to measure my grandfather did have a form of dementia that was you know a big problem and i wanted to do something about that one in six women get dementia after the age of 65 and um one in ten men which is a lot of people when you think about it right it's these diseases that you previously thought were inevitable so we thought maybe we'd have drugs to alleviate the pain or to stop one particular type of disease from occurring but never sort of to you know look at the root cause of these diseases and tackle it from there each animal species has in certain ways an expiration date in a mouse it's less than five years in the bowhead whale it's 211 years in humans it's 122. each species has a time that's kind of allocated to it and the question is why is that in nature death is a normal part of life but can we humans push this biological age limit human life expectancy has risen steadily in recent history back in ancient rome it was just 25 years by the middle ages it was still only 35 now we live into our 70s on average medical advances and better living conditions are enabling us to get older and older but can we extend our lifespan indefinitely and would we really want to and they wonder if we can reverse or slow down the aging process history tells us so much about violence death and dying but it also touches on reincarnation in life it's a hugely popular theme immortality is a topic that will never die in germany there's a famous painting the fountain of youth and on the painting you see all the old men and women particularly taking their clothes off and getting into the fountain of youth and swimming across to the other side and emerging young and healthy on the other side and then going off to the tents and dressing and then having a wonderful dinner together with plenty of wine and it's it's man's age-old dream to be able to reverse aging this fountain of youth has become an allegory in biomedical research it's no longer just about eating a healthy diet and leading a balanced lifestyle we want to make more serious adjustments we can take pills or get injections and so on and we'll end up living longer the idea of the fountain of youth that's outside me that i can we are closer to finding the fountain of youth than ever before but what if aging were a kind of program a program we could hack into an initial clue as to how humans might be reprogrammed leads to an unassuming setting in central america [Music] i've lived in costa rica since 1972 and just completely fell in love with costa rica the peninsula of nakoya is a place where people age very well and long i think about it all the time i think about it all the time because it's really mysterious and [Music] they themselves cannot give you any clues as to why you ask them and they say i have no idea it just is what it is but yet we are more curious and we want to know more anna gail glenn takes care of some of the region's centenarians the residents of costa rica's nicoya peninsula not only live longer but stay healthy for longer too it's done hi monkeys people here often live to be over 90 many to over a hundred floors lots of people around the world want to know how to live a long and healthy life what's your advice [Applause] [Laughter] eat a healthy diet and lead a peaceful stress-free life when a person eats lots of cheese their heart won't suffer is mm-hmm out though this area was very very distantly removed from the mainland so to speak it's a peninsula it's still connected but our roads were bad communication didn't exist people survived here on what they planted on what their parents taught them how to survive there was no pharmacy to go to that smells so good this herb treats fever and all kinds of things the fact that people in nakoya live to be older than average went largely unnoticed until one scientist stumbled onto some unusual data some years ago i was initially an economist but it never really felt like the right field for me eventually i found my niche and demographics it's much more precise with clear-cut rules it's black and white by sheer coincidence we discovered that mortality rates in the region were much lower than the rest of the country initially i didn't pay much attention but one person from the audience approached me afterwards and said it's because it's a blue zone and at that moment i realized that nikoia really was a special place five so-called blue zones have been identified so far on our planet these are locations where an unusually high percentage of the population lives very long men in nakoya have the world's highest life expectancy an 80 year old male here is likely to outlive his contemporaries elsewhere by an average 8.2 years [Music] but why [Music] is it genetics or is it lifestyle people in costa rica say puerto vida vida [Music] we carried out a study to see what happens when people leave nikoia and what happens when people from other parts of the country move to nicoyah we found out that neither of these groups achieved the same longevity as those who were born and spend their whole lives here in blue zones aging seems to proceed more slowly the environment and the lifestyle appear to positively impact human biology but how exactly and will this help us crack the aging code i'm a molecular biologist biochemist i'm interested in understanding the origin of diseases the majority of diseases are those associated to the aging process so i'm interested in understanding why we age at the molecular level i wanted to devote my life to understand the origins of cancer and aging and i thought telomeres could be the key the human body consists of around 37 trillion cells some last a few days others lived for years we constantly produce new cells to replace the old ones it's a process that involves duplication before cell division can take place the chromosomes in the cell nucleus have to be duplicated the dna double helix they consist of is unwound and separated into strands each strand then becomes a template for a new one the ends of the chromosomes which are especially prone to replication errors are protected by telomeres