Molecular Biologist's Quest: Can We STOP the Aging Clock? | Dr. David Sinclair EP 687

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0:34Make sure to get your tickets right now and step into greatness with us at the Summit of Greatness 2024. Head over to lewishouse.com slash tickets and get your tickets today and I will see you there. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:57Aging is a disease, is that right? Well, that's what I think, yeah. That's what you think it is. Would that mean death is a disease as well? Well, death is the end product of aging. Okay. So we've cured just about every other major disease. So you don't die from an infection. You typically don't die in childbirth if you're a woman. So now what's left is aging. And while we're whacking each of these diseases, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, trying to whack them on the head like a whack-a-mole game. Right. We forget that the main reason all these diseases occur is that our bodies are aging. If you don't get old, you don't get those diseases.

1:35Is that because your immune system is strong and so that it fights against disease essentially? Well, yes, it's similar, but it's not the immune system that you're thinking of. We actually have inbuilt defenses. We call them longevity genes that we can activate in our daily lives by doing certain things. Longevity genes? Yes, that's what we call them. How many genes do we have? Oh, we've got about 23 ,000, 24 ,000 of them. 23 ,000 or 24 ,000 genes. Right, but there's only about 50 really important ones for longevity. Okay. And what is the longevity gene? Well, the ones we study are called sirtuins, and there are seven of those.

2:13And they're in all parts of the body, and they do all really crazy good stuff for us. Okay. And where do telomeres come into play? Well, they're part of it. Okay. Yeah, there are seven hallmarks or eight, depending. These are causes of aging. So telomeres are one of those hallmarks. Other things are like the battery packs winding down, those mitochondria in our cells, we lose stem cells, all this other stuff. But here's the important point. We think, A, that there's a unified cause, a whole upstream cause of all of those things. But also these sirtuins, they defend against all of those. So while we used to think we'd have to develop eight different drugs to slow down aging, if you just tap into these longevity genes, they take care of everything.

2:58Really? They continue to regenerate good cells, they continue to fight against disease or stress or whatever it may be? They do. They're really smart. They make proteins that act like traffic cops telling the body how to fend against adversity. And they've been with us on the planet since life first arose. And it's seven of them? Well, the ones I studied, there are seven. There are others. There are seven sirtuins, and there are three classes of longevity gene. The ones I studied, those seven, and there's a couple of others that you can turn on. Why don't you study the others? We do, but we scientists, we like to specialize.

3:38Gotcha, gotcha. But in truth, even though 10 years ago we used to fight with each other, my longevity gene is more important than your longevity gene. It was ridiculous. My worm's living longer than your worm. It was really silly. But now we've realized most of us admit that all these genes are talking to each other and if you tweak one set, the others will be tweaked too. Right, okay. So these genes, when you say you study them, what does that actually mean? You're pulling like blood out of different humans and you're putting them in a tube and you're researching and you're like, what's actually happening to study these?

4:12You've got to come to the lab. You've got to see what's going on because it's crazy stuff. We do anything we can to answer a question. You're cloning humans in there. You're doing all sorts of stuff, right? It's crazy stuff. So we're driven by the question, not by the technology. So most labs will say, okay, I'm an expert in rats. I don't give a rats about a rat. I care about answering a question. And our question is, why do we age and what can we do about it? And will that transform medicine? And so what we do, if you came to a lab, you'd see we've got jellyfish growing. We've got mice that are living longer and running on little treadmills.

4:46Wow. Up in the lab, we have stem cells that we're growing and actually turning them back in time. We can reverse the aging of these human cells. Yeah. So what does that mean? You take a cell from a human, like a sample, like a skin sample, like a blood. Skin, brain cells growing in the dish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, brain cells growing in the dish? Yeah. So you take it from a living human? Yes. You take a little piece of brain? Yes, you put it in a dish and you reverse the age of the brain. Correct. Wow. Yeah That's what we do now. We can actually grow little little brains in the dish too From scratch Well, you start with a network of cells and then you coach them into forming those networks and it's like a mini brain Yeah, and we can age them forwards make them older No, we think we understand what's driving the aging process and then we reverse it right so you can create a brain from nothing, a bunch of little cells that come together and create a thinking brain.

5:43Well I don't know how much it thinks but it'll respond to stimuli, it'll fire. And then you can make it older like Benjamin Button and then reverse its aging. Right. Wow. I'm telling you it's it's crazy but when I'm in the lab and with my students for us it's just every day it's like work. It's like there's the brain it's getting older it's getting younger yeah. Yeah yeah. But now that I'm talking about it with you, it does sound bizarre. For a non-scientist.

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7:04Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.