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Can Aging Really Be Reversed? with Dr. Michael Fossel - E98
32 Plays3 days ago
Most of us think aging is inevitable - a slow, steady decline we can only hope to delay.
Stuck with this mindset, people scramble for small wins: another supplement, a new diet, anything to slow the clock. But this habit of only “managing” aging shuts us off from a bigger question: Could aging itself actually be reversed? The gap between current research and true breakthroughs leaves even the most motivated feeling powerless, especially with chronic diseases like Alzheimer's still taking so much from families and lives.
In this episode, we rethink aging as something more dynamic and more in our control than we realize. You’ll hear from someone challenging decades of conventional wisdom, and get a glimpse into the science and persistence fueling a completely different future for healthspan.
Dr. Michael Fossel serves as chairman of the board of Telocyte, a biotech company developing telomerase therapy for Alzheimer's disease, with FDA-sponsored human trials planned to target the underlying disease process. His invited lecture at Harvard Business School discussed Telocyte, age-related disease, and biotechnology. A recognized expert in aging and telomere biology, Dr. Fossel has authored over 100 scientific articles, book chapters, and books, and has lectured internationally, including at the National Institutes of Health.
“Anybody who thinks you can reverse aging is naive. Anyone who thinks you can't reverse aging is just as naive.” - Dr. Michael Fossel
In this episode you will learn:
- Why most aging research only looks to slow, not reverse, the aging process, and what new science shows.
- How advances in telomere research could shift the way we treat age-related diseases like Alzheimer's.
- The main ways these new treatments might reach people and what steps are next for human trials.
- What habits and daily choices still matter most while we wait for new therapies.
- Why thinking about aging as a set process is mistaken and how that mind shift matters.
- The role of cost, access, and ethics in making future therapies open to everyone - not just the wealthy.
Resources
- Connect with Dr. Michael Fossel on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-fossel-md-phd-4196255/
- Learn more about his offerings: https://michaelfossel.com/
- Buy his books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Michael-Fossel/author/B000APTG28
This podcast was produced by the team at Zapods Podcast Agency:
https://www.zapods.com
Find the products, practices, and routines discussed on the Alively website:
https://alively.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Aging and the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
but was always what annoyed me 50 years ago when i ran into this aging. just happens. Well, it doesn't just happen. It's much more complicated than that. you know Every cell in your body is at least several decades old. Well, except that you got that first cell from your mother who got from her mother, it from her mother. So quite literally, in a biological sense, you're about 4 billion years old. You look marvelous.
00:00:17
Speaker
Why does it happen certain times, not other times? That's a real question. It's got real answers.
00:00:25
Speaker
This is the Home of Healthspan podcast, where we profile health and wellness role models, sharing their stories and the tools, practices, and routines they use to live a lively life.
Meet Dr. Fossil and His Expertise
00:00:38
Speaker
Dr. Fossil, welcome to the Home of Healthspan podcast. Thank you very much, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be with you today. It is a pleasure to have you. i think this is going to be a little different than our other episodes. And we'll talk about what I mean by that shortly. But before we jump into that, how would you describe yourself?
00:00:57
Speaker
I am a lively gardener who spent about 50 years involved in age-related research, and I'm finally getting someplace. They say the overnight success, a decade in the making. And this is overnight success, five decades in the making.
00:01:08
Speaker
That's about right. Yeah. And I mean, it's it's appropriate. So i was I gave a talk for Harvard Business School about biotech. And I said, I can't tell you how to succeed, but I tell you how to fail. And the absolute best way to fail is to quit.
00:01:20
Speaker
I could have quit 50 years ago. No, thanks. Yeah. Yeah. That's a you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. So you got it on the nose.
Exploring 'Reversal' and Aging Reversal
00:01:29
Speaker
So how we connected your book reversal. And I find this really, really interesting because so much of our show, so many of our episodes, so much of our approach is about things people can do to slow down the pace of aging, to to try to just delay the train that's eventually going to crash.
00:01:49
Speaker
And you come at it in a very different way and saying, hey, why are we selling ourselves short? why Why would we make that the goal? Why wouldn't we look at turning it around on itself and say, can we actually reverse what's going on in some of these instances?
00:02:04
Speaker
And so what was it that made you think that's even a possible thing to do in biology? Yeah.
