Transcripts For CSPAN2 Chip Walter Immortality Inc 20240713

Computer science and phd in biology from cambridge university. Doctor robert is founder, chairman and ceo, he is an accomplished surgeon, biomedical scientist and aviator. Doctors is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia University school of engineering and applied science. He also earned his md and earned his phd degrees from cornell university. Doctor cynthia help pioneer the aging. She spent many years on the you cfs faculty from my molecular biologist and phd from mit of filmmaker and author of immortality inc. Renegade science, and the quest to live forever. Chip was one of the original employees at cnn and served as bureau chief in san francisco. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming doctor aubrey, doctor robert, doctor cynthia, and chip walter. The be joining me on stage shortly. [applause] tonight, we have the honor of specialists in the field but we only have about 15 minutes to explore the science and quest for longevity. I would like to keep us on a story line. Chip and i have discussed this previously. We are going to stop by defining your missions, then dig into the signs of aging, and explore the strategies as well as the pros and cons of expanding the life plans and the will take questions from the audience. Lets start with chip, you have written this amazing book, immortality inc. And can you describe your mission with the book . What made you want to write the book and what are you hoping to achieve . I have always have fascinated with the idea of a long life, longevity. Its always been i think all of us are fascinated in the human, the human race has been fascinated from the beginning going back, there spread plenty of myths and arts and philosophy, religion and theres also been plenty of snake oil. So, i think when i was looking at this i began to wonder, is it possible that we are actually at a place in Human History where science, not snake oil, not myths could solve one of the great mysteries that we have all wandered about. Which is, basically solving aging. And i thought, i think this is beginning to happen. I wanted to go out on my wanted to look at that question. I wanted to in a way you might think of it as a science book, but its kind of a history book. No. I tried to find who are the key people, the big thinkers, what kind of money has to be behind it and why do we even want to do this. In the end, i hope that i was able to bring together a story that tells the tale. Fascinating story. It reads like a novel. Cynthia cannon, youre the leading asian research, briefly what is your mission there and what is your definition of success . Well, i was a professor for almost 30 years before i went to calico. While i was there i became interested in aging, partly because at the time most people thought aging was entropy and you just wear out and its more disorder and decline and thats all there is to it but if you look at nature which is he is a different species have variables lifespans. Some live a very short time and others a long time. During evolution things had to change lifespan. Id either have to be genes that somehow determines the rate of aging and it makes us age much more slowly than a dog, for example. We worked on a tiny little roundworm called [inaudible] that lives a few weeks. In my lab we look for gina changes that could extend life. We were lucky to find that mutations in a single gene could double the lifespan of the animal and keep it younger longer than normal. It wasnt long before we were able to make a few changes and give them six times living longer than normal. With these mechanisms trying to understand them it really, interested in, you know, and trying to go beyond my own lab and to help find out whether you could i dont know, first of all trans like this to humans in some way or in other words use the information that we know from studying the basic biology of animals to improve our heal health. I also when i worked at calico its a funny company because they wanted to do half just basic research and the idea just been able to do creativity driven basic research in a really kind of moonshot away, studying animals like naked mole rats which dont seem to age. Most like creatures that seem to live a really long time, for example. And also to be in a position where we could actually try to take to the clinics some of the information weve gleaned from work on animals and make discoveries at calico at the clinic so it was exciting and big an opportunity for me to turn down. Success, to me, is two kinds of success actually. One is to make there have been and i hope we can talk about this but there have been fundamentally fascinating discoveries about aging and how it works and the many different ways you can slow it down. I hope we can find another. Maybe two, three more. I think there are more big discoveries have the need to made and i hope that we really can apply what we know to huma humans. I will stop in a second but for a long time we been trying to cure diseases which is a fantastic and weve done a really, not just perfect but people dont die of infections the way they use two or Heart Disease the way they used to. But people still age at the same rate so you have more people who are older who, in some cases, arent living in healthy conditions. The hope is we can find ways like these little worms that stay healthy for a long time but maintain our health for longer periods. Thats another goal. Its not just my goal but the goal for the whole field. Its a shared goal. You put is your mission at the Research Foundation and what is success for you . Well, first of all, is this working . Is that good . Good. So really its similar to what cynthia just said. I grew up not understanding that the idea of bringing aging under medical control was a controversial concept. No one ever told me that aging was not a medical problem. And so, it was actually 1993, the same year which cynthia published her seminal paper the transform the entire field that i went through a transformation of my own because