08/03/2025: Demis Hassabis and Freezing the Biological Clock

0:06It's moving incredibly fast. Few understand the speed of artificial intelligence like Demis Hassabis. He won a Nobel Prize and showed us what's coming next. It's reasoning. Definitely, yes. AI, he told us, promises a future of wonder. The end of disease? I think that's within reach, maybe within the next decade or so. I don't see why not. Let's get some eggs. Let's go. Let's get some eggs. More and more American women are freezing their eggs to preserve their fertility. Those are the eggs. Could egg freezing offer what previous generations only dreamed of, the chance to put the biological clock on ice?

0:54There definitely is that TikTok clock, and I'm not ready quite yet. I think that egg freezing is as revolutionary as the pill was in 1960s and 70s. It's as revolutionary as the pill? I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

1:28When Demas Hassabis won the Nobel Prize last year, he celebrated by playing poker with a world champion of chess. Hassabis loves a game, which is how he became a pioneer of artificial intelligence. The 49-year-old British scientist is co-founder and CEO of Google's AI powerhouse, called DeepMind. We met two years ago when chatbots announced a new age. Now, as we first told you this past spring, Hassabis and others are chasing what's called artificial general intelligence, a silicon intellect as versatile as a human, but with superhuman speed and knowledge. After his Nobel and a knighthood from King Charles, we hurried back to London to see what's next from a genius who may hold the cards of our future.

2:28What's always guided me and the passion I've always had is understanding the world around us. I've always been, since I was a kid, fascinated by the biggest questions, you know, the meaning of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality itself. I've loved reading about all the great scientists who worked on these problems and the philosophers, and I wanted to see if we could advance human knowledge. And for me, my expression of doing that was to build what I think is the ultimate tool for advancing human knowledge, which is AI. We sat down in this room two years ago, and I wonder if AI is moving faster today than you imagined.

3:10It's moving incredibly fast. I think we are on some kind of exponential curve of improvement. Of course, the success of the field in the last few years has attracted even more attention, more resources, more talent. So that's adding to this exponential progress. Exponential curve, in other words, straight up. Yep, straight up and increasing speed of progress. Start. Yeah. We saw the progress. Hello, Scott. It's nice to see you again. In an artificial companion that can see and hear and chat about anything. Early chatbots learned only the Internet. An app called Astra also takes in the world. Do we call her Shi?

3:54It's a good question. I'm not sure we all know the answer yet. Bebo Shu is product manager for Project Astra, an app in a new generation of chatbots that interpret the world with their own eyes. We challenged Astra with virtual paintings we chose and showed to Astra for the first time. This is July Hay by Thomas Hart Benton from 1942. How about this one? That is The Virgin of Charity by El Greco. That painting is Automat by Edward Hopper. The person in the painting, what emotion is she exhibiting? The subject in the painting appears pensive and contemplative, her expression suggesting a sense of solitude.

4:40Can you create a story around this picture? It's a chilly evening in the city. A Tuesday, perhaps. The woman, perhaps named Eleanor, sits alone in the diner. She is feeling melancholy due to the uncertainty of her future and the weight of unfulfilled dreams. The scene freezes in time. Only the flow of ideas moving onward. That line, only the flow of ideas moving onward? I wish I'd written that. And did we hear a limit to Astra's patience? What was that fictional conversation about? Ah, in the story I imagined, Eleanor and her friend talked about their shared dreams and the challenges of pursuing them.

5:21Something about the way you said, ah, made me wonder if you were getting bored. I apologize if my tone came across that way. My aim is always to engage thoughtfully. And she said, well, I'm sorry if you don't like my tone. Wow. Well, you see… What's happening there? Well, that's interesting. That's again a challenge with these systems as they act in the moment with the context that's around them. And that may have never been tested before. He's often surprised because AI programs are sent out on the internet to learn for themselves. They can return later with unexpected skills. So we have theories about what kinds of capabilities these systems will have.

6:03That's obviously what we try to build into the architectures. But at the end of the day, how it learns, what it picks up from the data, is part of the training of these systems. We don't program that in. It learns, like a human being would learn. So new capabilities or properties can emerge from that training situation. You understand how that would worry people. Of course. It's the duality of these types of systems. that they're able to do incredible things, go beyond the things that we're able to design ourselves or understand ourselves. But of course, the challenge is making sure that the knowledge databases they create, we understand what's in them.