History and Future of Aging Research
00:02:13
Speaker
It's funny to ask that because about 30 years ago, ah next month, I gave a talk at the and NIH on reversing aging. And I said something is still true now, it was true then, which is I said, anybody who thinks you can reverse aging is naive.
00:02:25
Speaker
Anyone who thinks you can't reverse aging is just as naive. If you're sensible at all, you'll say, where's the data? um So it really is a question of where's the data? But for me, i think it came about, again, about 30 or so years ago where I began to see some of the early work on cell senescence, cell aging, ah telomerase, telomeres. And I began to put it together.
00:02:45
Speaker
And then about 1998, the very first data came out that showed we can reverse aging in human cells. Two years later, human tissues. um And then since that time, to the extent we're technically able to do it right in animals. So, yeah, I think it's quite doable.
00:03:01
Speaker
We'll just have see. Okay, so yeah we started seeing evidence with the telomeres, extending the length of telomeres and and tissues, you're saying? Well, in 1998, there was a premier article in Science. It was one of those articles that's almost impossible to read. I have had to go back.
00:03:18
Speaker
i I took the main author out for a beer in Menlo Park and then went back and dug through his slides and then reread the article. and made sense. But what he had shown is, he and his group at Jaron, that you could actually reverse aging in human fibroblasts.
00:03:31
Speaker
in the lab in petri dishes, basically, you know in in vitro. um And then two years later, the same sort of thing was done, but this was ex vivo. They took human ah cells, in this case, subendothelial cells from coronary arteries, as well as bone cells, a few other cells, and showed that when you transplanted them onto an immunocompromised animal,
00:03:52
Speaker
you could actually grow young human tissue from old human tissue. So we began to realize it was doable. Then the question was, that's nice, but what about me? you know What about people? And there, the first studies that looked at that really in animals were more than a dozen years ago, I think about 14 years ago, when Ron DePinno did it at Harvard in ah a way that
Challenges in Aging Research
00:04:12
Speaker
doesn't help us. It was altering the germ cell line with an estrogen switch. But then about a dozen years ago, Maria Blasco in Madrid did the same thing using what's currently an AV vector that we use, for example, um for the Zolgensma approach.
00:04:27
Speaker
So it's a technique that we can take to human trials. The FDA is used to it in a sense. It's not optimal. but it's doable and it has limitations. We know that it doesn't affect all the cells we'd like to affect, but even then it has dramatic effects.
00:04:41
Speaker
So the question is what happens when we improve it? We'll see.
Future Prospects and Human Trials
00:04:44
Speaker
Okay. And so you're saying we'll see, I mean, this is research going back more than a quarter century initially, and then it took half that time, 12 or 13 years for the kind of next wave. And I guess now we're 12 or 13 years since then, maybe getting the next wave.
00:04:59
Speaker
What is it? Is it funding? What is it that's such a big gap. You would think, whoa, this is possible. Everything should pour into this because of the downstream effects and costs of not.
00:05:12
Speaker
It's not just funding, although that's true. But the question is, where why why hasn't there been funding? And there, I think you're dealing with a mindset that we see all over the longevity community globally, which is this idea of let's slow down aging a little bit rather than reverse it. It reminds me of, ah i think it was 1895, the world's preeminent physicist, Lord Kelvin, said we'll never have heavier than air flight.
00:05:34
Speaker
and It was only eight years later who was proven wrong. but But that's sort of thinking. you know If I'd gone back to 1895 in Paris and said, here's an AI, there's a couple of AIs, you have Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT, quantum computers, massive... ah What we would have done is ask the wrong question.
00:05:50
Speaker
How do you actually get the perfect balloon flight? Wrong question. And i think it's the wrong question we ask now. And investors do the same thing. They look at all the potentials out there for various potential interventions, and they don't step back and say, wait a minute, are we asking the wrong question?
00:06:05
Speaker
That is not how do we perfect the hot air balloon, but can we do better? So it's ah it's a matter of sort of digging in the wrong place. We've been digging in the wrong place very effectively. You know, but when you're digging in the wrong place, it doesn't matter how big the steam shovel is, the backhoe is, the number of people you put into or the funding or the n NIH, ah you know, of the PhDs.
00:06:27
Speaker
It's a matter of digging in the wrong place. So it's been convincing investors to do that and convincing, as it will be, the FDA to go ahead with it. We'll see. That does make a lot sense. had a very successful kind of startup friend that talked about creating companies as much like drilling for oil.
