An Vice President with new Technology Discovery at age check therapeutics. Doctor tigre is a biomedical gerontologist and received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and phd in biology from cambridge university. Doctor robert is founder, chairman and ceo of cellularity inc. , he is an accomplished surgeon, biomedical scientists and aviator. Doctor is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia University school of engineering and applied science. He also earned his md and phd degrees from cornell university. Doctor Cynthia Kenyon helped pioneer the field of aging and his Vice President aging research, and calico light science sees a Google Alphabet company. She spends many years on the ucs as faculty at the molecular biologist and geneticist. She earned her chemistry degree from the university of georgia and phd from mit. And finally, chip walter is a geographic explorer, filmmaker, and author of immortality inc. Renegade science, silicone ballot billions and the quest to live forever. Chip was one of the original employees at cnn and served as a bureau chief in san francisco. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming doctor aubrey tigre, doctor robert, doctor cynthia, and chip walter. Theyll be joining me on stage shortly. [background noises] so tonight we have the honor of some specialists here. Some experts in the field. But we only have about 50 minutes to explore the science content science and quest for longevity. So i would like to keep us on a storyline. Chip and i have discussed this previously. We are going to start by defining your missions, then we are going to dig into the science of aging, and explore the strategy as well as the pros and cons of extending our lifespans. And then we will take your questions from the audience. So lets start with chip. You have written this amazing book, immortality, inc. Can you describe your mission with the book what made you want to write this book . What are you hoping to achieve . I have always been fascinated with long life, longevity. I think all of us are fascinated in the human race is been fascinated from the beginning going all the way back there has been plenty of myths and art, philosophy, religion, and there is also been plenty of snake oil. So whenever i was looking at this i began to wonder is it possible that we are actually added place in Human History where science could solve one of the great mysteries that we have all wondered about thats basically solving aging. And i thought, i think this is beginning to happen. I wanted to go up and i went in to look at that question. I wanted to really come its really in a way you might think of it as a science book but its a history book. And i am trying to look with the book, i wanted to ask if this happens, who are the people behind it. What would be the motivations behind it. What kind of forces would need to take place . For this to happen . And then tell that story. Get to the bottom of it and thats what ive tried to do with this book. I try to find who are the key people, who are the deep thinkers, what kind of money has to be behind it . Why do we even want to do this . In the end, i hope that i was able to weave together a story that tells that tail. Its a fascinating story and it reads like a novel. Okay cynthia you are leading aging research at calico labs. Briefly what is your mission there and what is your definition of success at calico . I was a for about 30 years before i went to calico. While i was there i became interested in aging, partly at the time i thought most people thought you just wear out its a disorder decline. What you see in nature different species have different lifespans. Some live short time some live a long time price or charges during evolution change lifespan. You need to look at gene to determinate at rate of aging. At has to be. It makes a sage much more slowly than a dog for example so we worked on a tiny little roundworm for a few weeks. And for my lab, we looked for gene changes that could extend life were excited to find that genes could double before it wasnt long before made a few change changes and they live six times as normal. And that, that we did with these mechanisms and trying to understand them, really got me interested in trying to go beyond my own lab and try to help find out whether you could, translate this to human somewhere use some of the ways of using of setting the basic biology of animals to improve our health. And our longevity. And i also, when i learned about calico comets kind of a funny company because they wanted to do basic research. The ideas just being able to do creativity, driven based research, and it really kind of moonshot way. Studying animals like naked mole rats which dont seem to age. Little mouselike creatures that live a really long time. Also to be in a position where week could actually try to take to the clinic some of the information that we glean from working on animals. And also make discoveries at calico that could make it to the clinic. It was too exciting and too big an opportunity to turn down. So success to me is two kinds of success actually. One, i hope we can talk about this but theres been a lot of really fundamentally discoveries about aging and how it works, the many different ways you can slow it down. And i hope that we find another, maybe two or three more. I think theres more big discoveries waiting to be made. In of course i hope we really can apply to humans. Im in a stop in just a second, but as you know for a long time we have been trying to cure diseases, which is fantastic and weve done our not a perfect job people just dont dive infections the way they used to or Heart Disease that with the use too. But people still age at the same rate, see you have more people who are older, who in some ways are not living in a very healthy condition. So the hope is that we can find ways like these little worms that stay healthy for a really long time in maintaining our healthrelated longer. So thats another goal, its not just my goal its a shared goal for the whole field. What is your mission at the