a couple of years before that i had married a biologist having previously been referred to in a different discipline of Artificial Intelligence and through her i accidentally learned a little biology but gradually i began to realize that she just wasnt interested in aging. Then the biologist i would meet and i thought what is going on. [laughter] after a year or term oh i decided i had to switch fields and work on this because the other biologists were not doing it. I do not know cynthia at that time. Time went on and obviously i made a few contributions and i do want to mention another contribution that cynthia made which is extraordinarily important but often overlooked these days when the medical applicability of this field is more established. Back in the 90s this was heretical in the extreme. The idea of saying we ought to do something about aging you would be dead if he asked for grant allocation. Cynthia was one of the first people that went out and said this. So i often said standing on her shoulders and doing what i do but for me success is all about saving lives. When i say saving lives in talking about quality not quantity. I also have to remind people that longevity is just a side effect of health. Were just doing medical research [inaudible] we are all about keeping people healthy and we think that we have a fighting chance doing so well that the magnitude of that side effect of long jevity will be rather long. Could you quantify large . We cannot quantify large. I always like to point that the human body is a machine. Its a really, gated machine but it is still a machine. As such we need to look at what happens. We know that car, for example, can be maintained in as functional a state as it had the day it was built for as long as we like. There are cars that are 100 years old today there were not designed to last more than ten, 12 years. We already know how to do really, he has a preventative maintenance on them. So the goal of our work is [inaudible] to develop medicines that do exactly the same thing but to sufficiently comprehensive preventative maintenance to eliminate the damage that the body does to itself throughout our lives in normal operation. Thereby to completely transcend lets call it the warranty. That solution is built into our bodies. Okay. Robert, you said that you believe aging is a stem cell problem and you called the genomic base Health Intelligence Company Human longevity inc. I know its [inaudible] when will you have arrived . Well, similarity was born out of a company that was seeking to turn living cells into medicine and we use the platform that took advantage of the unique biology and the placenta, the organ that we all know is sort of a life support system for the developing fetus. Turns out that at a time when im a neurosurgeon by trade [inaudible] i was mostly interested in finding a way to prove the outcome of those patients when stem cells first hit the airwaves. I said this might be a tool for me to improve the neurological outcome but that is what got me into the field and we made advances turning those cells into tools to control inflammation, stem cells are good at doing and stimulating regeneration. The concept of Regenerative Medicine as a means to provide or improve health is not new, not novel and its been around a long time but it was during that time when our Company Became part of a growing enterprise, a cancer focused company that i first saw david that impressed me. The data basically showed that in patients, as they age, there was a very, abrupt decline in the number of stem cells in one organ system that we were looking at, bone marrow. Turns out that if you look at the bone marrow of the baby one in about 20, 30000 cells are a stem sub in the bone marrow of an 80 yearold its one in 30 million. So, what is that tell a surgeon who is not as smart as the rest of the folks on this panel . Can we add to some cells and change things . What we did was we ran a simple experiment. We collected the placental stem cells from Newborn Research animals and gave them back to the stem cells after a section on maturity on regular basis. This skunk we studied turned out to that those animals live 30, 40 years longer so that was enough to launch a big Research Program but it intrigued us enough to say that stem cells may in fact, play a role in doing two things. Preserving performance, in other words, maintaining the structure and function of our bodies as we age and allowing the immune system to perform at optimum levels throughout our life span. That is what got us there. Our success for us is showing that these products are meaningful in the treatment of agerelated diseases, immunities and cancer that i think the future will be very bright and we are in applying them to Human Performance with the preservation of Human Performance to me is a nicer way of saying longevity. Great. I like that framing. Lets dig more into the science of aging. I think cynthia you are probably the best to explain in basic terms what is why do we age what is happening to our bodies . Well, the tissues ability to withstand stress and to function in the proper way just declines. Cells lose the tissue integrity to some extent, the cells within the tissues lose their ability to carry out their functions in the normal way and they dont coordinate their behaviors with one another as well as they use to. It is interesting, if you look at the mortality rate of a species like humans. As you know, the chance that you will wake up one morning and died that day goes up with the older you are. It goes up in a very regular way. If you plot it exponentially is a Straight Line with starting at age 30 the chance of death you know it doubles every eight and half years. Exactly. Thats the human rate and it starts when you are young. A dog it doubles much more quickly, obviously. Dogs have a shorter life span that we have but it starts when they are puppies. Its interesting because it says that there is something inside a young person and we dont know where it is in the person but its whether its in all the cells were just