00:06:43
Speaker
And that you can be the most resourced, you can have the smartest people, your exon, right? you You know everything and you still can come up dry if you're not in the right place. Or you could be a wildcatter without all that.
00:06:54
Speaker
And sometimes you hit a gusher. And so it's really, you need to know the right place to dig. And when you're above the ground, it's not always clear. And so with having seen this research and presumably this is what led to you publishing this book to say, hey, we can think about this differently.
00:07:13
Speaker
What do the next five, 10 years look like for this of seeing, hey, can we do this in humans? What does that look like? And then how does it ultimately get to where someone listening to this, not Silicon Valley billionaire, but someone listening to this is able to access whatever it is that works.
00:07:32
Speaker
Well, you know, the first thing we need to do is take this to FDA human trials. doesn't have to be FDA, but it's still sort of the the global gold standard. Strategically, our first target is going to be Alzheimer's disease.
00:07:43
Speaker
If I were to say to you, listen, to you you've got some nasolabial wrinkles and would you like an experimental gene therapy? The answer should be no. Come back to me in five years. Show me the data, you know risk, benefit. Okay.
00:07:54
Speaker
But I can't even finish the sentence about Alzheimer's before people volunteer because, you know, it's a fatal disease. And there have been more than 3,100 interventional trials listed on clinicaltrials.gov.
00:08:05
Speaker
By global consensus, none of them work. I mean, the best you can say is that some of the monoclonal antibodies, leukemia comes to mind, There's a statistical ah inference that it may slow the vector, slow the downhill slide.
00:08:17
Speaker
But nobody has been able to prove that it cures it. And I think that's what we can do. So first thing we have to do is do it. We'll go after Alzheimer's first because it's a major target. um And it it's you know it
Alzheimer's as a Research Priority
00:08:28
Speaker
gives us a little leeway.
00:08:29
Speaker
After that, we're going to go after cardiovascular disease. Yeah, which is the single largest killer globally, right? Yes, globally, yes i mean, there are exceptions. Like the UK currently claims that Alzheimer's is the major killer, but it depends on the year you're looking at and the country you're looking at. But yes, those are the big ones. Neurodegenerative disease and cardiovascular disease. And they overlap too. i mean, a lot of neurodegenerative disease is probably cardiovascular too.
00:08:52
Speaker
Right. And so when you say we'll go after it, what is the mechanism? So what what is the it that that you're going to roll out to test on these Alzheimer's patients? What we're really doing is resetting gene expression.
00:09:05
Speaker
If I looked at my genes at age seven and my genes now at 75, I have the same genes, but they're expressed differently. Put it bluntly, the turnover rate on most molecules is slower now than it was then.
00:09:16
Speaker
But what we're doing is resetting the rate of turnover, among other things, um so that your cells, instead of acting like 75-year-old cells, will act like at least, say, 50-year-old cells or whatever we can get to. So let me give you another example of this. um If you came to me and said, I've got a patient, I want to know if they have Alzheimer's, and you can only ask one question about that patient, what would it be?
00:09:37
Speaker
I wouldn't ask about their genes. I wouldn't ask about their family history. I wouldn't ask about head trauma and cardiac or CNS infections. I'd say, how old are they? because you know, five-year-olds don't get much in the way of Alzheimer's and 95-year-olds do.
00:09:50
Speaker
and So the major risk factor is that, and that has to do with cell aging, and that's what we intend to to reset. And what does resetting, is in apologies for my ignorance here, but how do you reset a gene like that?
00:10:05
Speaker
That's a key question, and let me put it differently. you know I could reset upstream risk factors. That is, i could I could say, you know, what about your genes? Can we change your genes, for example, your ApoE4 genes?
00:10:15
Speaker
whole set of upstream risk factors, your diet, your smoke, alcohol, your head injuries, your infects, all of those things. I could try to reset downstream things. For example, your ApoE, your beta amyloid, your tau tangles, all these are downstream things.
00:10:30
Speaker
But in between, there's sort of a black box. The question is not what causes it, you know how does it work, but where's the optimal point of intervention clinically and financially that is something that works well and is relatively cheap.
00:10:43
Speaker
And The data suggests, and again, it's borne out by experiments and in cells and tissues and animals, that the most effective point of intervention is the telomere. If we reset the telomere, it resets the pattern of gene expression. And again, that's just the facts. That's what happens.
