Transcript: I think people should be asking themselves whether their direction in life is being sufficiently defined by their own desires, or whether they are sleepwalking. But I don’t wanna be too, you know, judgmental on that. Because I know that I’ve had an extraordinarily privileged life. I’ve had an awful lot of luck in being able to get to the point where I could make a lot of money ____ luck. So a lot of people, you know, they’re sleepwalking through life because that’s all they’ve had the opportunity to be able to do. However some people, I think, are sleepwalking unnecessarily.

Recorded on: 6/22/07

Transcript: There are two possible ways to extend your life with action that you take today. One is to do things that allow you to maintain your health for a longer period. And the other is to act to hasten this research, so that the time when therapies come along which can rejuvenate you and give you another lease on life come along in time for you – even if you are going downhill. Those two things are _______ so to speak _____ independent criteria. Now it turns out that with the first criterion, there’s not much we can do, unless, of course, you are unusually susceptible to some particular age-related problem. Like, you know, some people come down with Type II Diabetes in their 30s. There are drugs for that. If you are the sort of normally healthy person whose natural lifespan is going to be 80 or more, then there is nothing to speak of that we can do that will extend your life by an appreciable amount – or at least that is proven to us to be able to do so.

So we have to look at number two. And number two, the situation is completely different. It doesn’t matter who you are . . . whether you’re a scientist, or a broadcaster, or a journalist or a general member of the public. It doesn’t matter who you are. You can make a difference by contributing to the enthusiasm in society for this work by changing the mood of society, and thereby changing the funding environment so the work will be done more quickly. I personally, for example, don’t get enough sleep because I’m traveling all the time. I’m on the road. I’m trying to get this stuff to happen. And from a purely health point of view, that’s probably bad for me. It’s probably shortening my life. But I’m pretty sure that I’m bringing forward the day when these therapies will arrive. By a larger amount that I’m shortening my life. So even in my personally selfish stand, I’m probably winning. And of course, I’m not only doing it for selfish stand. I’m doing it to save your life as well.

Recorded on: 6/22/07

Transcript: I don’t think there are any inherent failings that are going to hold us back indefinitely. I think it’s purely a matter of progress breeds progress. Progress breeds the expectation of further progress. And it depends on the field. I often make the distinction between fundamental breakthroughs and incremental breakthroughs – incremental refinements of breakthrough if you like. So if you look at pilot in flight, for example, it took us an awful long time to work out how to get bits of ______ stuff off the ground. But once we’d done it, we were able to refine that rather rapidly. You know, it was only 24 years from the Wright brothers until Lindbergh got across the Atlantic, which the Wright brothers couldn’t have imagined. And of course subsequent progressions. And we can see this in computers. We can see it in the combating of infectious diseases. You name it. So it seems to me that that was because there was no credibility barrier. People tried because they knew that they could make a small advance, and they just did it. It’s big advances that are tricky. But then that also works across fields. If you’ve made big advances in one field, you can make . . . maybe make it in another field. That’s what I was saying about raising sights. So I feel it’s a psychological thing; but it’s not an intractable, innate, psychological thing. It’s a . . . a contingent psychological consequence of our ______ success hitherto.

Recorded on: 6/22/07

Transcript: I have, perhaps, a somewhat more charitable view of that failure than many people do. So let’s take climate change. It’s obviously . . . the obvious example. We’re not very good at going out together to do something about climate change. Why not? Well, a couple of reasons. I think one of the reasons is we trust technology to save us at the last moment. And, you know, that’s a dangerous trust; but it’s not surprising because technology quite often does actually provide solutions to problems. So, you know, I wish we didn’t rely on technology; but it’s understandable.

The second one, perhaps ________ a lot more profound, is fatalism. I think that a large part of why people are not going about trying to do something about climate change is because they don’t think they can. And I don’t just mean individuals here. I mean whole societies. Why don’t they think they can? Well actually, I have a feeling that aging is part of that problem. It may be the _______ of that problem. Aging, after all, is a constant, daily reminder of our inability to manipulate our world as we might like. There are so many things that we can do with our world; but ultimately, when it comes to the really critical things – saving our own lives – we can’t do it. We’re helpless. And this grinds us down.