one place that it has program that person to aid at a certain rate. And its already there when they are young, same with dogs. That is what i think is the most interesting thing is to find out whats the programming and what is it that it creates this resilience. Its different in different species. You found the simple genetic mutation that can double or make six times the length lifespan for a roundworm so can you explain in civil terms how that happens . Whats going on . Yes, i can. It turns out that in evolution it looks as though simple organisms developed the capacity to withstand stressful conditions like the removal of food or presence of a lot of radiation or hot temperature, all different stresses. What they seem to do is the first approximation of any stretches they have a system that can make them resist all these stresses all at once. It turns out the mutation have changed in a gene and its a gene change and if we change is one of gene called [inaudible], one in the whole dna, thats all, the animals, everything changed in the animals age more slowly. How did we do that with one based change . It turns out we changed a regulatory gene like a computer programming. If you have a hierarchy of control systems and we had intervened at the high level without knowing we did at the time but now we know. We came in at a high level and we essentially because the animal dash i will say think rightdoublequote that it was under stress. What happened is this animal had reprogrammed itself and all is also now is much more resistant to any damage and the way they did that is they made proteins that take care of other proteins and repair the dna in all things they do at different levels. But they were all coordinate leaf switched so it was very interesting and those animals lived twice as long. It suggests that we dont really know exactly but some of the same properties that are systems that protect animals from stress can also protect them, if you will, from the stress of aging. Its a high level, not very expiration but whats cool about this is that if you change the same genes in fruit flies or mice they all lived longer. Mice are mammals like we are so its a universal kind of programming mechanism and they are hints that its present in humans as well. We all live a pretty long time so one of my theories is that perhaps this system is already a little turned on and off by evolution or allowing us to be naturally more resistant to the stresses of wear and tear and time. Aubrey, youve identified seven aspects of aging damage or as you call it, accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us. Could you briefly describe a couple of key side effects . How do i answer this quickly . I think the best way for me to do is jump off from what cynthia said because, as you say, we focus or i have focused on not slowing aging down but actually reversing its. Repairing the damage that the body does to itself through our lives. To truly rejuvenate people. Of course, in principle this would be far more valuable than just slowing aging down. But also, the really good thing that the concept i introduced maybe 20 years ago now that is now being taken more seriously is the idea that this might be easier to do medically then flowing aging down. One thing that cynthia touched on is that in humans we may already be somewhat adapted to doing the kinds of things that mutations in other organisms can confer. In fact, it does seem that way paid for example, if you put [inaudible] if you put them under the stress of famine then they tend to live longer but the proportion by which they live longer is much smaller than what you get in [inaudible] so the whole combination tear that we certainly dont understand. To me the goal is to figure out how much we need to understand. I look at this more as a basic scientist and i dont find things out for the sake of finding them out but i find them out in order to figure out what to do and to manipulate the data in a manner that is desirable. The kind of damage we look at with things like waste product which happens to all organisms but in different ways in different cell types and in different organisms for example, the lost of cells. We need stem cells to restore the number of cells and in order him that is perpetually losing them as a driver of the aspect of parkinsons disease. There are many examples. It means that the approach we are taking this rejuvenation approach is much a divide and conquer approach where we have to repair a bunch of different times of damage simultaneously and this is complementary to the more years to re approach that dominated the field ever since cynthia made this blew this whole thing opened with the discovery of [inaudible]. Robert, you are a pioneer in the Stem Cell Research and the use of the placenta, as you said, to treat lifethreatening diseases. You called the placenta natures stem cell factory. You said youre striving to turn themselves into medicines. Can you explain, in simple terms, how Stem Cell Therapy works and what you anticipate in the next five, ten years . Well, to try to simplify the way we believe stem cells exert their therapeutic effects i think of it in terms of that are consistent with what cynthia and aubrey are talking about which is that underlining health and adaptability and the ability to deal with disease or injury you have to have a good programming system that is intact and uncorrupted. Stem cells can be thought of as a way of preserving the fold turns probable, uncorrupted genome in a form that can be used to sort of reprogrammed the body over time. With stem cells what they do and all of us is allows for continued process of renovation and renewal. All of us most of the cells in your body are less then three years old. They have been derived from a stem cell reservoir that had been called upon to renovate your organs and tissues over time. Now, aubrey you said something which i love because of the pilot i see the same thing you talk about with automobiles. You can keep an airplane in remarkably Good Condition if you always have perfect uncorrupted