00:10:59
Speaker
So that's what we're going to go after. Think of it as the conductor of an orchestra. Rather than retuning the violin or passing out a different sheet to the first violinist, we're just going to reset the a score for the entire orchestra.
00:11:10
Speaker
Okay, so you go after the telomere and how is that done? is it Is it like a vaccine? You take a shot? I mean, what what is the mechanism to actually do that? Yeah, there are a number of ways you could do it. The the big ones right now are either to use a viral delivery system like AAV or lentivirus, things like that, or to go after it with an mRNA approach and lipid nanoparticles, for example. We're going to look at both. the I think that five years from now, we won't be using AV at all. We'll be using essentially lipid nanoparticles and hand-built ones, you know especially custom-built ones that target what we want.
00:11:48
Speaker
But right now, the the the state of the art is sort of um changing every week. And what we're going to probably start with is looking at both both approaches and so it would be two different trials entirely? or Well, actually, we'll start with large animal studies. We'll actually we'll do whatever the FDA wants us to do. And that that has been changing for years and it's been changing again in the last year.
00:12:11
Speaker
And we're not concerned with the politics. We just want to know what the rules are because we'll follow them So we'll probably start with a large animal study like beagles, and we'll find older beagles and see if we can reset function using both the the mRNA approach and the DNA approach and see which
Animal Trials and Intervention Methods
00:12:27
Speaker
works best.
00:12:28
Speaker
And as I say, well whatever works, at whatever seems to be safest and most effective, that's what we'll take to the FDA. Our default will be you to use an AV with ah ah you know with a promoter and a human telomerase gene.
00:12:42
Speaker
Okay. And so it's, it's just two trials or you would do a third saying, Hey, the combo, let's see if there's something different. If you did both of these. No, it's pretty much two ways of delivering it. So will you look at both? But you know none of that's set in stone.
00:12:54
Speaker
And we expect that we'll probably be starting that animal trial later this year or next year. And we will be keeping an eye on the market as it changes. As I say, you know the AAV serotypes changing every week. The best promoters are changing every week. There are all sorts of variables in this. And we'll be asking ourselves, what's the best at the time we begin?
00:13:14
Speaker
Okay. And again, because I don't know the specifics, are these shots? Are these pills? Like how, when you're going to a beagle, how are you getting this to them? to Shots. In fact, right now, if I were to run this human trial for Alzheimer's, think of it as a single lumbar puncture.
00:13:32
Speaker
and we'd expect to see results within six months. And again, not slowing, but improving cognitive status. Okay, so, and it's once a year or it's once, okay. Think of it as a once, but now think of something like a tetanus vaccine. You get a tetanus vaccine and current recommendations are about every decade, you should get another one.
00:13:51
Speaker
And the same is true of COVID shots and lots of other things. Think of it that way. That is, to be a little more specific, what I'm doing is trying to reset cell function in, for example, your brain.
00:14:02
Speaker
And so instead of having a 70-year-old brain, you effectively have the 50-year-old brain when you didn't have Alzheimer's. But that also means 20 years from now, you'll have 70-year-old brain again. So the best estimates we've got currently is that about every five or 10 years, and we'll have to see what happens in the dogs and what happens in humans. We've seen it in mice, but different different setup. We'll have to see what it is. So we'll not only be trying to treat you, but then following you to see what happens after that and when do you need to be treated again.
00:14:28
Speaker
and And is the reset... I realize it's a variable that you're just putting out there, but is the the thought that the reset is it can reverse the clock by 20 years or is it that it reverses the clock to 50? So there's no point in doing it until you're 50, but you at you could do it at 60 and you'd only save 10 years. which Which is it? Is it amount of time or percent of time?
00:14:53
Speaker
It's not really the time. It's how it's how your brain is working. ah you know Some people do really get Alzheimer's at age 25. ah Very unusual genes, but it happens. Some people are age 100 and they never have it. So it really will be a question of your physical health as time goes by.
00:15:09
Speaker
And if we can reset, and it may it may work different ways for different parts. You know, your knees may be one thing, your cardiovascular system, another, your brain, a third, your kidney function. So there are a lot of unknowns in this that we're going to have to learn about. Best I can say is that we'll keep an eye on people and reset them when it seems to be to their advantage.
