You're listening to the inquiry on the b.b.c. World Service with me Helena Merryman Each week one question for expert witnesses and a not so. It's a sunny morning in Texas is walking to work wondering what she's going to find she opens the door to her. Inside tens of thousands of worms wriggling around in different boxes. She peers into while then another and slowly it dawned on her what she seen could help cure the most debilitating condition known to us aging. Diseases related to aging kill 100000 people every day but a growing number of scientists say it doesn't have to be this way over the past few years researches have carried out remarkable experiments challenging what we thought we knew about our lifespan billions of dollars are being spent all over the world in efforts to extend our lives in this week we bring you some of the world's leading research that's to tell you what they found you'll find out what Meng Wang discovered with her worms and hear how one scientist reversed the aging process in our cells as we answer a question that all of you have probably asked how long can we live. Part one it's all in the teeth. We're having a tremendous development in life expectancy we have doubled our lifetime in a very short period and we should really be happy that we were right on this spot in history our 1st expert witness called Christensen. You worked as a doctor for many years and then one day decided he'd had enough of treats. People he now runs the Danish Aging Research Center where he's trying to stop people getting ill in the 1st place. We all know what aging looks like from the outside what does actually do to a bodies Well it's accumulation of damage from the molecular level that then spread to the cells and tissue and organs and to the whole organism it's kind of all the hits that we get all the time under molecules and then when we came keep up with the repair and then they start and when does it all begin when do we stop to decline that is in the mid thirty's this so I'm $37.00 so it's it's begun for me yeah now the party started well thanks for the Give me it's so Ari And there's more bad news once we start to go downhill we go downhill fast it's twice a stranger's being 42 compared to 3510 again it's twice as dangerous being 49 compared to 42 and so on so your risk of death is increasing 1112 percent every year and damn the mortality risk levels off around $1105.00 where the yearly risk of dying is about 5060 percent so if you're really optimistic then you could say that it never get any worse than 5050 and when you're thinking about these odds there's a lot stunt against you when you age as your molecules tissues and organs get tired and damaged you're susceptible to a whole range of diseases cardiovascular disease came to rhyme it is Alzheimer's disease Parkinson's disease lung D.C.'s all the major ones as well as the more kind of nonspecific you know you. Get more frail less Riseley And despite all bunt that when you compare our lifespan with our ancestors we're doing pretty well no 150 years ago the life expectancy was around 40 in most countries and now it's around 80 in most countries in northern Europe and why is that is that advances in medicine I think that the main factor is that people arrive at higher eighty's in better shape now one easy thing to observe is for instance teeth you can see that teeth of elderly people are getting better and better and that makes a real difference doesn't absolutely you know just imagine quality of life food but it's also kind of shows that if the teeth are good there might be other thing in that body that also arrive in better shape like a barometer of your general health Yeah and also one of the parameters is that people arrive at high eighty's with better cognitive functioning when we do i.q. Test on elderly people it's getting better and better for every decade why is it that we were arriving with better teeth but I could listen that's the whole packets of better living condition better schooling and what kind of work you have had. Dest good reason to believe that this development with continue and so now people are living into the ninety's and even the hundreds. Takes on Louise Comal a French woman who lived until she was 122 the oldest recorded 8 so far what's interesting is that she died in 1997 that's 20 years ago we don't know anyone who's lived longer than her. And that raises a question is this rapid increase in our lifespan beginning to level off that has been one of the argument we are kind of as good as we cared and what's your view are we living as long as we can live full no I am very skeptical I have a hard time imagining that we never in the future you will invent anything that can help us when aging is taking its toll on our body so I think it will continue to continue until when. We grow ever older or do we have a natural sell by date so far advances in our lifespan have been as a result of what you could call good old fashioned medicine kills for single diseases that kill us off the being fewer advances in kills for the condition itself old age but as you're about to find out all that's beginning to change. Part too. 3 d. Printing ourselves. To have this family dinner where everyone is sitting around the table and I still often see this discussion between my dad and that they couldn't save this guy. A scientist an entrepreneur from a family of doctors in India. Somebody and then he was like because there was no more medicine. And then I was like Ok then I won't become a doctor but I'll become somebody who makes the medicine and that's exactly what he did. He took a Ph d. In structural biology and now runs a company which 3 years ago made India's 1st artificial human liver tissue it all began with a simple idea that by old age is most of the time by some kind of cardiac problem or some kind of problem with you along our liver or kidney like vital organ failures in these cases you can definitely give the patient a 2nd lease of life if you have a functional organ the problem is there are more people in need of organs than donors to give them elderly people all over the world or in long queues for new kidneys or hearts but exact matches have to be found and in many cases the person dies waiting so to him Bhowmick thought instead of holding out for a donor organ a liver for example what if you could make one let's say you need a lever and you have a c.t. Scan are you have m.r.i. Which shows exact size and shape of your organ in the computer right now you feed it into a bio printer that 3 d. Printer the news is the scan of your liver to print an artificial one in