replacement parts. If you replace them on a regular schedule you replace them before they fail. Failure of the system and an airplane is like a disease. You can replace that beforehand and we do that with a cell and replace a bad cell for it goes bad you might never ever develop any of these diseases or symptoms. In our world what we are trying to do is provide reliable, highquality, scalable and economical replacement parts. The beauty of the placenta is these cells are onesizefitsall. You can take a placental style and put it into an unrelated recipient and not have to match that. Weve treated hundreds of patients with placental stem cells and never had to match them to tweet recipients and donor. The other thing is a universal cell in that regard if we collected them at birth, process them, expand them and then freeze them and put them into cryopreservation they are in a state of suspended animation so that programming that is in the cells can be corrupted. People probably dont know this but a cryopreserved cell when you put a cell in literal nitrogen is impervious to all those things which damaged dna. You could put a cesium radioactive source next to a cryopreservation tank and the cells will not be damaged by it. When you saw them and put them into somebody youve now given them a whole bunch of master reboot discs and crying and i talked about this that if your dna which you are biologically programming language and were talking about some of the corruption the programming that can occur when genes go awry the cell, the stem cell itself is like a miniature computer with a processor and the cytoplasm and the keyboards and the circus. If you can replace that and always have those in a new healthy young form you have a better shot at maintaining that youthful core, genotype well into your advanced years. That will presume that performance that is makes living longer worthwhile. One of the ideas with h ally when you and craig were working together in the idea of understanding the genome itself you would be able to anticipate what might start to go wrong before it goes wrong and then address that . That was the hope. We knew longevity was founded were just beginning to compile the data set necessary to fully understand what these genes actually did and how it related to risk of developing disorders, the strength to prevent them from developing diseases and the reality is its a great opportunity to act before you have one of those fatal, lethal events taking place. So, you remember when we first started talking about this the concept was study enough patients, get enough data and then try to find what the common denominators of [inaudible] in that process is still going on. That brings me to my next question but we are here in Silicon Valley at the center of technology and what is tech developments speeding up the develop meant of these longevity breakthroughs . Chip, you could probably talk to this about Silicon Valley is aiding with Artificial Intelligence et cetera. One of the things that hasnt really been mentioned and i should mention is these people here are some of the key people in the book and there are many others key people in the book and the whole idea of the book was to pull together the work they are doing but also to learn who they are and why they do what they do. You know, [inaudible] is an important character in the book and he certainly is a person that feels that technology plays a big role in this. But to step back from that a little bit, you guys may or may not agree with this but i think where i am coming from, at the end of the book i basically came to the Conclusion Even though i was quite skeptical at the beginning that people like this are going to solve this problem. I sort of see it, i guess, and a couple of different steps. One of the first waves as he is stem cell technology. That will be a way to sort of reboot to some of the systems that are breaking down and elongate our lives and improve our lives. And then that relates a lot to the work you are doing, aubrey. And then i think the second wave is understanding the genomics of the human body. We know so little and we have sequenced the human genome but we dont really know that much about it. What are those switches that are flipped in the human body that could change these things and how can we understand those in need to have much more information and we are gathering it rapidly and thats an important factor and in order to do that you have to have Artificial Intelligence, machine algorithms that can solve problems that are incredibly biological problems that are incredible he complex. Bench scientists are not going to be able to solve this problem. Just sitting there they will sit there for a million years and then i think the last issue is can we truly understand the underlying reasons why we age in the first place and that is obviously related to genomics. What are those switches that are being flipped and how, if possible, can we change them and again, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms are going to be necessary in order to do that. Its been a fascinating story to watch the science unfold into watch the thinking and to watch the Human Emotion that is involved and why you wanted to do these things. And then i guess one of the things we will talk about at the end is if we succeed in this then what . That brings me onto, id like to move us on to the longevity. Chip, you write in your book for with our clocks stopped we might discover it more time to enjoy our families, our friends and learn from our mistakes and get our life right. They will be fulfilled and happy at last. Its very much a utopian dream but i also want to explore the negative parts of this. Lets talk about the wider indications of radically extending longevity. There is the opportunity cost of using millions of capital in the best ways to extend life spans when there are more urgent x essential pricing problems like Climate Change. It could create some people say a dystopian future of further overcrowding and keeping of our planet and then theres a