00:15:28
Speaker
And can you stack it? Because I guess if it's based on your brain, right, you're at 70, you reset to 50. So it took to six months and like it worked and you're at 50. Could you then go go again and let me get to 30? And we decide, hey, 30 is actually the target. That's where.
00:15:43
Speaker
Good question. Although as my wife once said, that's fine, but she wouldn't be 18 again for anything under the sun when things matter to me. You're right. Okay. We don't know. That's a good question. We don't know. And then, so if the idea is dogs, beagles, animal studies, what is the timeline for something like that? How long, once you start running it, is this a decade-long trial? Is it five years?
00:16:06
Speaker
if things go well, and things never go well, because you're probably only, you know, anybody who's gotten involved in biotech or company, anything else to realize, things- It's always going to cost race as much. Every now and then, God blesses you. But no, I mean, to be realistic, I think that it would be realistic to think that if nothing goes wrong,
00:16:22
Speaker
We could be in human trials in two years and and within six months after that, have a readout on the data.
Lifestyle and Molecular Aging Interventions
00:16:30
Speaker
That is way faster than I thought possible. Okay. And and even if it's twice as long, I mean, to to have human trials within four years and in five years, read out the data. Yeah, that's...
00:16:42
Speaker
That's incredible, okay. And so, I mean, I think this is what rick Kurzweil and ah Peter Diamandis, a lot a lot of these people talk about of the escape velocity. Like once you kind of get to this point,
00:16:55
Speaker
there's no real end date because you can keep reversing and and resetting. All bets are off. Right. And so the really important thing to do in the interim is take care of yourself.
00:17:06
Speaker
And so yes what are the things, I mean, they're certainly the the normal lifestyle things, sleep well, eat well, move your body. They're molecules. i know you put some in your book like epithelon or rapamycin, like other things that you can do that have shown, hey, this can extend.
00:17:22
Speaker
What is that package of things? Maybe the basic lifestyle, but then maybe some of the more arcane things that our listeners might be is not be as familiar with. I would, how I put this?
00:17:34
Speaker
And maybe ah maybe that's a funny way, but I would take a lot of that with a grain of um You know, the the things that people claim to slow aging, you wait a year and you discover somebody showed it didn't work. And then two years after that, they show it does work. And then after that. So it it really is hard to get a read on this, ah partly because the data is difficult.
00:17:55
Speaker
partly because, to be honest, some people do actually make up data. Most people don't, but it does happen. So it makes it really hard to follow this. Also, there are fashions out there. For example, if you look at at replacement of blood products, that actually goes back almost a century to the beginning of of people dealing with with blood transfusions. In fact, the the the first thing in fiction i ever saw that was ah Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children, where he quotes that as a possibility for reversing aging. um you know The whole idea of heterot... What is it? ah
00:18:26
Speaker
what's like Anyway, it's it's a parapheresis where you've changed blood transfusion. It's gotten various names over the decades, but it comes and goes about every decade or two. And then people poo-poo it, and then they say it's going to work. it Well, so it's very hard to say what works.
00:18:40
Speaker
The thing that I've seen that has the data I believe best probably is the use telomerase activators. um I was involved as the editor of journal. We published a number of peer review articles about that.
00:18:54
Speaker
One, i don't know that it works. I just saw the data. That's all. And two, even if I believe that it worked, the question is, it worth the money? The answer is, I don't know. Third is, can you get a ah source of this that actually you know is is getting what you want? So there's so many unknowns.
00:19:10
Speaker
So I'm not saying you should take a telomerase activating compound. I'm saying that to me looked like the best data, but boy, there's just so many unknowns for all of this stuff. to To sort of summarize the whole thing, I would say for most of us,
00:19:23
Speaker
What you should be doing is what you have said, what your grandmother told you, what your family practice doc probably told you. And most people don't pay any attention any of it. You know, yes, we all know we should eat less, exercise more, avoid stress, not smoke, careful of alcohol, all those things.
00:19:37
Speaker
All true. Not sexy, but true. No, I don't think there's a magic pill, particularly a s small molecular compound that's going to do that for you. It is a funny thing because the the most impactful things are...
00:19:49
Speaker
the cheapest or free things at our fingertips that it just takes you doing the action. right I think that's true, Andrew. Yeah. if you If you want to be lively, you should be doing these things, right? Yeah. I mean, that, that is our five pillars and you know, that that's the original download of, Hey, here are the things that you don't need to buy anything from us. Here are the five things you should be doing just baseline.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah. I always like, you know, it came to diet, for example, I always like Michael Pollan's advice, you know, ah never eat anything your grandmother couldn't pronounce, eat things from the outside of the store and at the inside, you know, pretty simple advice and nothing sexy about it, but pretty true.
