Seeking immortality: Aubrey de Grey at TEDxSalford

this is the biggest tedx i've ever spoken at this is actually bigger than the real ted so congratulations to all the organizers for making that happen i'm very impressed indeed um yeah i'm not really keen on aging i i'm i'm not in favor of it but unlike most of you i'm really doing something about it um where are my slides can i have my slides excellent great um do i have a clicker marvelous here's what we like um so i'll explain what this this means later on this bit is about the sweet spot between prevention and treatment uh we'll worry about that in a minute um but first of all let me tell you one of the two things about aging first of all it's fantastically expensive this is just statistics from um from the usa because it happens to be the statistics that i have the best information on the red line shows how much bigger the us economy has grown over the past 50 years the blue line shows how much bigger the expenditure in america on medical care has gone up and it doesn't look too dramatic when you look at it like that but if you divide one by the other you get the green line that shows you what proportion of the us economy is spent on medical care it's gone up from like five percent in 1960 to something like 18 that's how unbelievably expensive aging is good marvelous so the first question we've got to ask is how come how come we're so hopeless at developing medicines that actually eliminate and alleviate and minimize the impact of the diseases of old age i mean we've done really really well on the diseases that affect people irrespective of what age they are you know infectious diseases 200 years ago literally 40 40 of babies died before the age of one and i can tell you one thing they didn't die of aging they died of infectious diseases and we got really good at stopping that from happening pretty much as soon as people figured out that that um hygiene was quite a good idea and we started actually implementing it and as prosperity increased we were implementing it in a more and more widespread way of course we started to actually develop vaccines and antibiotics and so on not long after that and things got better why haven't we been able to get anywhere to speak of when it comes to the diseases of old age well ultimately here's why aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place it is the lifelong accumulation of damage to the body and that damage occurs as an intrinsic unavoidable side effect of the way the body normally works the body is set up to tolerate quite a lot of damage but only quite a lot not an infinite amount and so eventually the body gets to the point where it's got too much damage and things start to go downhill that's all that aging is it's a really really simple concept and when when people tell you we don't know what aging is they're not they're talking nonsense that we do know what aging is that's all it is so now what about the diseases of old age that are so expensive as i told you a minute ago well hello they're parts of aging how could a disease be a disease of old age how could it be something that actually predominantly affects people who were born a long time ago the answer is because it's some part of the later stages of this process that goes on throughout life so it is simply having too much of the damage that being alive causes that's all that age-related diseases are about and what that means is it's no surprise whatsoever that we have made no real impact on those diseases despite the immense amount of effort that we have put into trying these diseases are universal you are going to get these diseases if you don't get the others the only thing that stops you from getting cancer is dying of heart disease first and vice versa so we're not going to be able ever to cure these diseases in the strict sense in the sense in which we can cure tuberculosis or something when you cure an infectious disease you do something once and it eliminates it from the body so that that person is never going to experience that disease again unless and until they are reinfected aging is not like that aging being a side effect of being alive in the first place we cannot eliminate it from the body in one-off treatments like that and make someone non-aging permanently but that does not mean that these phenomena these diseases of old age are are intrinsically resistant to medical intervention they are amenable to medical intervention it's just it has to be a different type of intervention so first of all let me just say one more thing about the economy that bizarrely underappreciated truth that i just told you about is reflected in not only what we spend on medical care but also in what we spend on medical research and again i'm giving you here statistics from the usa but i can assure you that it's exactly the same here it's exactly the same in any other country in the industrialized world in the usa there's a an organization called the national institutes of health it's part of the government and it spends roughly 30 billion dollars on medical research on trying to develop treatments that work better against the diseases and disabilities that people suffer only three percent of that money goes to the institute the the component of the nih called the national institute on aging despite the fact that maybe 90 percent of medical expenditure goes on the diseases of old age now what's going on there well actually there are other institutes dedicated to specific diseases to cancer to heart disease to diabetes and so on and they're actually much bigger than the national institute on aging but as i've just explained they're trying to attack these diseases in the wrong way they're trying to attack them as if they could eliminate them from the body it's actually even worse than that within the national institute on aging only one-sixth of the budget is spent on actually trying to understand aging that's the division of aging biology the rest of it is spent on things like improving the dignity of the elderly and making sure that you know local councils build ramps on curbs and stuff um and even within the division of aging biology literally well certainly less than ten percent probably more like two percent is spent on actually doing anything about aging trying to develop therapies or knowledge that will lead towards therapies as opposed to knowledge that simply tries to understand aging as a phenomenon you know so it's unbelievable how little money is spent central foundation the organization that's been created around my work is a charity based in california and we've only existed for four years and we're already not much smaller than the amount of money that the government of the usa is