Recorded on: 6/22/07

Transcript: The survival instinct is one thing. The urge to reproduce certainly exists well, and I think it’s part of this . . . the innate human nature. But again, it’s something that can be overstated. A lot of people would say, “Well, it’s crazy that we would ever use birth control.” You know, the idea if you asked people 200 years ago whether they would actually submit to the concept of limiting their procreation in order to control population or whatever, people would have said it was a crazy idea. But sure enough, when infants start dying very often, you know, we all did it. And it’s only because children are expensive. We ______________ laws or anything like that. So if we look at the ____________ same sort of thing. We see a fall in ______ rate in pretty much all of the _______ world, and even in the wider world. Like China’s below replacement level already. India is plummeting, and they haven’t had a “one child” policy or anything. They’re nearly down to replacement level. More than that, even women who are having children, they’re having them later . . . as if they’re delaying until they have to have children because of menopause and, you know, problems with Down’s Syndrome and so on and ________. So I think that’s really good news. It means there actually are, you know . . . Our presumption that there is this innate drive to have kids, quite often, may not be so strong as we may have been brought up to believe. And that actually, if we were to eliminate menopause and the . . . you know, the decline of quality of egg cells, and therefore the decline of the safety of having kids, then women would actually – professional women anyway – would continue to delay their procreation even further. So we might actually not be correct in thinking there would be a serious overpopulation problem if we eliminated aging.

Recorded on: 6/22/07

Transcript: I think that certainly there is a very strong survival instinct that is apparent in all people. But the _______ of that survival instinct . . . Some people are less risk averse than others. And we can go further. There have been some very interesting studies recently looking at things like the history of violence, of how the world’s become less violent. In most parts of the world people have become more affluent and more able to control their lives. And also with regard to . . . It’s a very interesting story from Chicago on the adherence to lifestyle modifications that will minimize the risk of getting AIDS. There are stories that have been done in Africa – ________ Africa – that have found that the countries that adhere best to these regimes are ones in which other causes of death are relatively low. So it’s _____ quantity _____ quality of life determined the perceived value of life, and therefore the percep . . . the efforts that one goes to, to make sure that one’s life doesn’t end prematurely. I think . . . You know, I think ____________ a good deal that . . . it’s. . . It’s a complicated question, but I think this is the way that life is going to proceed in the future as well. But as we gain more control over our ability to live longer, we will perceive the value of life to matter a great deal more.

Recorded on: 6/22/07

Transcript: There’s a learning process in becoming a good researcher. I became a good researcher when I was looking to be a scientist. And that was something I was able to take into the biology field when I chose to become a gerontologist. Now a lot of the research process is understanding yourself . . . understanding your own mind, because sometimes you can know too much to be able to have a good idea. You can be encumbered by conventional wisdom. And you need to know when to step back and pace up and down, and talk to yourself for half an hour . . . when you might ought to go to a particular conference just to get a bunch of new knowledge . . . when you ought to read a bit . . . things like that. So you have to get an innate feel for that. It’s not something that can really be articulated and taught. However, in switching from one field to another, it’s important to emphasize that this has a very long and distinguished track record of success in research – people who switch, making big contributions more or less at once – because they are unencumbered by conventional wisdom. They have been trained in a different field, so they know how to research. Research is a very transferrable skill. But you come in, you know only enough but not too much. And you can come up with new ways of looking at things.

Recorded on: 6/22/07

Question: What are the risks and benefits of curing aging?

Transcript: It’s important to appreciate that there are big distinctions – big differences – in the reaction to my proposals from different communities. Let’s first of all take the wider world . . . people who are not biologists and who are just wondering about the consequences of success in these ventures . . . whether it would be a good idea to combat aging or to defeat aging. The predominant reaction is people are . . . have fear of the unknown. People appreciate that a post-aging world will be unbelievably different from the world that we know today. And in some ways they appreciate that, yes, there would be some good things. There would be much less suffering because, of course, aging doesn’t just kill. It kills people really horribly. People appreciate, you know, that it would be economically very valuable that . . . that people can carry on contributions to society rather than concealing ______ by virtue of medical care. That would be good. But on the other hand people are very scared about things like overpopulation or dictators living forever, boredom, or whatever it might be. Now these are legitimate concerns, but they’re overblown. People are essentially abandoning any semblance of sense of proportion when they make these suggestions, because ultimately we’re talking about saving lives here. We’re talking about the fact that 100,000 people die every single day in the world from aging . . . from causes that young people essentially never die of. So that means that, you know . . .