00:20:25
Speaker
And I think he had it even simpler of eat not too much, mostly plants or something like that. Yes, exactly. all Right. Exactly. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Practical advice.
00:20:36
Speaker
The simplest things a lot of times. are the best ones. Most corporate wellness programs overwhelm employees with too much, or they offer too little to be useful. Alively gets it right.
00:20:49
Speaker
We start with each employee's data and goals, then serve one clear, personalized action at a time. No noise, just real behavioral change. The outcome? A healthier, happier workforce.
00:21:01
Speaker
A measurable impact for your business. Visit Alively.com to see personalized wellness in action. Okay, so there's exciting science happening and it's moving. That being said, I mean, it's it's been quarter century since the first thing. So if all goes well, we're looking two two and a half years.
00:21:24
Speaker
They're going to be past kind of winding along the way. What are the takeaways for someone today so there is yeah certainly take care of your health but those are things they probably knew before right like us telling them hey you should really take care of your sleep you should really think about your diet is not to be life-changing what is it the takeaway for someone listening to this and say hey okay there is a lot of problems there there are a lot of things going on it's not certain but it looks very promising
00:21:56
Speaker
Are there things, if you believe in the telomerase, right? Like this is the the leverage point, this you know the Archimedes lever. Give me lever long enough and I can move the world. This is where it is.
00:22:06
Speaker
I think it's the best point. Yeah. What are the things while we're waiting, even if it is, like, do you take any do you take any small molecules? Do you have supplements you take? Do you do anything and say, hey,
00:22:23
Speaker
I take a telomerase activator. I've taken brewer's yeast for 50 years. I meditated for 50 years. Not the entire 50 years, just every day. boom You know, and again, i I keep my weight pretty much where it was. i got the same waist I had when I was in height school in high school. um Things that you know are you ought to doing.
00:22:43
Speaker
But again, that doesn't... that doesn't reverse aging, it's just as as you've dealt with so many times on on the Lively program, it's it's a matter of trying to slow down the problem.
00:22:54
Speaker
yeah but Again, back in 1950, people were advised to stay away from public pools because the kids would get polio. There was even a ah best-selling book out in the US, something about diet conquers polio or diet prevents polio.
00:23:05
Speaker
Well, it doesn't. But for all I know, it might actually make you have a better immune system, so you're less likely to get polio, or at least the paralytic part of it. And that's kind of where we are now. People talk about the best diet to prevent aging.
00:23:16
Speaker
Well, the best diet to prevent polio. I'd prefer the stock vaccine, but okay. Meantime, yes, yes. Yeah, that makes sense.
Biological and Evolutionary Aspects of Aging
00:23:26
Speaker
ah For me, the biggest thing is for people just to realize that aging is not just, it just happens.
00:23:31
Speaker
That was always what annoyed me 50 years ago when i ran into this. Aging just happens. Well, it doesn't just happen. It's much more complicated than that. Example, you know every cell in your body is at least several decades old.
00:23:42
Speaker
Well, except that you got that first cell from your mother who got from her mother, it from her mother. So quite literally, in a biological sense, you're about 4 billion years old you look marvelous. You know? So don't tell me if this happens by explaining, you know, why does it happen certain times, not other times?
00:23:57
Speaker
That's a real question. it's got real answers. But you can't just wave your wave in the air and say it's magic, it's entropy, it's wear and tear. No, it's a lot more complicated than that. That is a really good point. right that There is a natural mechanism, obviously, to reset back to zero, to go create new life and generate. And then this kind of recycling through that may have been adaptive and evolutionary that you would want this cycling to go through.
00:24:27
Speaker
but There are a lot of things that, you know, I say, well, it's not natural. I'm like, okay, well, wearing clothes isn't natural. Having a roof over your head is not natural, but we've kind of mastered our environment to make it better and more comfortable. So if we can advance, why would we just accept this is natural? and Having a rabies vaccine isn't natural, but it's a good idea. you know Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:24:47
Speaker
Okay. Here's another example of this. to People, a lot of times in the aging community, you know, I've noticed this again for, well, a long, long time, but particularly over the past 30 years, because it's been big. The idea is that mitochondrial dysfunction, your little powerhouses in your cells, cause aging.