6:44Now, DeepMind is training its AI model called Gemini to not just reveal the world, but to act in it, like booking tickets and shopping online. It's a step toward AGI, artificial general intelligence, with the versatility of a human mind. On track for AGI? In the next five to ten years, I think. And in 2030, you will have what? Well, we'll have a system that really understands everything around you in very nuanced and deep ways, and kind of embedded in your everyday life. Embedded like Astra in eyeglasses. What can you tell me about this building I'm looking at? This is the Coal Drops Yard, a shopping and dining district.

7:33She sees what I see. There's a speaker in the earpiece only I can hear. What was it originally before it became shops? The Coal Drops Yard was originally a set of Victorian coal warehouses used to receive and distribute coal across London. Was coal ever a problem for the environment in London? Yes, coal was a significant source of air pollution in London, particularly during the Industrial Revolution. It occurred to us that the only thing we contributed to this relationship were legs, which will also soon be engineered. I also think another big area will be robotics. I think it will have a breakthrough moment in the next couple of years where we'll have demonstrations of maybe humanoid robots or other types of robots that can start really doing useful things.

8:21For example, researchers Alex Lee and Giulia Vizzani showed us a robot that understands what it sees and reasons its way through vague instructions. Put the blocks whose color is the combination of yellow and blue into the matching color ball the combination of yellow and blue is green and it figured that out it's reasoning definitely yes the toys of demis hasavas's childhood weren't blocks but chess pieces at 12 he was the number two champion in the world for his age this passion led to computer chess video games and finally thinking machines. He was born to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mother.

9:16Cambridge, MIT, Harvard. He's a computer scientist with a PhD in neuroscience. Because he reasoned, he had to understand the human brain first. Are you working on a system today that would be self-aware? I don't think any of today's systems, to me, feel self-aware or conscious in any way. Obviously, everyone needs to make their own decisions by interacting with these chatbots. I think, theoretically, it's possible. But is self-awareness a goal of yours? Not explicitly, but it may happen implicitly. These systems might acquire some feeling of self-awareness. That is possible. I think it's important for these systems to understand you, self, and other.

10:01And that's probably the beginning of something like self-awareness. But, he says, if a machine becomes self-aware, we may not recognize it. I think there's two reasons we regard each other as conscious. One is that you're exhibiting the behavior of a conscious being, very similar to my behavior. But the second thing is you're running on the same substrate. We're made of the same carbon matter with our squishy brains. Now, obviously, with machines, they're running on silicon. So even if they exhibit the same behaviors, and even if they say the same things, it doesn't necessarily mean that this sensation of consciousness that we have is the same thing they will have.

10:42Has an AI engine ever asked a question that was unanticipated? Not so far that I've experienced. And I think that's getting at the idea of what's still missing from these systems. They still can't really yet go beyond asking a new novel question or a new novel conjecture or coming up with a new hypothesis that has not been thought of before. They don't have curiosity. No, they don't have curiosity. and they're probably lacking a little bit in what we would call imagination and intuition. But they will have greater imagination, he says, and soon. I think actually in the next maybe five to ten years, I think we'll have systems that are capable of not only solving an important problem or conjecture in science, but coming up with it in the first place.

11:30Solving an important problem won Hassabis a Nobel Prize last year. He and colleague John Jumper created an AI model that deciphered the structure of proteins. Proteins are the basic building blocks of life. So everything in biology, everything in your body depends on proteins. You know, your neurons firing, your muscle fibers twitching, it's all mediated by proteins. But 3D protein structures like this are so complex, less than 1 % were known. Mapping each one used to take years. DeepMind's AI model did 200 million in one year. Now, Hassabis has AI blazing through solutions to drug development.

12:17So on average, it takes 10 years and billions of dollars to design just one drug. We can maybe reduce that down from years to maybe months or maybe even weeks, which sounds incredible today, but that's also what people used to think about protein structures. It would revolutionize human health. And I think one day, maybe we can cure all disease with the help of AI. The end of disease? I think that's in reach. Maybe within the next decade or so, I don't see why not. Demis Asabas told us AI could lead to what he calls radical abundance, the elimination of scarcity. But he also worries about risk.