Research Foundation and what is success for you . First analysis working customer so really its very similar to what cynthia just said. I grew up not understanding the idea bringing aging interim medical control is a controversial concept nobody ever told me that aging was not a medical problem. It was actually 1990 93 the same year cynthia published a paper that transform the whole field that i went through a transformation in my own. Because a couple years before that, i had married a biologist, having previously been a researcher in a completely different discipline of Artificial Intelligence. And through her i accidentally learned a little biology. But gradually i began to realize she just wasnt interested in aging. And none of the others i was in meeting were interested. I thought what is going on . After a year or two more, i decided i had to switch fields. And work on this because the other biologist they just werent doing it. They did not ascend at that point. And as time went on, i became able to make a few contribution contributions. And i do want to mention another contribution cynthia has made over the years which has been extraordinarily important and often overlooked these days when the medical applicability of this field is more established. Back in the 90s, this was theoretical in the extreme. The idea of actually saying we want to do something about aging, if youd had a Grant Application youd be dead. And cynthia was one of the very first people who actually went out and said this. So i often feel that im kind of standing on her shoulders and in doing what i do. But to me success is all about saving lives. And about the quality of work i have to remind people that longevity is just a side effect of health. We are just doing medical research, just like any other medical research except we are working on a specific disease. We are all about keeping people healthy, and we think we have a fighting chance of doing it so well that the magnitude of that side effect of lung jevity will actually be good but it still side effect. Can you quantify large . We cannot quantify large, the human body is a machine its a really complicated machine but is still machine. We need to look at what happens with simple machines. We know that the car, for example, can be maintained in as functional state as it had when the date day it was built. For as long as you like. There are cars that are a hundred years old today, that were not designed to last more than ten or 15 years. The only reason is they are simple enough that we already know how to do really comprehensive preventative maintenance on them. So the goal of our work as by admin the biomedical to develop medicines that do exactly the same thing. To have comprehensive maintenance to eliminate the damage the body does it to itself throughout life in its normal daytoday operation. And thereby, to completely transcend, lets call the warranty period, the evolution has built into our bodies. Okay, robert you said you believe aging is a stem cell problem. You cofounded the genomic based Health Intelligence company, human lung jevity ink. And what are you striving for exactly and when will you have arrived . Cellularity was born out of the company that was seeking to turn living cells into medicine. And we use the platform to take advantage of some very unique biology in the placenta, the organ that we all know is sort of a lifesupport system system for the developing fetus. Turns out that at a time, im a neurosurgeon by training i was mostly interested in finding a way to include the outcome in those patients when stem cells first shoot hit the airwaves. I said this might be a tool for me to it help the neurological outcome. Thats what got me into the field, and we made a lot of advances turning those cells into tools to control inflammation, which stem cells are very good at doing, and stimulating regeneration. And the conflict of this medicine is a means to provide or improve health is not new comments not novel its been around long time. But it was during that period when our Company Became part of a growing enterprise, it was really a cancer focused company that i first saw dated that impressed me. In 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, the bone marrow. It turns out if you look at the bone marrow of a baby, one and about 20 to 30,000 cells a stem cells. If you look at the bone marrow of an 80yearold its what in 30 million. So what is that tell us, as a surgeon who is not as smart as the rest of folks on this panel, can we just add stem cells and change things . So what we did was we ran a very simple experiment. We collected the placental stem cells from Newborn Research animals and then gave them back their stem cells after sexual maturity on a regular basis. In this little skunk work study showed out those animals live 30 to 40 longer than their littermates. But that wasnt obviously enough to launch a big research program, but intrigued us enough to say stem cells may in fact play a role in doing two things. Preserving performance, physio anatomic performance. Maintaining the structure and function of our body as we age, and allowing the immune system to perform at optimum levels throughout our lifespan. That is what got us there. Success for us is showing these products are meaningful in the treatment of age related diseases, immune diseases and cancer. But i think the futures going to be very bright for applying them to Human Performance. And the preservation of Human Performance is a nicer way of saying longevity. I like that phrasing. So lets take a little more into the science of aging. I think cynthia, you are probably the best to explain in basic terms why do we age . What is happening to our bodies . That tissues ability to stand stress and dysfunction in the proper way just declines. At many levels. Cells lose the tissues lose their integrity to some extent. The cells within the tissue lose their ability to carry out their functions and normal way, they dont coordinate their behaviors with one another as well as they used to. Its really 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 