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[female narrator] Every life...
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has a lifespan.
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The C. elegans worm gets on average
14 days on Earth.
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European lobsters get up to 50 years.
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The Bristlecone pine tree,
as much as 5,000.
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And humans?
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We have a maximum lifespan of around 120.
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As best we can tell, some people
throughout history made it past 100.
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One tombstone of an ancient Roman soldier
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states simply, "Vixit annis C."
"He lived 100 years."
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But for most of human history, you were
pretty lucky to make it past five.
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Just 200 years ago,
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no country on Earth had
a life expectancy higher than 40.
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But then, that number started ticking up.
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City's engineered ways
to give people clean water.
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We discovered that germs caused disease.
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[man] The germs have to leave the body
of a sick person
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and enter the body of one who is well.
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[narrator] And started regularly
washing our hands with soap
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Nutrition improved, and we invented
new ways to keep food safe.
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We discovered antibiotics
and we developed vaccines,
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knocking out some of the worst killers
mankind has ever known.
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Since 1800, the average life expectancy
worldwide has more than doubled
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to around 72 years.
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And the biggest reason
is that you're now far less likely
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to die of an infectious disease
before you reach old age.
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But for people who reach old age,
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their life expectancy
hasn't increased much at all.
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In England and Wales in 1840,
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a 70-year old could expect to live to 79.
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Today, it's 86.
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A hundred and eighty years
of scientific advancement
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for just a seven-year bump.
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If the human lifespan is 120 years,
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why, even in developed countries,
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do most of us only make it
two-thirds of the way there?
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What is it about old age that kills us?
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And is it treatable?
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Today's drugs truly work medical miracles,
for young and older lives.
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[man] It was only 1930.
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You get a disease, you die.
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And then suddenly, you take a pill
and you live.
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[woman] Aging is only now
coming into its own.
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I really think we could be on the eve
of a whole new era.
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[man] The finiteness of life.
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It forces me
to appreciate every sunrise.
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[narrator] So, what is aging?
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Some of its symptoms are hearing loss,
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poor eyesight,
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weakened muscles,
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our heart rate slows,
our blood pressure rises,
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and our brains become less nimble
and more inclined to forget.
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Our ability to stay focused on a problem
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declines with aging.
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There's a series of problems,
all of which accumulate
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such that the quality of life diminishes.
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The amount that we can actually live
actively in the world goes down.
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[narrator] And as we age,
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our risk of dying from a chronic disease
skyrockets.
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Aging is the major risk factor for death
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for any one of those diseases
we're afraid from.
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From cancer, from cardiovascular disease,
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from Alzheimer, from diabetes.
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Now, you might stop me and say,
"Just a minute!
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For cardiovascular disease,
isn't it cholesterol?"
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Well, cholesterol is a three-fold risk.
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But aging is a 5,000-fold risk.
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[narrator] In the US,
the majority of deaths
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are now caused by a chronic disease
associated with old age.
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The costs are extraordinary.
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86% of healthcare spending in the US
goes towards treating chronic diseases.
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Finding cures for these diseases
has been a fixation
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of governments, and scientists,
and societies.
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With a new moonshot,
America can cure cancer.
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An incoming coalition government will
commit an additional 200 million dollars
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to dementia research.
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Heart disease is the number one killer
of women.
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[narrator] But we haven't found one yet.
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So some researchers have proposed
a different strategy,
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focusing on what they see
as the underlying cause.
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Aging.
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Scientists have estimated
that if we cured all cancers,
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that would only extend lifespan
by about four years on average,
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because people would get sick
from some other disease.
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And if we're successful
in finding the targets that drive aging
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and we can slow aging down,
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then that's going to affect
the rate of disease.
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If you have a leaky faucet in your house
and you want to fix it,
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there couple ways to do it. One is
you put a bucket under the faucet.
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You have to empty that bucket
every week, and it's just a big hassle.
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On the other hand, if you just go under
the sink and you find the part of the pipe
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that is leaking and you fix that,
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that gets rid of your whole issue.
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And so what we think about
in the aging field
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is how can we find the core problem
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that is actually causing all these
downstream pathologies and fix that
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and eliminate the chances of any of them
actually occurring in the first place? [narrator] Aging is the result
of the biological accumulation
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of damage in our cells.
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This damage actually starts
before we're born.
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Soon after conception,
our cells start duplicating
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so our tissue can grow and regenerate.
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As our cells copy themselves,
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they make errors
that cause molecular damage.
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For about two decades,
we are able to repair those mistakes.
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But by the time we are in our 30s,
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aging is accelerated.
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Fighting this process isn't a new idea.
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We're constantly bombarded
with ads for products
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promising to restore our youth.
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The angi-aging industry is now worth
250 billion dollars
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and growing.