exactly the same size and shape instead of using an ink cartridge though it's ink is made up of protein and cells and not just any cells yourselves then when you put it in the body and your body fail to recognize that it has grown outside your body because it has the same signature does that mean your body there's no chance that your body would reject it very little chance letter all of this is a little way off but not as far as you'd think they've already made an artificial piece of liver tissue the next step is to scale it up making a miniature external liver and this will be something outside the body hopefully small enough so that it can be portable so the patient doesn't have to sit in one place when he or she is hooked to it but can move around with this he thinks that's around 5 years away then finally will get to the promised land. And the point where we can make a fully functioning liver that can be transplanted into a body and how far would you say we are from that I would say to 10 years for the final step and it's not just live as they're planning on making. He says they can make kidneys lungs and other organs to which we don't always associate with along the line so for example just in India there are like around 5 to 6000000 people suffer from corneal blindness and Corneille blindness is something which can happen as early as you are like 4 years old 6 years old. And when we're talking about a developing country being blind limits that number of years you're going to live in other words it's not just about new livers and lungs. Give a blind person in a developing country a cornea transplant and the probably live longer and so will the replacement might help one person in one country live till they're 60 and help someone in a different country little the 160 and when another organ fails they can get that replaced to a life extension is definitely possible like if somebody is in a fetal stage because of a liver disease then giving that person a fully functional liver is expanding his life till the time some other organ feat that's the point isn't it because if they've got a failing organ does that indicate that perhaps they're coming to the end of a natural lifespan and there might be other issues in the body that need fixing to so it depends if you replace an organ which has been the primary cause of the patient's debt that patient could have lived for 20 more years because maybe that person's liver was feeling but not the same with the brain or the heart maybe he had a perfectly working hard with this new technology then how long does to him Bhowmick think we can live well I would say the millions like the people who were born after 181 I believe they have a good shot at life span of 135 years and you know what's. More interesting if you actually lived that long you can keep pushing the boundary maybe. Make it to 135 and who knows what other inventions will be around by then to see you through to 200 and so with this tissue printing technology perhaps we can 3 d. Printer ourselves into old old age replacing one going off to another liver or kidney our eyes and our lungs but that will only ever get us so far as the rest of our body that can't be replaced like our brain slowly with. That's why some research is the looking beyond our individual body parts to something more fundamental. Part 3 the secret of the worms. So there are some person no inspiration from my family that's Professor Manning why my grandma passed away when she was 100 but she was a really house see and active to the end of her life. Watching her always make me wonder there is a secrete about being a long lived Samoan one decided she trying to find out. She's not a professor of molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in the us she's been carrying out experiments into one of the most exciting new areas of medicine on micro biome. Cell those little Michael August is living together ways as actually all over our body from the just of track inside our body to the skiing outside our body so they're everywhere you can't see it with the naked eye but a micro biome is all over in an. Side us most of it is made up of but Tyria but it also contains funky viruses and other microbes too in the past scientists haven't given it much attention but we now know it has a profound effect on our body the studies show actually they are like an organ to us because they can even friends how while away they have and always show how while we respond to different medications and some time to make a sick but on the other hand they also play a very important role to keep us housey Mainwaring wanted to know whether a micro biome has an effect on how we. So she decided to do an experiment and what she needed was an animal with a short lifespan she chose a particular kind of why they only live about 2 to 3 weeks felt that make them wander from all those are perfect subject yet. She wanted to find out what would happen if you alter the worms micro biome would it live longer. If you chose one of the kinds of bacteria that lives inside the worms got tweaked its genes to make different varieties and then fed them to separate groups of worms. And a few weeks later she went to see the worms expecting the mall to be dead now they'd reached the end of their lifespan I was so excited because when we find him feel cases the animals are not that they're still alive when we check them I was jumping up down because this is totally unexpected and how long did some of the worms live for about 50 percent longer 50 percent yet that's extraordinary So you had most of the worms were living for 3 weeks and there were some that lived for 4 and a half 4 and a half yes I was that much more than you would have expected Yes I think. Scientists sometimes we do research is kind of like them bowling. So we have some crazy idea than you know we did fire way to test but you never know whether your idea is right or wrong and those moments when you find the result that's the best moment and so they went on to test other things would have different micro biome give worms not only a longer life but a better quality of life in their final days so the way way do it we can look at how well they've behaved when they are older because warm when they're getting older their physical activity is declined so they move slower and also become a little bit of co-ordinated. She's got a video of some of these elderly worms. And she's right you can tell they're old while younger worms wriggle energetically around them the older ones move slowly the skin being as they go I don't think the show raincoats but you can tell