die that day, goes up the old you are. It goes up in a very regular way. If you plot it on and exponentially its a straight line, starting at about age 30 the chance of death, you know what it is. You dont know if youre going to die. Doubles every eight and half years. So thats the human rates in it starts when youre young. A dog, it doubles much more quickly. Obviously dogs have a much shorter lifespan than we have. But again it starts when they are puppies. Its very interesting because it says that theres something inside a young person, we dont know where it is in the person, its in all the cells are just in one place, thats programmed that person to age at a certain rate. And its right there when they are young, same with dogs. So thats what i think is the most interesting thing, is to find out what is the programming . What is it that creates is resilience that is different in different species . And you found this simple genetic mutation that can double or make six times the lens or lifespan for ground worms. Can you explain in simple terms how that happens and whats going on . Yes, it turns out that very early in evolution, it looks as though simple organisms developed the capacity to withstand stressful conditions. Like the removal of food or the presence of a lot of radiation or hot temperature all sorts of different stresses. What they seem to do, the first approximation of any of these stresses they have a system at least that can make them resist the stresses. All at once. And it turns out, the mutation that we the change that in the gene boy found as we change this one gene to one base to pair in the whole dna. Thats all. The animals everything changed in the animals age much more slowly. So how do we do that with one base pair change . It turns out we changed a regulatory gene its kinda like a Computer Program when you have a hierarchy of control systems. In which we had intervened in a high level without knowing what we did at the time. Now we know, we came in at a very high level, and what we did is essentially we caused the animal to kind of think, say that, that it was under stress. So what happened is this animal had reprogrammed itself so they are much more resistant to any kind of damage. In the way they did that as they made all these proteins that take care of other proteins and repair the dna, all sorts of things they do at different levels. But they were all co awarded nutley switched on. It was very, very interesting. And those animals lived twice as long suggesting that we dont really know exactly, but at least some of the same properties or systems that can protect animals from stress, can also protect them from the stress of aging. Its kind of a very high level, not very nuts and bolts the explanation, but i think its really true. The thing thats really cool about this is if you change the same genes in fruit flies or mice, they all live longer. Mice are mammals like we are, so its universal kind of programming mechanism. There are hints that its present in humans as well. In fact we already live a pretty long time, so one of my theories on chance theories is that perhaps the system is already little turned on in us by evolution, allowing us to be just naturally more resistant to the stresses of wear and tear and time. Arbor youve identified seven aspects of aging damage or as you call it a key mated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us. Can you briefly explain a couple of the key side effects . I will answer this quickly. I think the best way for me to it do is jump off what cynthia just said. I have focused for a long time on not slowing aging down but actual reversing it, repairing the damage that the body does throughout itself throughout life. To rejuvenate people and of course in principle this would be far more valuable than just slowing aging down and its for people got to the middle age or older. But also the concept that i introduced, 20 years ago, is now being taken more seriously is the idea that this might actually be easier to do medically than slowing aging down. One thing that cynthia just touched on is that in humans we may already be somewhat adapted to doing the kinds of things that mutations in organisms can confer. In effect it does seem that way. For example if you put animals under stress 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 shortlived organisms. So theres a lot of complications here that we certainly dont understand. To me the goal is to figure out how much we need to understand. I always look at this and the technology more as a basic scientist. I dont find things out for the sake of finding things out. I find them out in order to figure out what to do to manipulate in a manner that is desirable. So the kind of damage we look at our waste products that happen in all organisms. But in different ways in different cell types, and different organisms. For example stem cells are needed to restore the number of cells in an organ that we are progressively losing them. Which is ultimately the driver aspect of parkinsons disease for example. Many examples, this means the approach we are taking the rejuvenation approach is very much a divide and conquer approach where we have to repair at bunch of different types of damage simultaneously the same person or in the lab in the same organism. This is kind of complementary to the more unitary approach that has dominated the field ever since cynthia really made blew this whole thing open with the discovery. Robert you are a pioneer in the Stem Cell Research and the use of the placenta to treat lifethreatening diseases. You called the placenta nature stem cell factory on said youre striving to turn stem cells into medicine. Can you explain in simple terms how Stem Cell Therapy works and what you anticipate in the next five to ten years . To try and simplify the way we believe stem cells exerts their therapeutic effects, i think of it in terms that are really consistent to what cynthia and arbor youre talking about, which is the Underlying Health and adaptability. The ability to deal with disease