00:25:03
Speaker
And that's fine. But then what causes mitochondrial dysfunction? And one of the people who wrote the glowing review of my book was a guy who did a lot of this original research. And he the same question. If mitochondria fail with age, and yours and mine are probably showing problems, why are they failing now? And yet they're already 2 billion years old in the eukaryotic cell line.
00:25:22
Speaker
So you can't just say it's mitochondria without saying, why did the mitochondria fail? But that sort of thinking comes up again and again. People will say, it's the immune system. All age-related disease is immunosenescence.
00:25:33
Speaker
All right, but then why did the immune system age?
00:25:37
Speaker
Step back. It's like it's a pre-programmed feature, right? It's like a planned obsolescence, right? So you think of a phone that they're saying, hey, we're going to make it So you kind of have to upgrade every 18 to 24 months.
00:25:52
Speaker
I think it sort of makes sense. You know, if um you don't want a species that's so long-lived that they can't respond to environmental challenges. You know, if if suddenly we get hit with an asteroid, if a lot of volcanoes go up around the world, the pH, the oxygen, the temperature, those things change.
00:26:11
Speaker
You want to have an organism that can make it through that sort of change that has a a really fast turning radius, in a sense. On the other hand, if the environment's pretty stable, then it's beneficial to have a long lifespan.
00:26:23
Speaker
What I think I see going on with telomeres is that they're a good way of responding to changes. So if there's high stress, you tend to get shorter telomeres, mutation rate goes up. That's a very bad idea for you, but it's a very good idea for the species.
00:26:37
Speaker
So it's complicated. So yes, for you and i we just don't live a long time, not have mutations. For the species to evolve, yeah, you need some of these things. Got it. Yeah, I mean, that there's a, I think if you remember the moss in industrial England, where because it turned over so fast, they they went where because of all the coal soot, the darker ones survive longer. And so the whole population shifted to that. And then when they cleaned up all the the coal soot, it went back to the weight. But it was because there was so much turnover, you could get those rapid turns on evolution.
00:27:12
Speaker
that if they were living for 200 years each, they would have just died out because they would all been white. And then... here's another example of that, that I can't prove no one can, but I suspect that it plays a role in this. you know, if you go back 66, 67 million years and you've got the dinosaurs being wiped out, let's say that the leading theory is the asteroid hit the earth and it changed everything very rapidly.
00:27:33
Speaker
but You know, never mind whether it's true, but the point is that what you see is that very big, long-lived organisms like, you know, enormous dinosaurs didn't survive.
00:27:43
Speaker
It was the smaller things that survived. We probably had a shorter lifespan and were able to adapt not only in terms of that individual, but in terms of the species to evolve and change. So, yes, being big and and having a long lifespan is beneficial to you until something changes.
00:27:59
Speaker
Yeah. It'll be interesting, the downstream effects. Humans are really bad at thinking through secondary, tertiary, much less, you know, 10 effects down the line. So as you take...
00:28:12
Speaker
the Anthropocene and we're shaping the environment and, you know, some are looking to ship to Mars and are we going to be extra planetary and all this to then tie that to really long lived. I guess the thing that changes here is it doesn't necessarily slow the rate of reproduction and variability because, know,
00:28:37
Speaker
you're You're not trying to reset to five. Like no one wants to go back mentally or physically when they're five. You might reset to 25. You say, okay, here's kind of the peak age that we're trying to get to. But your peak reproductive years may be 18 to 25 anyway. And so you could still be reproducing and going through cycles. You're just stacking up more people.
00:28:56
Speaker
it It could really change what the world looks like very rapidly. Very, very much so. One thing we we haven't touched on is the cost, right? I mean, so there's one cost of the study, and then there's the cost of what something like this would ultimately cost to to deliver and and receive as a
Economic Factors in Aging Research
00:29:17
Speaker
patient. But then there's the trade-off cost of when you're doing this,
00:29:21
Speaker
X number of dollars are spent in the last two weeks of someone's life because you've kind of piled on these things that if you're able to reverse that, so you're not getting all those, do we actually save more money? We have more productive years so the economy can grow faster because you're not getting all these people obsolescing out of the workforce.