financial aspect which radically increases the device and port ability given that 60 of americans have less than a thousand dollars in savings is extending our lifespan even a desirable goal and if we all lived even ten, 20 years longer i think many of us how can we afford to retire . Lets go down the panel instructed you, aubrey. I could spent a couple of hours. [laughter] you got two minutes. Of course, the key thing to recognize in the entire entirety of what you just said all of these socalled efforts is that overall revolving around longevity. You may remember some of you that i already told you we dont work on longevity. We work on health. The only way that it is possible to entertain any of the things you just said is that by starting by completely putting out of everyones mind the fact that in a world that doesnt have aging anymore people wont be getting sick as a result of having been born a long time ago. That is quite a big deal and when i talked i often asked them hands up anyone who wants to guess get all timers disease. Go ahead. [laughter] hands up anyone who wants anybody else to get alzheimers disease . [laughter] its not a difficult question and yet it seems possible for people to completely forget that. When they ask questions along the lines of what would you to live a long time. When i first encountered this i realized that the only way to describe this is not a chance because when i was an undergraduate [inaudible] i went to a hypnotist show where this kind of thing was done and nobody got up on stage and told something wasnt true, namely [inaudible] he said please touch your left elbow with your right forefinger and he cannot do it and the key thing was not that he couldnt do it but he said why couldnt you do it and its a grammatically correct information that nonsensical in the extreme and does not realize its nonsensical. It is that bad, boys and girls. Chip, follow that. Aubrey mentioned something that i think is incredibly important. Imagine a world in which people are not think of the last four, five years of life and how much money we spend to keep people alive and how nice it would be if we werent sick like that. Theres 1000 chance that as you age you are going to get sick. That is a huge bonus just financial business. Imagine people that can continue to work and have all the intellectual capitals and the wisdom that they have but they are not doddering and falling apart. I think that alone is really important question to ask. Its also been shown and i think we were talking about this before that as societies become better educated women or become better educated and societies they dont get married as early and they dont have children as early and cynthia you are talking about how important that is and how rapidly we have more people slowing down. Since the 1980s the rate of growth has been slowing even though even more people are being born more. There are a lot of issues here that we have not really looked at. I think one of the important things that i wanted to come out in the book was that if this is going to happen we better get smart about how we handle these things. So, i just think we have to step back and go my god, this will happen so how are we going to handle it as a society. Thinking that can happen until we admit that it will happen in the first way. Cynthia, i know youre synthetic to the Climate Change argument. My god. I have to say. Obviously not. I thought many days should i just quit my job and do something for Climate Change. I honestly really think that. The immortality, first of all, i dont think we will be immortal. If the earth ends its moot. Thats a huge deal but i will just put that aside for a second and focus on this other question. The cool thing about these animals were these mutant animals that live for such a long time diseases of aging so lets talk about agerelated disease. Things like cancer and diabetes, alzheimers they are diseases that become much more frequent among the elderly. We have to ask the question why is it and what is it about a dean about being all that makes it more likely to get cancer or alzheimers disease . People are trying to understand theres a certain cell in the body called the senescence sell, its interesting. They are cells that no longer divide and stop doing what they are normally doing because they sit there and secrete substances that cause information and turns out that can lead to a lot of diseases. In fact, scientists have now shown that if we kill these cells in older animals they dont get diseases. That is one thing that links to agerelated diseases. The idea is if you slow down aging itself like i said with animals you can change one gene or take one pill, for example. Maybe. You can slow down the aging thing you should so all the diseases down and you push them out and you also, for some reason, make them less severe when they do occur. That is the kind of its a medical goal in a way of in fact, the National Research institute of antiaging is interested now in incorporating age and research into the different institutes. Institute of cancer and narrowed his degeneration because if you could slow down aging then you should affect all the diseases at once and this is the thing that i know you want to know about whether its good to be immortal or not but we cant. You would get hit by a bus. No way out of it. Some weight you will die but i dont even want to go there but i feel like we have such an opportunity right now to have a whole new approach going after lots of diseases all at once by studying the root cause and its way bigger between smoking and cancer. Its way bigger. Anyway that is exciting to me and also the fact of staying healthy for a long time is exciting. Robert. You know, i dont want to get into the philosophical issues here because we need far more time and it would drift into political perspectives and so on but the reality is that for those the goal is to live longer very few would accept that outcome if the extended life did not come with what we call quality which i call performance. Ive given a talk to a fairly