spending on this that's absolutely scandalous and it's scandalous because of this misapprehension of what aging is and how we might actually go about dealing with it so how might we go about dealing with it let's talk about some actual facts now what i've essentially told you so far is that all the effort all the money all the thinking that goes on in the vast majority of people's minds including people who have deep pockets in the usa and the uk and everywhere else is over here it's all about treating the pathologies of old age as if they were diseases like any other disease and trying to eliminate them from the body bashing away at the symptoms and just kind of hoping for the best and putting one's head in the sand to be perfectly honest pretending that this might have some significant effect despite the fact that it never has had and because of the nature of diseases of old age it never can have there are some people out there who have known this for quite a long time for maybe the past century actually there have been a few scientists out there who have actually faced up to the complete um unrealistic nature of the geriatrics approach and they've been looking at what i'm going to call the gerontology approach which is essentially to say well okay look some animals live a lot longer than other animals they age more slowly than other animals in within a species some humans seem to age more slowly than other humans maybe we can study that and find out a lot of detail about how that happens and having done so maybe we'll be able to turn that knowledge into some kind of therapy to slow down the aging of aboriginally aging humans that would be wonderful bit of a problem um we haven't actually succeeded and i'll tell you why in a second well no i'll tell you what now is that the reason why is because what that would involve is messing around with this thing here metabolism is the word that biologists use when they want to say being alive it's the normal operation of the human body everything that we have to do in our bodies from one moment to the next from one day to the next just to keep going in order to make this approach work to slow down the rate at which metabolism does itself damage the body like itself damage we are going to have to somehow tune this and rebuild the way that metabolism works and that is incredibly hard biologists still understand the human body very poorly and that means that trying to play with it and thereby stop it from making this damage or stop it from making it so quickly is incredibly difficult to do without doing more harm than good by in some way um you know unintended side effects of the modifications one made and that's essentially why people who have been adopting this approach gerontologists over the past maybe century and certainly over the past 30 or 40 years have become extremely pessimistic about the prospects of ever developing medicines that can substantially postpone the disease and disability of old age but there is in fact a third approach which somehow was almost entirely overlooked until about 10 or 12 years ago when i started promoting it i'm going to call it the maintenance approach and you'll see how intuitive the maintenance approach is in a moment first i'm just going to define it the maintenance approach simply says let's not try and slow down this process where metabolism creates damage and let's also not try to combat this process where damage eventually leads to these pathologies these diseases and disabilities instead let's uncouple those two processes from each other let's separate them by periodically diving in and repairing this damage when it is still sub-pathogenic when it is still at the level that is not actually um causing pathologies because it is tolerated by the way the body is naturally set up and i claim that that's a much much more realistic plausible near-term option an option that we have a respectable chance of implementing in the next few decades at worst now why is it so intuitive well simply because the human body is a machine the human body is a very very complicated machine but it's still a machine and therefore it's reasonable that we could extend the healthy fully functioning longevity of the human body by the same kind of approach that we already successfully use to extend the longevity of simple man-made machines here's one this car is 100 years older thereabouts it was not designed to last 100 years it was designed to last 10 or 15 years the reason it's lasted longer is because the people who owned it have done a lot of maintenance on it they have done a greater amount of maintenance than the law requires more comprehensive maintenance and it's worked sufficiently comprehensive maintenance on any machine has the capacity to keep it going just as well as when it was first created and the approach that i'm telling you about today for combating aging is exactly the same so what does it actually amount to well in order to tell you that i have to tell you a little bit more about what this damage is that the body does to itself as a side effect of its normal operation and the big breakthrough that allowed this approach to actually be fleshed out and pursued in the lab over the past decade or more was to realize that even though there are many many many different types of damage at the molecular level and the cellular level they can all be classified into a very manageable number of categories just seven major categories here's the list of categories and i've only got a ted length talk i've only got five and a half minutes left so i'm only going to go through them very quickly i'm just going to talk about this one first of all because you've heard about it cell loss that's simply cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells the reason you've heard about that is because stem cell therapy which i'm quite sure you all have heard of is simply the way to repair that it's the way to repair that damage and this is the type of damage that occurs in aging just as elsewhere in parkinson's disease for example cells in a particular part of the brain die and they're not naturally replaced and if they die too fast you get parkinson's disease the way to fix that is stem cell therapy to replace the cells that die and we can't quite do it yet it's in clinical trials early stage sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't when it does it works spectacularly and i am completely convinced that within not very long we will have reliable cures for parkinson's disease that consist of this maintenance approach so as i said i can't go through all the others right now but i will talk a little bit about why i think this is an exhaustive classification it's been the same list for