How we can finally win the fight against aging | Aubrey De Grey | TEDxMünchen

I work on Aging and I'm not in favor of it I'm trying to fix this and I thing to be doing okay so um I've got a question for you here's the first question in fact I've got a few questions over the next few minutes um I decided when I was really young like eight or nine years old that I wanted to make a difference in the world and that eventually led me into science for several years I worked in artificial intelligence research and then when I was in my late 20s I switched careers and became a biologist now the reason I did so was because I found out that hardly anyone was working on the world's most important problem namely the fact that we get sick when we were born a long time ago and then we die and that's kind of like not a good thing so so I am you know I really want to know why people don't get this and at Ted or TEDx events I have the right kind of audience for this because these guys people who can't you guys people who come to conferences like this ultimately you are visionaries or at least you are one of the visionaries right you you you would kind of like to UM you know to make a difference in the world so you know let's look at the let's look at the kind of things that I don't think are very controversial that that you probably all agree with you know you care about people you're not skating you're a visionary right you're not scared to aim high you see that there are lots of people out there who are not visionaries who are scared to aim high and ultimately it's not a crime not to want to aim high you may not think much of those people but the fact is you want to help them anyway so um that's it right what if I actually mean well it means making a difference perhaps making a really I mean really big difference and the question that is what is a bigger difference than what he's a smaller difference I think there are two dimensions to that two things that determine whether you're how big a difference you're going to make number one how important the thing is that you're going to work to change and number two how easy it is to change it those two things both have to be looked at because unimportant things we can forget about those they're definitely not big but important things actually if they're easy then they're already done or at least a lot of other people are already trying to do them so you're not going to make much of a difference by being just another person who's also trying to do them then again there's the other end of the spectrum things that would be great but unfortunately they are completely impossible like perpetual motion okay now that's just you know life we know that perpetual motion is genuinely unsolvable but the thing is it's actually quite hard to tell whether something is unsolvable by and large really hard things are actually solvable but they're also the most important things because they're not easy so the first step is to distinguish the two and that's not trivial most people get it wrong most people think that hard things actually are impossible unsolvable that's what we need to fix for now what is the most important hard but not impossible problem climate change well it's pretty hard it's probably solvable in the fullness of time how about these you know I mean well peace that'd be quite nice you know prosperity stuff like that disease that is everybody wants to be healthy being sick is seriously no fun hand up anyone who wants to be sick tomorrow right in particular there are a particular subset of diseases called the diseases of old age diseases that people in the twenties and thirties and forties basically never get but pretty much everyone gets them when they get to be seventy or eighty or ninety what is special about those what's special about that means everybody gets them because everybody the other disease is so now the topic of the talk the real topic why is it that most infectious diseases you know tuberculosis the theory or things like that have been prevented now you may not know this but 200 years ago in every country even the wealthiest countries more than one-third of babies would die before the age of one more than one-third was around 40% in any country that tells you how far we have come against infectious diseases but age-related diseases ain't the same we've made almost no progress what's going on what's so different well is it like you know is it something that we can solve or is it unsolvable first thing I want to look at is the question of what is aging because people think well there's aging and there's the diseases of old age and the aging is this kind of natural thing that's universal and fixing it is like perpetual motion and we might as well just get over it but actually that may not be true because there's 'yes' of old age we don't think about them that way we think of them as curable you know things that we can't cure yet but we'll get there in due course right wrong now when you look at the problem of aging and the ill health of old age most people will say well actually the thing is yeah maybe it's solvable but it's just so intractable there's so many things that go wrong and they go wrong almost at the same time and they interact with each other and make each other worse you know it's just so complicated that's what's been holding us back don't worry you're not supposed to be able to read this slide it's just right but actually that's not the main thing that's holding us back so I'm going to spend the next minute or two telling you what is holding us back I'm going to start by giving a definition of aging that turns out to be necessary because if you ask 10 people what that what aging is then you'll