12:55There's two worries that I worry about. One is that bad actors, human users of these systems, repurpose these systems for harmful ends. Then the second thing is the AI systems themselves, as they become more autonomous and more powerful, can we make sure that we can keep control of the systems, that they're aligned with our values, they're doing what we want that benefits society, and they stay on guardrails. Guardrails are safety limits built into the system. And I wonder if the race for AI dominance is a race to the bottom for safety? So that's one of my big worries, actually, is that, of course, all of this energy and racing and resources is great for progress, but it might incentivize certain actors in that to cut corners.

13:41And one of the corners that can be shortcut would be safety and responsibility. So the question is, is how can we coordinate more, you know, as leading players, but also nation states even? And I think this is an international thing. AI is going to affect every country, everybody in the world. So I think it's really important that the world and the international community has a say in this. Can you teach an AI agent morality? I think you can. They learn by demonstration. They learn by teaching. And I think that's one of the things we have to do with these systems is to give them a value system and a guidance and some guardrails around that, much in the way that you would teach a child.

14:24Google DeepMind is in a race with dozens of others striving for artificial general intelligence, so human that you can't tell the difference, which made us think about Demis Hassaba's signing the Nobel Book of Laureates. When does a machine sign for the first time? And after that, will humans ever sign it again? I think in the next steps, It's going to be these amazing tools that enhance almost every endeavor we do as humans. And then beyond that, when AGI arrives, I think it's going to change pretty much everything about the way we do things. And it's almost, I think we need new great philosophers to come about, hopefully in the next 5, 10 years, to understand the implications of this.

15:19Fertility rates in the U.S. are near historic lows. One reason is a sharp decline over the last three decades in the number of American women having babies in their 20s. And yet there's been no change in women's biology or the age at which fertility declines. Unsolvable problem? Enter egg freezing. As we first reported earlier this year, freezing embryos for in vitro fertilization, IVF, has been possible for decades. But freezing unfertilized eggs was a tougher scientific challenge used initially for patients with cancer and other conditions that threatened fertility. Egg freezing, for non-medical reasons, became an accepted practice 12 years ago, and since then, demand has skyrocketed, with hundreds of thousands of eggs now frozen, raising big money, big hopes, and big questions.

16:24Could egg freezing offer women what previous generations only dreamed of, the chance to put that dreaded ticking of the biological clock on ice. Early one rainy Tuesday, Kate Sonderreger came to a fertility clinic in midtown Manhattan to undergo a minor surgical procedure to harvest and then freeze her eggs. The next morning, at a different fertility center, we scrubbed up and met another egg freezing patient, Catherine Schneider. How are you feeling? Excited. Her doctor, Tomer Singer, head of Northwell Health's fertility practice, escorted her into the OR. Let's get some eggs. Let's go. Let's get some eggs.

17:17Egg retrieval is the culmination of an arduous process, nearly two weeks of daily self-administered hormone injections, sometimes several a day. The shots induce the ovaries to ripen multiple follicles, the sacs that contain eggs, so that a surgeon can go in with a tiny needle and drain the fluid in those follicles, which is then run into an adjacent embryology lab to search for the eggs. So the patient is right around the corner? Correct. We watched as a pair of embryologists did the delicate work of maneuvering tiny pipettes under a microscope to find and isolate Catherine's egg cells in the fluid.

18:08And here are all the eggs together. See? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Those little black balls are... Yeah. Those are the eggs. Those are the eggs. Oh, my goodness. After a few hours, the eggs are put onto tiny special straws, then plunged into liquid nitrogen, and stored in tanks at negative 320 degrees, where they will stay, possibly for years, until their owner is ready to thaw them, add sperm, and turn them into embryos, which is effectively the second half of IVF. According to the data thus far, as with IVF, there are no differences in the health of babies born from frozen eggs.

18:57I think that egg freezing is as revolutionary as the pill was in 1960s and 70s. It's as revolutionary as the pill? Yeah. And that changed everything, as you know. I know. Women had the option of choosing who to be with and not to accidentally get pregnant with the wrong guy. and egg freezing took it an extra level. So you don't have to have a baby at 30 because you're 30 or 35. You can delay fertility into your 40s. You'll have women having kids in their late 40s with their own eggs that were freezing in their 20s and 30s. There's a famous painting of the young woman with tears going down her face.