broad audience and i asked them how many of you in the audience lsu here right now. How many in this audience would like to live to 150 . Okay. What is your view of 150 . Is it a robust, highperformance lifestyle . Most people say that when you think about that that the concept of living to 150 is that you are decayed quite a bit but if i told you how many would you like to live another 75 years exactly the way you are right now how many would raise their hands . Larger number. So that, to me, is all about preserving that level of, again, visio anime tonic performance, puncture function and performance that allows you highperformance mobility, highperformance cognition and selfishly, its a big factor, you want to maintain Youthful Aesthetics because that allows you to compete in society with peers for generations younger. The reality is, for the work that we are doing were looking to find tools that can be broadened to the clinics that will impact one or more performance mechanisms like mobility. If we can demonstrate that a product like a cellular [inaudible] or a modifying pill would allow a hundred yearold individual to be able to walk or have a six minute walk test that was highperformance orchid lift 100 pounds over their head those are the sorts of endpoints that to us are meaningful. We do think that we do have tools at our disposal could help right now but many of you know people are going around the world with clinics who have degenerative joint diseases and delaying the need or joint replacement surgery by injecting things like placement rich plasma which is a signaling array of molecules that come from the most part cells like stem cells but also injecting stem cells into joints and seen evidence of [inaudible] improvement in many patients dramatically. The tools are out there but its a matter of putting them into large enough clinical experiences to make legitimate rational decisions about how they should be deployed. Great. For our audience i would say 50 of the audience said they would live to 150. I like to go to audience questions now and i have a question, how can i use the techniques you are researching now before you are finished without waiting until i age further first . [laughter] i dont know, i think bob why dont you tackle that. You know, we run a company that is developing therapeutics using the traditional Drug Development model which is phase i, phase ii, phase three clinical studies that are randomized placebocontrolled trials for you to find the products in the clinical endpoints and attempt to demonstrate that the degree to the relative cory world. That is what you develop these products with cancer, immune disease and so on but the demand for treating some of these degenerative diseases and performance decline is so large that cellular medicine is being deployed around the world in clinics where they are looking for products that are at least acceptable for use in patients. There are lots of problems with that. You are never going to get the answers we need if that is the way these products are put out there. But a progressive forward thinking regulatory clinical communities that allows clinics offshore as well as domestically to try these products in things like agerelated [inaudible] where some of the endpoints are straightforward. Again, what we call the short physical performance battery. That would give us high quality data that could arrive at an approval. The process of proving a product by regulators is not just based on efficacy but on safety. If something is safe you can accept even marginal efficacy. I think that is way this field will evolve and there are probably 20 very respective academic scientists who are chasing things like agerelated [inaudible] so that gives me a lot of hope that this will move. Heres one for cynthia. How far are we from product meaningful longevity changes . Thats a really good question. I dont know. We wont know until we know. Honestly. There are lots of different ways now that you can make animals live longer and, for example, there is a drug that people take already called [inaudible] that is used to prevent graft projections if you have an organ transplant and there are side effects. Were not recommending you take it but when you give animals this same substance they live longer. It affects these same systems that i was talking about before the stress resistance systems. Again, i dont think its a good idea to take it and i dont want to go into it but there are side effects but there are lots of people right now trying to make better versions of this and dont have the side effects. That may not work and people or they work for things like Organ Transplants but they may not work for longevity but since they work in many species like worms and even single cell organisms and fruit flies and mice theres a reason to think that they might work in people. If they do, and it wont be long because we already have them. If they dont, then it could be long or not. We just dont know and we wont know till we know for other thing is sometimes there are these well ill stop there. Ill stop there. I like to say about that. I completely agree with what cynthia said and that we dont know and we wont know until we know but nevertheless i feel experts like us to have some kind of duty to come out with best estimates. At the end of the day the fundamental program that we have in the problem exemplified by the answers that even when we put in the qualification which could help a lot of you did not raise her hands. This is a problem. I think a lot of it comes down to peoples fundamental unwillingness to get their hopes up. You know . Unwillingness to believe it would ever happen. A lot of people throughout the entire history of civilization saying maybe will be able to do something about it and theyve always been wrong so its justifiable to be skeptical but if youre too skeptical you will think its just a pipe dream and it will never happen and you wont be interested in promoting it or anything like that and then research will go slowly because will be less support for it. I believe