which are sequences of non-coding dna but with every cell division these safety caps become shorter [Music] charged [Laughter] i feel charged [Music] what's that is that shoe all the telomeres [Laughter] imagine this shoelace is our chromosome so this part of the shoelace is the dna where the genetic information is and this little plastic part which is very important to protect the shoelace would be the telomere so the telomeres are very important to protect our chromosomes to protect the dna as we age the telomeres become shorter and shorter this is because every time that we have a damage the cells have to multiply to regenerate the damage and this shortens the telomeres the the cell division the cell multiplication so at the end the telomeres become so short and we don't have any more a telomere so now our dna is unprotected and this is leading to aging it's leading to disease and ultimately will be leading to death cell division and the rate of telomere shortening may be influenced by our lifestyle smoking stress environmental pollutants and poor nutrition are all negative factors some researchers believe living in harmony with the natural world has a positive effect we couldn't carry out experiments like this in costa rica so we sent our samples away when the results of this collaboration came back we realized we'd found something people from nicoya have longer telomeres significantly longer telomeres than people in the rest of the country scientists like maria blasco are exploring ways of artificially lengthening telomeres in order to slow the aging process but this does come at a risk the danger is that cancer can develop because cancer cells are immortal and we're walking a fine line here do we tell the cells to resist their pre-programmed cell death and risk that it will result in cancer or do we leave things to run their natural course and let the cells die when their time is up and there's no proliferation and we just accept that our final destination is around 120 to 125 years but of course we all know the answer humans want to test the boundaries and see if they can really live to 150 or 300. how far can we go how much should science interfere in nature's blueprint we don't have to necessarily accept current biological limitations because that's what we do as a species we're problem solvers we don't just sit around and get rained on we build houses so we may want to transcend normal biology at some point and set goals for ourselves beyond just normal concepts of health [Music] when you wonder about what is aging you end up asking how tissue repair this is a process that is still poorly understood cells progressively accumulate damage they age but when they reach a certain threshold they undergo a switch they become senescent i like to describe them as zombies because you know they're like in a middle state between alive and dead they're not either but they're at the same time they're really damaging senescent cells produce an alarm signal so that the other cells in the body realize that there is a damage there and they go and they repair the problem is that as we get old these repair cells they are also old and they don't go and they don't repair and we accumulate these cells that are constantly producing this alarm this is a phenomenon that is called inflammation all people have inflammatory signals elevated caused by their own senescent cells that are not eliminated we are trying to crack the code of these senescent cells trying to understand the vulnerabilities how to kill them without killing the non-senescent cells in some initial experiments manuel serrano and his team were able to show that mice lived longer once their senescent or zombie cells were eliminated but that does not guarantee eternal youth it's a double-edged sword senescent cells play also very good and important role for example in wound healing if you have a wound if you don't have senescence the wound will never heal so you could have a treatment that removes all senescent cells and suddenly you have terrible side effects it just means we need more research you know research into telomeres and zombie cells are only two approaches in the race for longevity and one thing is certain whoever cracks the code is set to earn millions all right so guys how do i look damn i look old so you've seen what we did we've announced the 255 million dollar raise is the largest raise in our industry today hong kong has the highest life expectancy on the planet today which is no surprise because longevity is very often correlated with wealth and here people are filthy rich welfare is increasing dramatically in the region in china and mainland people who were peasants just 35 years ago they are now multi-millionaires and people demand longevity [Music] as a ceo of a biotech company i try to collaborate with a lot of people and i try to contribute to as many projects as possible live clinic is a very fun concept where the founders decided to bridge the starbucks concept with preventative medical care you choose a cocktail of all kinds of nutrients that will be going into your blood while you are sipping on a juice they offer iv drips and all kinds of other interventions i cannot vouch for some of them correct correct in hong kong anything geared at increasing life expectancy already promises mega bucks dubious wonder drugs and iv drips are readily available the region is also attracting biotech companies from around the world money from wealthy investors has created a much hyped startup scene longevity research is hong kong's new dot-com boom a new development is that the research is being carried out with business startup methods with massive capital we're investing we're pumping funds into it we're throwing cash at it and that will invariably result in a product it's an infallible economic model it will is a huge market what these new companies want really is to have treatments for for diseases so that's where the the big bugs are i'm willing to experiment on myself because there is a lot of data on me i'm one of the most well studied humans on the