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[woman] It's clinically proven to give
ten years back to the look of skin.
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[woman 2] With Olay, you age less.
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[woman 3] Visibly younger-looking skin.
Youth is timeless.
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[narrator] Most of the anti-aging market
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is focused on the symptoms of aging
you can see, like wrinkles,
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and marketed mostly to women. Not the wrinkles themselves.
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They haven't been scientifically tested
to actually change the skin.
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Forget looking younger.
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Some people have tried
to cheat death entirely.
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In the 1960s, we came up with cryonics,
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freezing a person as soon as they die
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with the plan of reviving them
in the future,
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once science has figured out how.
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I think cryonics
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takes the human body
a little bit too seriously.
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My inclination is the doubt
that simply saving the body
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is going to be enough to make it possible
to resurrect a person.
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And in particular, a person who's at all
like the person who died.
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Because that's the other problem
if your brain has changed a lot.
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[narrator] But some people believe
there's a solution for that:
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preserving the brain
by uploading it to a machine.
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Seems to me rather unlikely
that we can load up my consciousness
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into a machine.
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My consciousness, I think,
is deeply connected
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with its biological existence in my brain.
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And I assume that what people care about,
when they care about continuing,
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is continuing as a conscious person.
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[narrator] These are ideas to fight death.
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But they don't fight
the biological process of aging.
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Science has mostly accepted
that aging is a part of life.
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If you look around
at different species of animals,
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what you notice right off the bat
is very striking,
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especially if you have had a dog,
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is that the rate of aging
of different species is different.
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So, a dog...
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has a lifespan that's seven times
shorter than ours.
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Aging could just sort of happen,
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but why does it happen at such
a different rate in different species?
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[narrator] Then in 1961, we found a clue.
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Dr. Leonard Hayflick discovered
that many human cells
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stopped dividing after about 50 divisions.
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It seemed our cells had
death programmed into them at birth.
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Then, in the 1980s,
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we figured out the cause.
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The chromosomes in our cells
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had protective caps on them,
called telomeres,
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and with every cell division
those caps got shorter.
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When the telomeres couldn't protect
our chromosomes anymore,
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our cells died.
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The solution to that seems pretty clear.
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We need to engineer our cells
so our telomeres don't get too short.
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But as it turns out,
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cells like that already exist.
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Cancer cells.
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Nobody's been able to solve
that puzzle yet.
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But around the world,
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a handful of communities seem to have
figured out a secret to living long.
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In this cluster of Sardinian villages,
one in six hundred people make it to 100,
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six times higher
than the national average.
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And on the Greek island of Ikaria,
one in three people make it to 90,
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living nearly a decade longer
than mainland Greeks.
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All their lifestyles have a lot in common.
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Daily exercise,
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a rich social life,
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and a mostly vegetarian diet,
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washed down with a couple glasses
of red wine.
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How you live clearly affects
how long you live.
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But some things are out of your control,
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and we know that
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because of this worm.
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The C. elegans worm
has an average lifespan of 14 days,
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and both of these worms
are 13 days old.
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But scientists mutated a gene
in the one on the left.
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It isn't just acting younger,
its lifespan doubled.
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It was such a striking result
that people didn't believe it,
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when it first came out almost.
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Scientists had knocked out a gene
called DAF-Two that regulates insulin,
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which meant the worm absorbed
far fewer nutrients.
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We basically tricked the worm's body
into thinking it was fasting.
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If you eat a meal,
the tissues have little doors in them
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and they'll take the food in,
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but in order to do that,
they need the hormone insulin.
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If you have less insulin,
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or if you have a receptor for insulin
that doesn't work as well,
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which is like the DAF-Two mutant receptor,
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then the animal doesn't think
it has enough food. He thinks, "Uh-oh.
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I'm headed for difficult times now.
I'm gonna be careful.
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I'm gonna protect my cells,
gonna fold my proteins better.
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I'm gonna make sure
my DNA doesn't get damaged."
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So once the cells are
in that good taken-care-of state,
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I think the animal can just live longer.
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[narrator] Scientist mutated the same gene
in fruit flies
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and their lifespan nearly doubled.
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In mice, it extended their lives by 50%.
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All these organisms not only lived longer,
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but they were more resistant
to multiple chronic diseases.
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If one gene, in one pathway,
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can modulate the rate of aging,
we're in business.
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It changed our field totally.
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It took us from hope to promise.
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[narrator] All the people through history
who lived to 100 or 110,
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or 120, maybe they had a genetic mutation.
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After that breakthrough, research
on lifespan extension took off.
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Within the next few years, we're gonna add
ten to twenty years to life.
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We know that this is achievable
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because there are already humans
that lived to be past the age of 100.
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They're called centenarians. These people aren't just lucky,
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it's genetically controlled,
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because their children are also
more likely to live past the age of 100.