their body structure is not as elegant as they used to be but the worms with the new micro biome not only wriggled around more quickly in their old age but they were less susceptible to disease to. Making wine is now carrying out tests on mikes to see where the changing them might grow by extends their life and so there's a chance that one day doctors might be able to prescribe pills which do the same for us some by colleagues say Ok You know I think people can live to 20300 years or Personally I think why under For me it's already a good number so how long can we live full. We've heard about artificial organs that could get us to $135.00 and how a different micro biome could give us 50 percent more time on earth but both these inventions are about addressing the symptoms of aging the cause what then if we could go straight to the source. Time for a final expert witness. Part for fighting your sell by did. You wouldn't believe the number of people I have had to get in touch with me that's Lorna Harry's professor of molecular genetics at the University of Exeter in the u.k. a Scientist whose work on Aging has got a lot of people excited before now it's all been a bit of a holy grail actually in our field now people are beginning to realize that this is a possibility and they're wanting to get and that I think is going to be huge. I work all begins with the building blocks of our bodies our cells so basically the organs are made of different types of tissue your tissues are made of different parts the cells now after cells get older some cells inside your liver or your kidneys or whatever will be dividing to replace some cells that are kind of dying or getting worn out now the more time the cell divides the greater its chance of becoming what we would call senescent senescence comes from the Latin word scary which means to grow old and that's exactly what happened to these cells they've grown old and come to the end of their life cycle but instead of dying they hang around and getting in a destructive manner they can actually communicate with the cells around them through a senescent cell will basically throw out a bunch of chemicals which affect all of the cells around them so that it's almost like the cell saying I'm an old cell and you guys have been around here about the same sort of amount of time as I have so you must be able to say you should be thinking about big senescent as well wow so it's almost sort of contaminating them with with age exactly so it's basically sending a message which can drive the cells around it in this mess and as we grow older more and more of our cells becomes innocent until a body is overwhelmed. Not only did they make the cells around them age faster these senescent cells stop functioning as they should which is the ought to be one of the things that leaves to diseases like dimension cancer and type 2 diabetes. So Professor Harry's wanted to know whether she could get the cells to stop behaving like old cells behave more like young one what happened there was I had a new research in my lab and she was sort of finding her feet and we had some old self and I had some chemicals and she suggested her new research to put some of these chemicals on these old skin cells and see what happened about a week after she came in with the dishes cells and showed it to me and when you look through the microscope What were you expecting to see that they would still look like old cells so they look kind of Lacy under a microscope and we have a particular dye that we can put on our cell coaches that turns blue if they're senescent So what I was expecting to see is that the cells would be still blue and still looking old and actually what they were they weren't blue and they had gone back to looking more like young cells to Professor Harry said no no you've got the wrong cells these are young cells going through it again and she did it and she did and she did it I think again Well yeah and then what happened same thing again she brought it back to me and still I'm convinced because we're naturally quite suspicious scientists and yeah you know we're taught the basically throw rocks at your idea and if it's still there then it's probably real how many rocks to do probably about NY right she did it about 9 times and finally I kind of looked at it and to actually maybe you're on to something here she done something that no one thought possible she defectively rejuvenated old cells internment a young cells and this is why Lorna Harries is now getting phone calls from scientists and investors from all over the world as the 1st experiment this reversed aging in human cells they think her discovery could be the secret to a much longer life so when it comes to our lifespan you think Lorna Harry's would be the most ambitious of all our expert witnesses instead as human beings I think we have a natural maximum lifespan so actually what I want this research to end up in is a new generation of anti degenerative drugs were still a way off yet but in the future for. Things like dementia and cardiovascular disease what I'm hoping is that this will allow us one treatment which will address several of those at once so that people who would have died early will then go on to live their natural altered life some how long can we live. We know the answer is at least 122 someones already got that far and from what we heard that figure is likely to rise. With the discoveries of our expert witnesses alone one day we may be able to replace our damaged organs take supplements that give us a useful micro biome and stop our cells aging how many years could all the saddle Well if we go by to him bomb exploded if you're a millennial like me born in 1081 you should be able to get to 135 and by the time we get there and 2116 who knows what else will be possible. This inquiry was presented by me Helena Merryman and produced by Beth Segall Fenton and if you want to listen to more episodes do download our podcast there are hundreds of other editions their search for b.b.c. The inquiry. This is the b.b.c. World Service looking at the lives of people around the world very young I want to contribute to the development of my country in some small ways cool we all share the same values and we support each other and if we want to do something new and Kazakhstani that momentum is turned to building up and there is a critical mass of people that are trying to change things in the city not in hope of the population of Kazakhstan is under 30 how do they see their future we have so many talented young people here and lots of them want to move but people want to come back and