19:34Oops, I forgot to have a baby. That won't be true anymore. Correct. I think that we're pushing the envelope. I'm currently 40. I froze my eggs when I was 35. The first time I did it, I was 34 years old, and the second time, I was 36. I did two cycles last year when I was 34. We spoke to a group of women about their decision to freeze their eggs. Why is it a good idea? I 100 % know that I really would love to have children. Yasmin Higbee is 30, works in consulting, and has a serious boyfriend. I'll be able to enjoy these times with my partner a bit more instead of rushing to have kids because there definitely is that TikTok clock that started and I'm not ready quite yet.

20:23It's an insurance. I know that, you know, I'm going to be an older mother. Namitha Jacob, 38, a health care administrator and strategist, isn't ready yet because she hasn't found the right partner. It takes the stress away from dating. You're not pressured to find someone and settle down and get married. You don't hear the ticking. That damn biological clock. It ticks in every woman's head. Amazing. Like it or not, says Dr. Lucky Sikhan of Fertility Clinic RMA of New York, that damn clock is very real. We're born with all of the eggs that we're ever going to have, and we don't make new eggs, and we can't fix or repair them.

21:11It's always decreasing over time. So you're born with a number. Yes. And it starts decreasing right away? It pretty much starts decreasing even before you're born. You're a fetus in your mother's womb at 20 weeks, and that's when you have the peak number of eggs, 6 to 7 million. You have eggs at 20 weeks? Yes. And from then on, the number keeps going down, and the eggs keep aging. So when you freeze an egg, you are stopping it from aging any further. Correct. So if you remove the egg and freeze it when you're 28, that egg is 28 years old. Yep. Until you thaw it. Yes, it's incredible. Because it's not just the quantity of women's eggs that decreases with age, it's also their quality, meaning their likelihood of becoming a baby.

22:04Even at peak fertility in women's 20s, some 25 % of eggs, when combined with sperm, will create embryos that are chromosomally abnormal and will likely lead to miscarriages, and the percentages rise from there. As you get to 35, that number has steadily increased to about 30 to 35 % of embryos being abnormal from your 35-year-old eggs. At 37, 38 years of age, 50%. That's a turning point. Things start to move more rapidly. And at 40, you're looking at 60 to 70 % of embryos being abnormal. By 45, 90%. 90 %? Correct. A lot of times people think that if they've done all the right things, if they've led a healthy lifestyle, they do yoga, they've never smoked a cigarette in their life, they feel younger than their age and they feel like their eggs will be younger than their age.

22:58And I have to explain to them that we have no data to suggest that you can influence your egg quality in that way, unfortunately. Is there an optimal age to freeze your eggs? Yes, your 20s, because that's when you're at your lowest possible rate of genetic errors in the embryos that result from those eggs. and you also have a lot more eggs at that age. Kate decided to freeze her eggs at the unusually young age of 22 because she's going to medical school and knows she has a long journey ahead of her. You know, education for four years, training for anywhere from four to seven years after that and so I'm not even going to think about building a family personally until after I'm done with all of that.

23:48Younger and younger women are beginning to freeze their eggs. When I started doing egg freezing in 2012, most of the women were 40, 41, 42. When I see patients today, most of them are late 20s, early 30s. He says there used to be a stigma, as though freezing eggs meant something hadn't worked out in a patient's life, but not anymore. It became a common thing. It's almost empowering. You come in, I'm in my 30s, I'm not ready for a baby, I want to freeze my eggs, I'm not going to compromise on the wrong guy. Freezing eggs is expensive. A single cycle, including medication, costs an average of$12 ,000 to$15 ,000, plus another$500 to$1 ,000 each year for storage.

24:38To thaw and fertilize the eggs later on costs an additional$10 ,000. Back in 2014, Apple and Facebook made headlines when they started offering egg freezing as a covered benefit for their employees. Today, more than a third of the largest corporations in the U.S., those with 20 ,000 or more employees, cover egg freezing. Our parent company, Paramount, among them. When I was job searching, it was something I was really looking for. Carissa Simic changed jobs three years ago. More and more companies started to offer it, or I was seeing it. So that was a consideration? Absolutely. As to where you worked?