planet now and i try to optimize for high performance at this point in time i try to perform at my peak i've tried dropomyosin in the past it's very often referred to as a magic drug in longevity in the same line as metformin but likely to be stronger than metformin it's not without side effects so there is a chance that you are going to see mucositis and a few others so we decided to try it on ourselves in a very controlled mode any side effects not at all zero side effects when i was exercising in the hotel i i got some serious muscle mass increases cool all right yeah that's me so that's from ryerson oh thank you my goodness thank you so much literally rapamycin metformin nad boosters do any of these substances really help how can their effectiveness be tested [Music] i was interested in anti-aging science since i was a teenager growing up in frankfurt germany i had a group of friends who were very interested in science and at some point we realized the most important challenge of our generation is to prolong life we had very lofty goals i need to tell you you know we had crazy goals we wanted to study physics math biology chemistry also we wanted to do space travel and then the minute you think of space travel you realize that you will need decades you know to travel over centuries and so we felt we really need to solve this problem first um to extend our lifespan before we can even think about space travel one day by accident really because i did somebody a favor i analyzed these methylation data i immediately recognized that epigenetics or methylation is really the data source that has a tremendous signal for aging he was able to find clusters of genes whose methylation state could tell you how old you were at a particular time the amazing thing about this is that it works from the day you're created as a fertilized egg cell all the way until the day that you die there are more than 200 distinct cell types in the human body although they all contain the same dna there is a mechanism that tells the cell whether it is a skin cell or a liver cell for example called epigenetics this involves information that sits on the dna resulting in genes being switched on or off perhaps the best known type of epigenetic change is methylation the addition or removal of methyl groups on the dna strand these changes continue to take place throughout our lives the dna contains four letters a c t g methylation sometimes attaches to the letter c and modifies it similar to an umlaut by keeping track very carefully which parts of the dna gain methylation or lose methylation we can measure aging methylation can be thought of like the rust that accumulates by measuring the amount of rust we can determine age so if we have an hourglass the passage of time is measured by how the sand how much sand accumulates at the bottom the dna molecule though has 28 million different hourglasses because we have 28 million letter c in our dna so by averaging the measurements of 28 million hourglasses you arrive at a very accurate measure of age this is one of the most insightful discoveries in the history of mankind does this video like the invention of the wheel that definitely was a turning point in aging i think that was just a very a very very important point where we were like hey we can measure aging now the epigenetic clock has revolutionized research into aging with a simple dna sample anyone's biological age can be determined however that can produce some nasty surprises [Music] my name is marcus horvath and i'm steve's identical twin brother he's my older twin brother he's five minutes older than me however only at birth we measured our epigenetic clock a couple of years ago and then according to one of the clocks i was actually four years older than him [Laughter] which is not necessarily good news [Music] those technologies are enabling us to accelerate aging research dramatically by not waiting until you die we can now measure where you are in life and measure how different interventions affect that prediction we picked this up and applied ai to the same problem and developed many many asian clocks above all the quest for eternal life requires personal biological data the digital devices we use every day can provide mountains of it big data is currently one of the most promising approaches to cracking the aging code unlike conventional medicine artificial intelligence can scour the data for hidden patterns to help prevent diseases from developing in the first place this situation looks very similar to theft on the subway somebody pulled your wallet and you don't know who every human on the train looks the same they move they move in different patterns so you need to observe many many of those theft scenarios in many subways globally to develop a really precise algorithm for catching a thief on the subway and you train ai technologies to recognize those thieves and predict human behavior and i think nowadays in advanced countries like mainland china there are video monitoring techniques that allow you automatically to recognize the theft movement so it's very similar to recognizing those proteins that misbehave during aging and cause trouble yeah so what we're gonna do now we're gonna solve a disease very quickly we're gonna solve the crohn's disease ai is already poised to increase our life expectancy or so we're told at the touch of a button startups can run through thousands of possible outcomes and quickly discover new medications all based on data from users of apps like the one that alex javaronkov has developed we recently received 255 million dollars from a group of ultra elite investors so it turned out that we are in the right place in the right time with the right technology i think that very soon we will see guys like amazon i'm waiting for these guys to react guys like facebook are guys that produce video games netflix those people who steal your time they will come back and try to figure out how to make more time so you can waste it on their product silicon valley is already on board in 2013 google founded a secretive biotech