00:29:38
Speaker
Have you modeled that out? How do you think about the economics of this? Yeah, and I discuss that in the book, too, it's worth both historical examples. For example, you know, it had been back to 1950, and iron line was very expensive.
00:29:51
Speaker
The current cost, the WHO estimates for preventing preventing polio, is about 10 cents per head. Prices went down. okay Very cost effective. And I think that's in spades what we're going to do. Example, in the US, s in most states, the last year of life for an Alzheimer's patient costs well more than $100,000, depending exactly where you are, but pretty expensive. our Our highest estimates on being able to treat somebody and reverse the Alzheimer's run around $30,000.
00:30:19
Speaker
In short, I think we can not only save lives, but save a ton of money too. And it's probably going to be even less than that when you get economies of scale and improve production. But we'll see. But yes, I think we can lower the cost of healthcare dramatically.
00:30:33
Speaker
but And that's personally, nationally, and globally. Yes, I think we can do that and have people more effective. Why should we have a 95-year-old or an 85-year-old or 75-year-old in the nursing home of Alzheimer's when they can be out playing tennis, swinging a hammer, running with their kids? Yeah, big deal.
00:30:50
Speaker
Good thought. Both sides of the equation, right? You're you're reducing the cost line item, but you're adding what they're, they'll be out at restaurants, right? They're, they're in society, living, doing things. Or working, know, maybe they start a new career, become an architect instead of a gardener.
00:31:04
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is very exciting. And then one thing before we started recording, we touched on briefly was the the ethics of all this, right? So I think in this space, when this comes up a lot, and I believe I didn't see the ad myself, but I saw a preview of the ad that maybe Hems or hers did about how the longevity game, how all of this is a game for the rich, right? And they talk about billionaires, all of it.
00:31:30
Speaker
um And so what's your take? Is the person actually working on this? ah My take is that we're going to make sure that anybody can afford this. And i I mean that. mean, it's one of our goals is to make sure that somebody, as I say, in Somalia or Bangladesh can afford this, not to have it something that's just for the rich.
00:31:47
Speaker
I think we can do that. I think we can make it so it's widely available to people. And it's actually will save money. As I say, if if you're if you're buying health insurance or you're part of the and NHS or Medicare, you will see this as a savings, not a cost.
00:32:00
Speaker
And I think that we can apply that globally as well. ah making Let me make a comment too about um about the ethics of all this. You know, some people are always afraid that you're playing God. And I would argue that the important thing is not worrying about playing God, but about working at being human.
00:32:15
Speaker
And that includes taking care of people around you, not just kids, but the elderly. Just because we get older doesn't mean we should be ignored. There was a classic, maybe apocryphal story about Margaret Mead when she was asked, how would you define the very first sign of civilization throughout all of human history and prehistory?
00:32:33
Speaker
First sign of civilization, she said, heel femur. What? Healed femur? Yes. Because a healed femur implies that somebody took care of them. Somebody broke their femur. They were cared for, fed, protected until that femur healed.
00:32:49
Speaker
I think that's true of civilization generally. Civilization is not defined by the size of the buildings in Manhattan or the you know or or how big Nairobi. It's defined by people being able to be compassionate and help other people.
00:33:03
Speaker
That matters. Yeah.
Personal Stories and Alzheimer's Impact
00:33:05
Speaker
It really does matter. And I mean, you you give a lot of hope as someone who I grew up with three great grandmothers that every single one ended up with Alzheimer's. One had it from the time I knew her, so I never got to really know her.
00:33:24
Speaker
And then the others I saw develop it over years. um It's there's not just the line item costs. There's the human costs, not just on the person suffering, but from the family all around them.
00:33:37
Speaker
Alzheimer's is the disease that steals souls. Yeah. Yeah. So i I love that that's where you're starting. I love that there's so much promise in here and that your optimistic timeline is so short. You know, as a someone with parents in their 70s who have been in Alzheimer's studies and everything and are are are concerned on it, given their genetics, that I am very selfishly and personally interested in this work.
Conclusion and Hope for Future Research
00:34:04
Speaker
And I look forward to following it and hopefully having you on as updates come down the pipeline.
00:34:10
Speaker
We'll see what happens. All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Fossil. Thank you very much, Dr. Andrew. yeah Thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Home of Healthspan podcast.
00:34:21
Speaker
And remember, you can always find the products, practices, and routines mentioned by today's guests, as well as many other Healthspan role models on Alively.com. Enjoy a lively day.