experts like us have to come out and give an estimate of how much progress we will have, even despite the fact that the estimate has to be enormously hedged. We have to say how speculative it is so my way of doing this as i say i give an estimate and its completely subjective. Based on everything i know how soon we will have a 5050 chance of making a decisive difference for longevity. As many of you know i feel that there will be a very sharp Tipping Point when it does happen we will go from making a small difference to making a large difference suddenly and of course it is when will that Tipping Point occur and i believe right now that we will have more than 5050 chance of getting the 20 years from now. That is the kind of quantitative predictions that almost all scientists possibly refused to give and i understand why. We are working on the foremost biomedical challenge of humanity and we will come out and put numbers on this. Very quickly since im not a scientist and having spent lots of time in the course of the book i basically believe that within four, five years we will begin to see some serious progress and i believe that we will see at first and Stem Cell Therapy. That does not mean we will flip a switch and everyone will stay young and healthy but it means there will be a beginning and we will begin to buy time and then there will be additional breakthroughs and that will be an exponential rate. Keep in mind that when you look at longevity is and how its defined in population terms lifespan has been most impacted in the populations by eradicating [inaudible] if you want to move the average age of death simply stop people from dying at 30, 40 or 50 so identifying cancer, building diagnostics for early forms of cancer will have a huge impact but one of your colleagues he looked at the analysis where he said if cancer was cured today it would only increase the average lifespan by two, three days years so that means theres room in there and you know, theres a real argument to be made that other factors would keep people active in society have almost as big of impact as reducing the incidence of coronary disease. There are other things we have to look at as well. I like to turn the discussion to this weeks big news is the growth of the coronavirus in china. I understand robert that your Company Singularity is collaborating for therapeutics to develop a vaccine and could you talk a little of that and give us a timeline a potential timeline for that . Let me preface it by saying this is an urgent Emergency Response to what might be a very serious global infectious threats. Joshua the Nobel Laureate said the greatest threat to human survival was the development of an unknown infection of unknown origin that could spread as a pandemic and kill millions and the earth has experienced that many times. Coronavirus is getting attention because it appears that its spreading rapidly and has the lethality that is higher than what you find in, for example, seasonal flu. What we are basically doing is as a responsible member of the biopharmaceutical, society is we are attempting to make available one technology which is fundamentally biologically active against buyers. It turns out that in our immune system is a natural killer cell and it specializes t cell that is preprogrammed to identify very interesting molecules that appear on virally infected cells, stress antigens. It turns out that the placenta produces a very large number of universal cell natural killers which can directly attack virally infected cells like coronavirus infected cells. We are working with governments to accelerate and making that available for the beauty is the cells come from the placenta and you know many placentas of the runway in the world every year . Almost 150 million. Its an abundant resource that could be called upon to deal with this type of crisis. We have another audience question and a guy in the audience whose life is eight months pregnant. If you had a baby tomorrow what would you do with the stem cells . Collect them, process them and thank them. Right now the stem cells from birth can be stored for the lifespan of the donor. That means anywhere from your babies entire life if necessary. They are already an insurance policy if you need to identify bone marrow, if you needed that for a transplant. The next conventional way that stem cells from newborns have been used but those same cells could be used as the starting material for immuno therapeutics, making t cells that can be engineered for therapy. There also the starting material being used today for organogenesis to, is using stem cells to repopulate organ templates and to make a placement parts. Listen, there is a cost to doing it, no doubt. Its not an answer but its about the cost of an annual cell phone bill but the reality is its a health tool that could be far more useful tenures are now than it is even today. Okay. Here is another question from the audience but what are the effects of advanced glycogen and products [inaudible] and what can we do about it . Well, there are many effects but ultimately they lead in the much clearer effect is loss of elasticity. This is believed to contribute to high Blood Pressure or wrinkles for those of you who care more about what you look like and for that matter [inaudible] weve been pursuing work on this for several years with the project at Yale University and we were successful with that work and we were able [inaudible] a couple months ago essentially the malec clear nature of many of these cross have been established for a long time and people just thought it was too difficult to figure out how to eliminate these and break things off and make them more elastic again. We dont like giving up so we worked on it for as long as we could and sure enough we have [inaudible] now. Okay. Another thing you can do is these things called [inaudible] if you take brussels sprouts and put them in the oven and make them black or vegetables what is happening is the sugars that are part of the vegetables are changing chemically and the chemical form is not good