venture called calico its longevity research is carried out behind closed doors with nearly unlimited resources a group backed by amazon founder jeff bezos has also burst onto the anti-aging scene with hundreds of millions in funding alto's labs is recruiting top scientists from around the globe to join the project they include steve horvath and manuel serrano there's even a longevity clinic in the pipeline despite the big players jockeying for position there are still opportunities for smaller projects like startup biotene which is working flat out to develop a self-test to measure aging biotin is a group of people who are working towards the goal of extending health span and eradicating aging-rated diseases we're all just sort of a group of people with a sort of a fascination for aging with diseases and aging itself we have sort of focused on this idea of biological age itself we tell you what your biological age is in sort of an accessible and cheap manner um a lot of biological age tests currently are very pricey which is fine i mean it makes total sense especially for biohackers and people who are way more interested in the very deep science of aging but we just want to give a general encapsulation of your aging process for the general population nina's clock is designed to determine age based on proteins in saliva although she can only work in a lab once she turns 16 she's found ways to access the latest data you'll go to research paper website and they have supplementary files that we're able to download and see their data so that's really cool sometimes when it comes to us working directly with labs they send us the data personally so they tell us here is the work we have done because it often helps them too in their projects you know people like nina are taking advantage of a new paradigm really in which you can process the data on your own data is available my lab does that and on the one hand i download data but i also upload a lot of data i put millions of dollars worth of data into the public domain i think school yeah i think it's very good actually i know you were making some progress on the image of the test recently and sort of have a good rendering and did you want to share your screen and show what that might look like yeah i'll just do that right now um hold on basically right now i think what we decided was the best way is like having a multi-panel test with each corresponding to one protein we're using the same technology used in pregnancy tests so i think that's pretty interesting you spend all the tests in the sampled area then from there you downloaded sort of our app and from there you're able to find out you know the ratios of your control to sort of uh your protein lines so what what is sort of the concentration of these proteins and based on the color of this test so you know you scan this you find out that information you entered into our website and you can find out a lot more about your aging process we would want to do a subscription based you know you're going to get several tests a year because you know it's slowly going to get better as you know as you improve too so it'll be really cool it would be very hard to conceive even wanting to do that for me and i don't think anybody here is going to sign up for it in contrast to nina anna gail glenn in costa rica has already ended her professional life a successful swimwear designer she was able to retire at age 50. ever since she's been involved in a range of social projects it's about being unified it's about to participate and be of service you know do what you can care for yourself but do what you can to care for others as well and hopefully you get to a point in life where your basic needs are being met well enough that you have plenty of time to care for others it boils down to the question you know do i do i save myself or do i save my community and really if your community doesn't survive what kind of life are you going to have a couple of years ago a law was passed to protect the long haevos or the centenarians of the area that we live in which is considered a legal blue zone legal you know by law in costa rica so that's new nicoya is preparing for an increasing number of centenarians a private initiative aims to raise funds to build the region's first nursing home rapid advances in longevity research are prompting a rethink of existing social structures what will our lives look like if we continue to grow older and older the centenarians did their contribution now it's somebody else's turn to take care of them nicolas when we visit the long hauls if you ask them how do you feel about this project we're doing why i completed i'm going to be 103.
that's great but when you get old you eventually need some help you're lucky to live with your daughter who looks after you there are people who have no support or no family okay yes i feel happy to have lived such a long life my friends and family are here i want to live as long as god wants me to hi exactly not more as time has evolved being here and observing the people who live in this blue zone i realize how connected they are the social component is very important they don't get cut off in a today we know that being part of a strong community is a life extent that's a way for anyone to grow older without turning to pills and injections that alter our dna well in my personal opinion uh i would not waste time on blue zones we need to fix the problem of aging right here right now we've reached the point of evolution where we need to accelerate evolution ourselves to do this we need to evolve and we need to change as humans as well [Music] nature has no plan nature is a random thing right but it works nature's built up life on this planet over the last four and a half billion years and it is fine-tuned and honed and optimized things to an unbelievable degree of perfection so you have to be a little bit careful about messing with mother nature [Applause] one of the interesting things about super centenarians and centenarians is that their immune systems last much better than the rest