Question: What is your response?

Transcript: The question is what should we do? Should we let people carry on dying just because we’re scared about these social problems? Or should we do first things first to save the lives and fix the problems as . . . when they occur or try to _______ problems ______? It seems to be pretty obvious that that’s what we should do, just as we did 100 years ago when we discovered that hygiene could save infant lives. You know, we didn’t vacillate and prevaricate and say, “Oh dear. Overpopulation might happen.” You know, “Let’s not go there.” We went and saved the lives and we went and solved the problems ______ we could. And it turned out not to be terribly hard to solve the overpopulation problem. Everyone started wearing condoms and here we are. But you know there’s this fear. There’s this terrible fear of the unknown. And it’s worse than that. There’s this irrationality because aging has been considered inevitable for so many millennia. We just don’t want to think about it. We want to put it out of our minds. And the best way to do that is to invent logically ridiculous, idiotic arguments for why aging is actually not such a bad thing after all . . . and thereby to, in some way . . . you know . . . help us not to think about it . . . not to be preoccupied by it. And that made perfect sense while aging really was inevitable. But now that we’ve worked out how to get within range of developing therapies that might actually work, that pro-aging trance, as I like to call it, has become an enormous part of the problem,

Question: What will a world look like in which people live forever?

Transcript: First of all, I want to point out that people in a world without aging will not live forever. Because there will still be trucks to be hit by. There will still be, you know, homicides. There will still be infectious diseases. People will live a lot longer on average, but some people won’t. And some people will live a lot longer on average, but we’ll see. Okay. So I think it’s very important not to . . . not to use words like “immortality” and not to use phrases like “living forever” in describing what I do . . . what I work on. What will the world be like, however?

Well the big thing is there won’t be any frail people. So we won’t be spending vast amounts of resources and time and effort and suffering on the last year or two of people’s lives as they get older. That will be the biggest difference. There really won’t be all that many other differences. There will probably be fewer children around; but not no children because, of course, there will be a turnover. And I don’t think, personally, that that’s going to be much of a problem; but we’ll see. There will be much more . . . much more ambition with regard to the ability of technology to do other things. There will be much greater perception of the value of life, so I’m sure that there will be a much less violent world – both at the personal level in terms of personal violence, and also at the national level in terms of wars and so on. Because people just won’t wanna sign up to such stuff. Those are the main differences.

Recorded on: 6/22/07

Question: What do you do?

Transcript: The best way to describe what I do as a biologist is to start by describing what I don’t do. Because there’s one big thing that nearly all biologists do that I don’t do which is experiments. I don’t have my own laboratory. I never have had. I don’t even have training in experimental work. So I work as what, in physics, would be called a theoretician – a theoretical biologist. I bring my ideas together. I take the ideas and the results that other people have generated in the laboratory, and I come up with new proposals for experiments . . . both experiments to understand aging better, and also experiments to combat aging. And I . . . I’m able to do this in a manner that experimental biologists are less able to do simply because I have more time. Because experiments are very time consuming. Just the same way that in physics, there are a lots of people who do that – who spend their time bringing ideas together, and who work symbiotically with the experimentalists – that should be the same with biology. In biology, however, it turns out that very, very few people work on the synthesis side. And actually that’s one of the big reasons that I chose to go into the field, because I felt I could make a big contribution simply because there were so few other people trying to do the same thing.

Question: What are you best known for?

Transcript: My main contribution so far – in my own view – is to realize that we probably know enough to be able to describe a coherent, comprehensive framework – a panel of intervention – some of which we are close to being able to already implement, and some of which are maybe 10 years away from being proven in the laboratory . . . a coherent and comprehensive panel of interventions which, jointly, could really postpone aging. And when I say postpone, I don’t simply mean “slow down” aging. I mean actually rejuvenating people at a molecular and cellular level to the point where they are . . . they are buying time, effectively, to be able to improve them more and so on. So yeah. That’s my main contribution.

Some people would say that my main contributions have been more on the particular area of mitochondrial mutations and their accumulation and the ways in which they do damage. And those are the things that I worked on first maybe about 10 years ago. So I guess that’s why they are best known. But I regard the work that I did a few years later, when I came up with this big, coherent framework as really my main contribution.