generally get about 11 different answers the thing is that people don't have a good sense of what aging really is so I'm going to give you a definition of aging that is first of all it's it's clear it's mechanistic it says what happens and you know cause and effect but also this definition demystifies aging it tells me what aging is in a way that helps you understand that you already do understand what aging is aging is not a phenomenon of biology really at all it's a phenomenon of physics which is to say it's the same process in the human body or in any other living organism that it is in a car or an aeroplane or any other machine with moving parts whether or not it's alive it's the accumulation of damage that the machine does to itself throughout its operation as a side effect of the normal operation of the machine damage is simply the changes in the structure of the body that are not automatically reversed by machinery that's built in and the body like any simple machine can tolerate some damage but no me some not too much if you have too much you go downhill so it's like this in a living organism metabolism is the word that biologists use to denote the all the entire network of processes that that the body does to keep us alive from one day to the next and damage happened through our life even starting before we're born and eventually that damage causes pathology I've drawn these little arrows in a strange way to indicate what we would like to do we would like to slow down those arrows but actually at this point we can't so here's the problem I told you earlier that the popular conception of the problems of ill health in old age is essentially this aging and the diseases so we could say it in the way that I'm describing on this table there are in most people's heads there are three types of disease there are infections that's column one then there are genetic diseases that's column two things that are few people inherit from their parents and then there are the chronic progressive diseases of old a and then way out there in the stratosphere there's this completely different thing that isn't a disease that the the somewhat like you know nebulous things that we call aging itself sarcopenia that's the loss of muscle mass as we get older that kind of thing that's what most people think but this is how you ought to think all the columns are the same as they were on the previous slide but as you can see the big black line is in a different place the point here is that column three is misinterpreted and misclassified the disease is the chronic progressive diseases of old age are not really disease at all they are not things that can be cured they are parts of aging the only difference between column 3 and column 4 is terminology we have chosen to give some of the aspects of aging disease like names and not other ones and that's all now once you get that right a couple of things come into perspective you get to understand a lot of things first thing is you can understand that the way that we've tried to go about keeping people healthy and old age is obviously never going to work it's called geriatric medicine and geriatric medicine essentially consists of attacking the things in column 3 as if they were in column one attacking the diseases of old age as if they were infections attacking the pathologies the symptoms directly it's never going to work and in from this simple diagram it's obvious why it's never going to work because the damage that the body does to itself in the course of life is continuing to accumulate and so anything that attacks the consequences of that damage is going to become progressively less effective as the person gets older now I'm not the only person to point this out this has been realized by a few people for more than a century now and that's why we have a field called gerontology but unfortunately gerontologist don't get it right either what John told us to do is they say well okay some animals live a lot longer than other animals they age more slowly maybe if we study that variability and we try to understand it really well we might be able to translate that understanding into actual treatments it's not work it's actually this is wise my work metabolism is rather complicated this diagram is a simplified diagram of a small so I'm sure I'm sorry it is of a small subset of what we know about how the body works and you know it's rather mess that handle up anyone who writes software right if you boil it right so anyway right software will understand that this is the ultimate nightmare of uncommented spaghetti code there is no way there is no way that we're ever going to be able to tweak this thing to stop it doing the thing we don't want it to do the creation of damage without at the same time having unintended consequences that stop it from doing things we need to do and that's actually an understatement the real problem is not that this is a simplified diagram of a small subset of what we know about how the body works it the real problem is that it's a simplified diagram of a small subset of what we know about how our body works which is tiny compared to the astronomical amount that we don't know about how the body works even ignoring all the stuff that we don't even know that we don't know yeah so ain't going to happen all right but luckily there is a common alternative a third alternative that was overlooked for a very long time until I started to point it out about 50 and 15 years ago rather than trying to slow down those two arrows the process were metabolism creates damage or the process where damage creates pathology instead we can separate the arrows from each other we can go in and periodically repair the damage so that even