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[narrator] People who live past 100
get sick much later in life
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and for a shorter period of time
than people with a more average lifespan.
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If we can find out what these secrets are,
then we can develop drugs that mimic them
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for the rest of us, so we can all
live longer and healthier.
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Investors have started betting serious
money on finding what those secrets are,
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funding a flurry
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of new companies
focused on the science of longevity.
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[woman] We test different drugs
at Insilico,
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in order to see how they can change
the difference between young and old.
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[man] The goal at Human Longevity INC.,
is to change the face of aging.
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[man 2] Elysium is sparking
new discoveries
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and bringing the science
of living healthier for longer to you.
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[narrator] One promising lead
with a lot of money behind it?
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Senescent cells.
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Sometimes when a cell stops dividing,
it doesn't die.
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It keeps sending out chemical signals.
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And these zombie cells
build up in our bodies as we age.
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Clearing out those cells in mice
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significantly improved
their health and lifespan.
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These startups are racing to create
the first proven anti-aging treatment.
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But there's a chance they might be beaten
by a drug that already exists.
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The field of aging has been fascinated
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by the fact that there are drugs
on market today
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which potentially impact human aging
that were approved for other diseases.
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[narrator]
And for a lot of people in the field
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the great hope now is
the anti-diabetes drug metformin.
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The active ingredient in metformin
comes from the plant Galega officinalis,
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also known as goat's rue,
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false indigo, professor-weed,
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French lilac,
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Spanish sainfoin,
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and Italian fitch.
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One major UK study showed that 78,000
diabetes patients taking metformin
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lived a little bit longer
than non-diabetics.
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People with diabetes who take metformin
compared to other drugs
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have 30% less cardiovascular disease.
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People with diabetes who are on metformin
have 30% less cancers.
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[narrator] Remember the worm
and how we mutated its DAF-Two gene?
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Metformin actually acts
on the human version of that same gene,
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regulating insulin.
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And works through other molecular
mechanisms we don't totally understand.
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The US Federal Drug Administration
approved a metformin trial
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as a possible treatment
for age-related diseases,
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not for aging itself,
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because the FDA doesn't recognize aging
as something that's treatable.
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But if the results come back positive,
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that might change,
opening the floodgates for more research.
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I'm very optimistic
that this is going to be accelerated,
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and that the next decade is really going
to be the turning point to target aging.
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One of the exciting things for me is
it could be the case
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that none of this translates to humans,
that's a possibility.
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But if any of it works,
it changes the paradigm completely.
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This is the beginning of a new way
to think about medicine.
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[narrator] But we may not even want
a world where everyone lives to 120.
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I've never heard anyone say
they want to, like, be the winner,
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they want to beat the odds and live longer
than anyone ever has lived.
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It's typically that you want to be able
to have good years for as many as you get.
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One hundred and twenty?
As long as you can be healthy.
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No asthma,
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no heart trouble, you know,
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and no bad legs.
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That'd be wonderful.
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Then it brings up other questions, like,
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do I have enough money
to survive that way?
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Part of aging is you might outlive
your money.
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Why do cells age, why do organisms age,
why do organisms age and die?
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That's a great puzzle to solve.
It's a challenging puzzle to solve.
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But that doesn't mean solving it
and getting a therapy for it
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is gonna be a good thing
for planet Earth.
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[narrator] Centenarians might be healthier
than other people in old age,
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but they're still old.
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They're probably not going to work a job,
and they'll need some care,
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and that has a cost.
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And these costs are hard to cut back.
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Caring for the elderly in many societies
is seen as a moral imperative.
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If you look at countries that have
very long life expectancies like Japan,
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what ends up as you have
a lot of old people
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who are very isolated and lonely.
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And you got frequent reports in Japan
of people dying and no one noticing.
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[narrator] And we still haven't finished
the project we began two centuries ago:
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getting every child to make it to old age
in the first place.
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Once you're past 75,
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getting it to 85 or 90
should not be our goal.
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What our goal should be
is to get everyone to 75.
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[narrator] If older people live longer,
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the ratio of elderly to the young shifts,
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and that changes society.
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Studies have shown that
when a population becomes more elderly,
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countries become less entrepreneurial.
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And if a population doesn't die at all,
we might stop doing much of anything.
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As that wonderful Star Trek episode shows,
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you would run out of things that you could
possibly think were worth doing
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if you had infinite time.
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There's nothing left to say.
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Can't you see, Captain?
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For us, the disease is immortality.
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The fact that my life has a beginning,
a middle, an end
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is a really important part of what frames
the questions about what I'm doing.
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In fact...
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living with limitations is precisely
what gives life meaning.
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Life's meanings derives
from the challenges we face.
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And taking away all challenge
makes life completely uninteresting.