of us which is a clue as to the fact that you need to have a good immune system in order to stay alive a long time [Music] steve horvath is one of the scientists set to follow the call of amazon boss jeff bezos but before he embarks on that new task he's focusing on another promising project it's the so-called trim trial designed by his colleague greg faye to reverse immune system aging hardly any other study in the field has prompted as much interest in recent times the flow of immune cells plays a central role in fighting illness in our bodies but there's a limited supply of these essential cells our body's thymus gland produces t cells the superstars of the adaptive immune system however once we reach puberty the thymus begins to shrink it is replaced by fatty tissue and eventually stops producing new t cells once we've used them up our bodies become more susceptible to pathogens and to age related diseases like cancer stroke and dementia [Music] when i saw that you could use growth hormone to regrow the thymus and take immune system function that was down to about 20 percent of young immune system function all the way back up to 100 percent of youthful function i just thought we have to do something about this but nobody took any action so i did an experiment on myself and i regrew my own thymus he published a scientific paper that described one person and that was himself in 2016 the trial was repeated this time a total of nine test subjects renewed their thymus fae suspected the treatment was having a positive effect on the whole body but how could he prove it this person came to me and said can't you help me to analyze a treatment and the minute he said the word thymus rejuvenation i already said yes you know steve horvath compared blood samples from the test subjects before and after treatment and he was just as amazed if not more amazed as we were about the results if they are confirmed it will be a sensation the original intention was get rid of the fat of the thymus this treatment had a side effect an unexpected side effect it really rejuvenated the methylation the epigenetic clock all nine test subjects turned their epigenetic clocks back by around 18 months in a year of treatment that means they had essentially reversed their biological age by two and a half years we began to get reports from some of the people in the trial that i feel great you know i feel so energetic now i feel my mind is working faster than it's worked before before this trial was over this volunteer says you know my my wife has been telling me that my hair is growing in dark again and i said really i that's interesting let's have a look so we looked at his hair and boy it was a big very strong difference his hair was darkening all over the place i need to say we are all very excited about it but we are also very sober scientists you know and therefore we always felt we desperately need a second validation study and that's really why i continued to work with greg why i became a study participant a third study with more test subjects aims to corroborate the original results if successful thymus regeneration could be the first scientifically proven anti-aging treatment for human beings but the scientists need more data steve horvath and his brother have volunteered to take part in the trial as identical twins they are ideal candidates steve will get the rejuvenation treatment and marcus will join the control group we're now ready for your baseline testing and and this is the testing that you do before entering the trimex trial and then we'll assess you after 12 months of treatment and see how you fare at that point the first step is a functional test where you're literally just standing up and sitting back down as many times as you can within 30 seconds in the entire life ever since no more at all no i had a better breakfast maybe after 12 months of the trim treatment you'll be able to compete with that all right and i'll give you a countdown okay on your mark get set go [Music] all right that's it i feel it in my in my phone now that we have your blood pumping we're gonna looking at your epigenetic clock [Music] okay perfectly and then [Music] all right which way all okay 80 women and men of different ages are taking part in the latest thymus study and the treatments inventor also hopes to rejuvenate himself once again i can't wait any longer right i'm getting older i don't want to age i'm 71. i don't know how old i will be that's an open question i hope longer than usual that's all i can say at this point the main component of the treatment is a growth hormone to counteract certain side effects the steroid hormone dhea and the diabetes drug metformin are also added down the hatch [Laughter] i think about this future of biotechnology and changing the composition of our bodies it worries me my dream is that there will be an intervention against aging if we are lucky and five years and 10 years and then people go to their annual checkup the doctor says you know what you're aging a little bit too fast why don't you take this pill that's the dream so we are now building the toolkit many enabling technologies that need to converge and we need several more technologies to come to life in order for us to make a major leap in terms of longevity for everyone i think we are 25 years away the development of an anti-aging wonder drug raises issues that threaten the foundations of our natural and social order what will our planet look like if we live to be ever older would overpopulation make our ecosystems and social systems collapse how can longevity be in harmony with the natural world and human civilization our lifestyle is expensive it consumes resources it creates overpopulation this is true when we were living very short life didn't have such a value and also would not care so much for nature or for anything so maybe it's not bad that we live longer because then we would care more about our planet and our environment and the lives of the rest of the beings in this planet [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you
2022-06-03