though it's being created at the natural rate nevertheless it will not actually accumulate to the point where it's bad for you and of course that's what we already do coming back to my point that Aging in the phenomenon of physics it's what we already successfully do with simpler machines with man-made machines this car of course is more than 100 years old and it's was not designed to be that old it was probably designed to last no more than 10 years or 15 but because it had periodic preventative maintenance throughout its existence it's doing just as well now as when it was built so if it's so simple if it's so obvious then why the hell don't have to but come and give these bloody talks I mean I mean honestly um the answer really is people are scared of getting their hopes up of believing that after the entire history of civilization having failed to bring the world's most important problem under control that finally we might be in striking distance of doing it nobody wants to get their hopes up so they like to make their peace with aging and put it out of their minds and get up with them miserably short lives and and make the best of it well I say that's I say that I say that we ought to fight to actually save some lives and that's why I'm saying we need to wake up and act decisively it turns out that we can for the past 15 years I've been working on essentially this dissection of the problem the types of damage that accumulating the human body can be classified into only seven major categories which I'm listening on the left here of course I don't have a chance to go through them today because I've only got another two minutes and 50 seconds but the what you really need to know is that for each of those seven types of damage there is a very plausible and viable approach to fixing it you've heard of stem cell therapy that's the way to fix one of those types of damage the one at the top loss of cells which is just cells dying and not being automatically replaced by cell division it seems very clear now that this categorization this classification really is actually exhaustive there's not some category number eight lurking out there waiting to be discovered furthermore this is getting traction among very elite and authoritative scientists this is here it's just a picture of our research advisory board 25 extremely prominent and world leading specialists in their various areas who are very much signed up for this damage repair approach furthermore other people are beginning at this point to actually reinvent this idea and pretend it's original this paper came out three years ago annex getting cited roughly once every two days by other papers so it's really saying something that people believe in and it's identical to what I just told you this is they divided Aging into nine categories rather than seven but it's essentially the same idea each of them they have a particular repair approach so that's all nice now the question then is um what progress are we making well the good news is quite a lot of course there is progress worldwide by various scientists and laboratories around the world there's also a charity a foundation called cents Research Foundation which we created around this idea and which I'm the chief science officer this is a selection of the papers that we've published over the past few years demonstrating our progress so it's happening it's real we're really getting there it's there's a long way to go that I mean if you get this book which I wrote a few years ago which actually was translated into German it's called niemals alt in german and you can get it but yes it's it's it's detailed there's a lot of material here because the fact is aging of the human body is really really complicated and fixing it is not going to happen overnight but we are making more and more progress as time goes on we're going to get there but the question is how soon the question has it we actually you have to remember how important this problem is going back to the word I say at the beginning of the talk this problem the problem of aging kills 100,000 people every day that's roughly two-thirds of all deaths it's about 70% of all deaths worldwide in the industrialized world it's about 90% of all deaths are caused by the ill health of old age that's quite bad you know and we've got we've had a few we were under lighted to say that we have had a few wealthy supporters including a guy named Michael graver from Berlin who started web de and Flute de and last minute de so you've probably heard of those website you'll hear of Michael graver as well fairly soon because he's giving us quite a bit of money to get this done but he's not giving us enough we need your money too we need every we need everybody's money so the fact is you know think about it how much difference do you want to make look at that bottom line you can save a life with $1 if you think about how quickly we're going to solve this I reckon that if we could get maybe 10 20 30 40 million dollars per year to do this rather than only four million which is what we have at the moment we could probably get this done about 10 years more quickly and that come at what if you work it out that comes to about $1 per life so that's worth doing thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 363,790

Rating: 4.7520232 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Germany, Science (hard), Aging, Body, Science

Id: AvWtSUdOWVI

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/manjmau]

Seen this guy live. Good presentor. Love it.

[u/wth21]

In a nutshell we neee money

[u/[deleted]]

wait, hasn‘t nature planned for us to having kids to fight aging?

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]