for you. It might be nice to eat more steamed vegetables and fewer of these brown even though they taste good they are not good for you. Same with using certain kinds of oils as cooking oils and high temperatures can become very reactive and undergo chemical reactions with your body that are damaging so there are some of things you do right now pretty much for free. So, this evening has gone superfast and weve have time for one last question. Id like to ask each of you spend the evening anticipating the future and its arguably could be just around the corner and id like to ask each of you what is your top tip for extending your lifespan using a technology that is available today . Where you want to start . The one thing that is clearly proven to improve your resistance to disease and your lifespan is maintaining your lean muscle mass as you age. One of the best ways ive ever seen they followed 9000 men for 25 years and found that the one predictor of resisting dying from cancer was Heart Disease and extended lifespan was those patients who maintained lean muscle mass and strength into their 70s and 80s. Workout. Cynthia. Come back to me. [laughter] tip. One of the things i wanted to say is the answer to that question that no one really wants to hear is exercise. That is important and i think another huge killer is stress. Do whatever you can to reduce the stress in your life and that is much easier said than done but it is really important because it will get you. What you do to reduce your stress tip . I meditate and i also tell myself dont do that. Selfdiscipline. A lot of times i get myself in trouble with projects or something and then i go oh my god its so stressful so i just think im not doing that anymore but ironically you have to have lived while before you learn that lesson. Aubrey, top tip. Ill give three. Goldmedal position is Pay Attention to your own body because everyone is different. You cant take any common denominator and say [inaudible] doing what works for you. The silver metal position is write me a check so i can [laughter] there are people who have done lots. But my goal position is get larry page to write your last check. [laughter] thank you all very much. I hope you have all enjoyed tonights Program Brought to you by im so sorry, cynthia. I believe what i said about brussels sprouts number one. Number two exercise, number three taking time to be happy. Having good social bonds does increase your lifespan, education is quality with lifespan, staying active mentally is good i think diet is important. I personally thank you should keep your eye on it and all sorts of diets. I personally eat a low glycemic index diets but i think it is, there arent good studies but its difficult to see studies of diet and people. Intermittent fasting is another thing that has become popular, diet is a ketogenic diet, keep your eye on the literature, people are starting to do real studies. Scientific studies about these things but your food can be quite important so those are the things and also i think i just one more little point about aubrey what aubrey said i should not do this but he said we have a duty to predict how long it will take and i think we dont have a duty to predict. I think what we have a duty to do is to tell you what can happen in animals and that there are many different ways of slowing down aging in animals and they are different from another animal but we dont have time to go into them. We are animals. Maybe they will work in us but they might not. To me that is the response will thing to say and if they do, its terrific. There you are. Thank you, cynthia. I hope you have all enjoyed this evenings programming brought to you by the Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley. I like to thank doctor aubrey, doctor robert, doctor cynthia and chip walter. Thank you for being here and i like to thank our audience here in palo alto and those of us joining us on the radio and now this meeting of the Commonwealth Club is adjourned. [applause] week ninth this month, we are featuring but to be programs showcasing what is available every weekend on cspan2. Tonight, socialism. Kentucky republican senator rand paul discusses his book, the case against socialism on the history and rise of socialist ideology in america. Then it is Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan Roberts robertson, author of why you should be a socialist. After that, economist Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell and socialism sucks, about the travels to socialist countries. Book tv this week and every weekend on cspan2. Tonight on the communicators. From the annual state of the net conference internet archive creator Brewster Kail talks about documenting the internet. We collect about 800 million pages every day. The total collection is about 800 billion urls, its kind of huge. It turns out that the its only part of what we do. We also archive television, abc, nbc, fox but also International Television and if you go to tv. Archive. Org you can find clips of what other people said and be able to put those in blog posts and the like. The ideas to make it so that people can quote, compare and contrast and think critically about what is happened on television. What the communicators tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan2. Speak cspan has aroundtheclock coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. Watch on demand ondemand anye unfiltered at cspan. Org coronavirus. Tonight, special evening edition of washington journal on the federal response to the Coronavirus Crisis. Join us at 8 p. M. Eastern. Join the conversation on the Coronavirus Crisis on washington journal prime time tonight at 8 p. M. Eastern on cspan. Welcome. The scheduling of this book and panel is certainly timely, given the rising crisis with iran. Well get to that subject eventually, but the point of the book entitled seven pillars and the discussion is to look more broadly in more deeply at the drivers of instability in the middle east. From yemen to syria to iraq, and now with iran, the region more th e