25:22Yes, absolutely. Her egg freezing cycles were covered, as were Nemeatha's. But there's also been criticism of those companies' motives. There are some people who feel that the companies do that to keep you at work so that you won't have a child and leave. not to make you happy, but to keep you at your desk. I personally don't see it that way. When I learned about the fact that they're offering this really wonderful benefit, it made me more dedicated and committed to my company, actually. It's a good way to retain top talent. My insurance did not cover egg freezing at the time. Tina Rampino, now 46, learned about egg freezing in its early days when she went for a routine doctor's visit at age 35 and got a message she wasn't expecting.

26:16My gynecologist said to me, have kids now. You're running out of time. You can get married whenever you want to get married, but you can't have kids forever. Whoa. And I went home, and I think I cried. And I was like, what should I do? The doctor had mentioned egg freezing. And I said, you know, this is kind of scary, but I decided to do it. Paying out of pocket, she froze 10 eggs, which she considered her backup plan. I did not have a partner. Lindsay Smithson Stanley also paid out of pocket when she froze her eggs at 35. A few years later, she got engaged to Paul. They want children, but not until they're married and Lindsay finishes her Ph.D.

27:06So Dr. Singer recommended thawing her 18 frozen eggs, fertilizing them with Paul's sperm, and then doing genetic testing to assess viability. Which is possible once fertilized eggs grow into 5 - to 7-day-old embryos. The results? Lindsay and Paul have four chromosomally normal embryos on ice waiting for them. Do they tell you the gender? We have two boys and two girls. You can't stop grinning. It's exciting. Tina's story took a different turn. After the pandemic, still single, she decided to become a single mother by choice and selected a sperm donor. I had just turned 40, and I knew that motherhood was something that I always wanted.

28:01Sorry, I'm like... But the first embryo created from her frozen eggs failed to implant. But then... Where's Christopher? There. There's Christopher. A second embryo from her frozen eggs did. She gave birth to a son, Christopher. He's such a happy, healthy boy. He's so playful. He loves people. On the day that I started my egg freezing cycle, I screenshotted a quote that said, do something today that your future self will thank you for. And that is something that I think about all the time because that really was the decision that changed my life. But not every egg freezing story has such a happy ending.

28:51It was just devastating. It's really the worst thing that's ever happened to me by far. They think they have an insurance policy that they don't have. Does egg freezing promise young women more than it can deliver? When we come back.

29:20More and more American women are freezing their eggs to preserve their fertility. The number of procedures has increased more than six times over, from 6 ,000 in 2014 to more than 39 ,000 in 2023, with numbers continuing to go up from there. Investors have taken notice, seeing a market that could one day include a significant percentage of all young American women. Venture capital and private equity firms have backed egg freezing startups and have bought up and invested in existing private and academic fertility clinics to consolidate them into giant networks. But not everyone is convinced that egg freezing is such a gift to young women.

30:12You're taking the financial cost, you're taking the medical cost. For what? For a gamble. Vardit Ravitsky is president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, and is a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School. The women we've spoken to, they're almost giddy with this choice. They say that they're freezing the biological clock. That ticking thing is, you know, unbearable and it's gone. I totally understand why young women are excited about it. My fear when I hear young women say, I froze the biological clock, is that they think this is guaranteed. They think I put a baby on ice, not my eggs, and I'm just going to go and thaw it when I'm ready to become a mother.

31:01It's not that. That's the problem. She points to stories like Evelyn Gosnell's. Evelyn froze her eggs three times at ages 32, 36, and 38 for a total of 30 eggs, considered a very safe number. Did you have some level of comfort? Absolutely. Even my doctor was like, that's insane. Like, this is going to be a breeze, totally, no problem. But when Evelyn and her now fiancé Edward went to use her 30 frozen eggs, only 19 survived the thaw, an unusually poor result. Even worse, once those 19 eggs were fertilized, only one grew to be an embryo. Anxiously hoping for positive results, they sent a few cells off for genetic testing to see if the embryo was viable.