about 30 years since well before i came along all of these things have been studied by gerontologists furthermore i've been actually challenging people to add to this list for at least a decade and nobody has come up with any cogent uh reason to add anything to it so it's looking pretty good right now let me say a little bit more about the relationship between damage and disease some of these relationships are a little complicated so it's worth putting this into your head in in a clear way sometimes the relationship is simple so in the case of cancer cancer comes down to exactly one of these seven types of damage cells dividing when they're not supposed to i'm calling them division obsessed that's a nice one-to-one relationship but it's not like that with heart disease because lots of different things go wrong in the heart during aging sometimes it's loss of cells that's when your heart stops just because the pacemaker cells that control the heartbeat um are insufficiently numerous anymore sometimes it's atherosclerosis which causes heart attacks or strokes and that is the result of molecular garbage accumulating inside cells inside cells in the artery wall sometimes it's actually garbage accumulating between cells that causes a very nasty phenomenon called senile cardiac amyloidosis which is caused which kills very old people a lot actually people over 100 um and finally it's possible to get arteriosclerosis that's hardening of the arteries which causes hypertension and all the effects of that and that's caused by changes to this thing called the extracellular matrix so rather more complicated story but it's still a very clear story we can say in a in a pretty confident way how hearts go wrong in old age it's the same with alzheimer's there are three types of damage that happen in alzheimer's molecular garbage inside cells again called tangles outside cells called plaques cells dying so it's a clear kind of relationship so now the bottom line what do we do about it how do we actually implement the maintenance approach there are four fundamental paradigms they all begin with r they are called replacement removal repair and reinforcement and they apply to these seven categories in oh i've not going on too much hello good um yeah in these various ways what that means in concrete terms is these things i've talked about cell therapy already um without going through all of these in too much detail we've got particular ways to do all these things sometimes replacement sometimes simply elimination of the superfluous material the garbage that's accumulated sometimes uh repair of the material very occasionally in a couple of cases reinforcement that means making the cell robust so that the damage which would normally have caused the pathology no longer does so i want to talk very briefly my last minute and a half about one thing that we're doing in our lab uh which involves the number one cause of death in the western world cardiovascular disease causes heart attacks and strokes it all begins with these things called foam cells which are originally white blood cells they become poisoned by toxins in the bloodstream the main toxin that's responsible is known it's called seven keto cholesterol that's this thing and we found some bacteria that could eat it we then found out how they eat it we found out the enzymes that they use to break it down and we found out how to modify those enzymes so that they can go into human cells go to the right place in the cell that need that they're needed which is called the lysosome and actually do their job there and it actually works cells are protected from this toxic substance that's what these grafts are showing so this is pretty good news but as i've explained the way to apply comprehensive maintenance to aging is a divide and conquer approach it is not a magic bullet it is not some single thing that we can do let alone a single thing that we could do just once so we're going to have to get used to the idea not only of preventative medicine treating people who are not yet sick but also actually doing a lot of different medicines to the same people at the same time we are pursuing as you can see here a lot of different projects we're trying to cover all the bases but we've only got a few million dollars to spend so it's not too good now the biography of me in the program called me a maverick and it used to be somewhat reasonable to call me a maverick but it isn't reasonable anymore because this concept is getting a lot of support we don't just have a foundation behind this we have a large number of extremely prestigious luminary scientists which who are advising us and who has have very publicly aligned themselves with this concept so this is an idea which is really getting traction now and luckily actually getting um experimental uh effort that's actually happening but of course there's still a great deal to do a couple of months ago i ran this conference or we ran it in cambridge in which again we had a lot of very prestigious scientists involved we have if you want to know more about the organization and annual report on our website and so you can see what's going on but the key thing i want to end with since my time is run out is i want you to understand that it's not just the scientists that are responsible for hastening the development of this work everyone can do something uh you're not allowed to ask the money at ted so this is me not asking for money um but but but i will say that even though we're a u.s charity we do have a subsidiary that's a uk charity just in case you wanted to know um uh and um so we've got um you know an educational arm we've got obviously if any of you are biologists choose a field that's relevant to this and the key thing i said there at the bottom everybody needs to engage in advocacy if you don't want to get alzheimer's disease or cancer or diabetes or cardiovascular disease and if you don't want your parents to get those things then get out there and reduce the chances of their doing so by hastening this work by getting people to understand that aging is potentially amenable to medical intervention in your lifetime thanks very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 282,113

Keywords: Science, United Kingdom (Country), ted x, Biology (Field Of Study), aging, Aubrey De Grey (Author), biology, ted, English Language (Human Language), English, ted talk, MediaCityUK, Salford Greater Manchester (City/Town/Village), Cambridge, tedx talks, TEDxSalford, TEDx, Immortality (Character Power), biogerontologist, Medicine (Field Of Study), tedx, Salford, ted talks, tedx talk, SENS, Technology (Professional Field)

Id: T0lvxTm2iLg

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 26 2014