Recorded on: 6/22/07

Question: What is ageism?

Transcript: ultimately, ageism is the nub of the contradiction that we have in society at the moment in this regard. At the moment, on the other hand, we regard ageism as a bad thing, just like racism or whatever. But on the other hand, you know, ambivalence about defeating aging is the ultimate ageism. It’s saying, “old people don’t matter”, right? So I think bringing that conversation out . . . you know, actually discussing with people what ageism really means, and whether actually it’s rather important to be working to defeat aging. Because the fact that one happens to have lived a long time already does not diminish one’s entitlement to live a lot longer. That, you know . . . So I think having that conversation. And in particular, having that conversation with people who don’t want to have the conversation. Not letting people change the subject is actually the single hardest thing, and the single most important thing. Because the more people have . . . The more people are forced to talk about these things, the more people are forced to think about them. And the more they’re forced to think about them, the more they will be unable to sustain that pro-aging trance . . . that studied resolute irrationality.

Question: How did you become interested in gerontology?

I always knew that it was a bad thing, and I always knew that it was potentially fixable. The thing I didn’t know was that nobody was really trying . . . or hardly anybody. I discovered this pretty much by accident. In 1990, I met – and in 1991 I married – a biologist from America who was a senior professor . . . a full professor at U.C. San Diego at the time. She was on sabbatical in England in the U.K. in Cambridge. And she decided to stay. And over the next few years I learned a lot of biology just over the dinner table really, but ___________. And during that time, gradually I began to understand and began to learn that aging wasn’t coming up in conversation. It was just sort of a backwater. And I began to realize this and to ask questions about why it wasn’t an interesting thing. Because before that, I had always presumed that everybody understood that it was obviously the major unsolved problem in the field. And therefore, you know, if you didn’t hear much about it, that was just because it was obvious – like you don’t talk about the color of the sky. And also, well, because it was a hard problem, and maybe progress wasn’t very much happening so people didn’t talk about it. But then I discovered that no! Actually the main reason was scientists were not very interested in it. They thought, well first of all, it’s very difficult. And so it’s not the way to have a nice, successful career if you work on aging. And secondly it’s so boring! You know, it’s just this decay phenomenon. You’re not gonna learn any fundamental truths. And I thought, well yes. I mean, from a basic, science-driven, curiosity point of view, these criteria make some sense. But from a humanitarian point of view – from a point of view of somebody actually wanting to do something to improve the world – it makes no sense whatsoever. So I thought this was outrageous.

Question: How do overcome these cultural obstacles?

Transcript: The solution is very straightforward. We just need to get results in the laboratory that cannot be ignored. We need to generate therapies that can be applied to mice who . . . mice that are already in middle age – two-thirds of the way through their lifespan shall we say – and that extend their healthy lives by a large amount. If we can do that, that’s . . . You know, mice are mammals. People know that mice are not very different from humans . . . it will no longer be possible to sustain one’s pro-aging trance. It will become impossible to continue in the belief, in the . . . in the supposition . . . in the irrational supposition that these things are impossible. And when that happens, all hell will break loose more or less overnight. It will be complete pandemonium. There will be pressure like you’ve never seen to accelerate the development of these therapies for humans. So that’s what we need. We need those mice.

Question: What inspires your work?

Transcript: When people ask me why do I work on this – why do I think it’s important – I

. . . I hang up a little bit because it strikes me as so bizarre that anyone would ask the question. I’m doing this because I want to save lives. And you know, people don’t tend to argue about the value of saving lives except in this particular context . . . as if it’s some sort of exception. And you try to figure out, you know . . . I have conversations with people and I say, “Well okay. What’s different?” And they say, “Well,” you know, “there’s a natural lifespan.” And I say, “Well hang on, hang on, hang on. Okay, so aging kills old people. But old people are people too, right?” And they say, “Well yeah but, but . . .” and then they sort of trail off and they try to change the subject. And I come up with the next answer and they try really hard to change the subject. And so I’ve got used to that. But no. I mean for me, it’s not really a . . . I don’t like to use the word “philosophy” because that sounds too ________and intellectual. I’m just a normal guy. I just want to save lives.

Recorded on: 6/22/07