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Can we stop the ticking of the clock anyway? Could we stop the aging process
altogether?
Maybe we can. Look at this, worn out mitochondira
waste energy. Up to 20 percent of all the energy from the food you eat
is burnt in generators the XX mitchondria
but the electricity is wasted, just fizzes across the membrane.
You give rats alpha-lipoic acid or acetyl-l-carnitine,
and suddenly their mitochondria operate at nearly 100 percent
efficiency.
You have killed the aging process. You have stopped it. You restored them to
maximum efficiency
that has an impact on the way rats
mazes.It has impact on how they remember. It has an impact
on their healing capacity. What about medicine which does this?
What about the medicine which you could take every day for a month, and throw it
away,
which would lower your blood pressure to normal, and give you a total body lift
at the same time? Imagine walking down the street, you don't know whether a
woman is 19 or 90.
Actually it's in clinical trials, did you know that?
Now the company is called Altion but don't buy the shares. Why? Because it
only works in mice and rats.
They get a total body lift. What it does is, it restores the elastin in the skin.
It dissolves out the carbohydrates, the sugars
which map to get the elastin fibres as we get older.
It dissolves them into the bloodstream where they get eaten up as fuel.
As a result, not only the blood vessels start to stretch in the normal way,
but so does the skin. Extraordinary.
What would happen if we found a way to actually make it work in humans?
What happens to blood pressure therapy then? A lot of companies are quite
worried about that.
What about monkeys? We're keeping mice and rats alive to the age
170 in human terms.
We're keeping dogs alive to the age of 140.
We keep earthworms alive to the age, in human terms,
of 200 years and now we've started on monkeys. We know the story about
restricting calories,
but this is different. You can get many of the effects of restricting calories
in animals
by giving them metformin, which is a drug you use to treat diabetes in old
people.
If you give it to healthy people, they're fine, they don't get any side effects except
a problem with alcohol, just tell them not to drink alcohol and they'll be fine.
And they can take a drug for 20 cents a day, which perhaps, will give them
the same metabolic effect as starving them.
It's very interesting. What it does is it clips
off the peak of sugar level after you eat a meal.
After 20 years we don't know what the result will be, because we haven't been
following for longer than 20 years, but after 20 years in some studies
80 percent of the monkeys are alive vs. only 50 percent on normal calories.
They have less cancer, less diabetes, less heart disease, less strokes.
And then of course with the stem cell story we know how to
repair the brains of mice and rats that have had strokes. We have animals
running around their cages after transecting their spinal cords.
We know that your grown brain can repair itself, it does so every day, using
bone marrow stem cells.
How do we know that? Because..put your hands up if you knew that.
I'm sure you've heard the story about a man-
the woman-with the male brain? Women with leukemia,
irradiated, and cured.
Cured, by a bone marrow transplant. From
a wonderful, wonderful match.
From a male donor. When she died, she gave her body to medical research and
they did all kinds of things, and
someone had a wild thought of actually inspecting the cellular structure
her brain. And they discovered her brain was full
XY chromosomes. And
male cells had seeded
her brain with new viable tissue
from her bone marrow. And it had clearly been doing so
every hour, of every day, that she had lived.
We're not quite sure what the
exact functions of those brain cells are, whether they contributed
to consciousness, or whether they're just supportive structures, but we're learning all kinds
of things about the regenerative nature
a brain tissue, that has made us think again, about the power
of stem cells. And then, of course, we start combining them, as we've already heard
today,
with polymer structures of various kinds, and we start to see
other extraordinary possibilities. Not just growing
tracheas, but all other kinds of other organs as well.
Fascinating. Well, what about the non-aging whale? I'm really interested about
another I'm going to show you, which allows us read the genetic code
of human beings at high speed. We know that there are some kind of whales which don't
get old.
There's no sign of aging in them whatsoever. You follow this
by looking at the Rockfish Project which is an American
project. I think that some of that team will win Nobel Prizes for aging.
Why? Because rockfish divide into two types:
Some of them are dead in 20 years and some of them live to the age of 100.
We have no idea why.The ones that live until they're 200, they die of stuff,
like infections and things, but they don't get old.
Every one of you, has seen a doctor in the last two years,
but if you have, it will have been because of your birth certificate.
Almost certainly, because of something that is related directly to your age.
But not these ones. The whales too, some of these humpback whales live to the age of
200, the rest are dead in 20 years.
We know it's a gene trick. It's a gene trick that must be the same probably, in the
rock
fish as in the whale. We are unable to find a single mechanism
of physiological aging in these creatures.
Soon we will know what those gene differences are, and all genes do, and make
proteins and we'll know what the proteins are too.
Which will enable us, perhaps, to activate a similar gene inside a human being.
By the way, parrots and turtles probably have the same gene if you think about it.