 and right people and please good not stuck at 99 percent restarting yes yes yes thank you thank you um hey it's life excellent excellent well we've been having some technical difficulties in getting people to join and i'm going to invite everybody else uh hey gennady all right so we have an exciting panel lined up for today we've had a bit of technical difficulties with our old uh google hangouts setup so i am inviting everybody to join this instance of the hangout and i'm also going to notify the public to watch it here instead we are still waiting on aubrey and bill to join us but hopefully that will happen shortly sounds great well those trophies gennady ah well those trophies are an accumulation of many years some of them are from math competitions some of them are from debate tournaments some of them are from speech tournaments a few science awards and professional insurance designations excellent hello marker yes hello bill uh good to see that you've been able to join and now we're just waiting on aubrey i gotta tell you i i'm the only one here in the building and we are getting fedex and ups deliveries i just that's why i'm late getting on right now i just had to go accept the delivery so i might have to leave during this meeting to do that it's a doorbell rings all right so i am just going to notify the public that we have shifted to a new live stream do you want to email us the link to that and we can send it out to our yes audience as well first absolutely yes i just sent that out okay awesome so i suppose because we are live at present we should begin with our discussion and then as aubrey joins us if he can share his insights as well my apologies for the technical issues i was very excited to have this conversation today and i think we should just launch into it i will be making an audio recording as well so ladies and gentlemen welcome to the united states transhumanist party panel discussion on life extension where we have some of the most distinguished researchers and thought leaders in this area available to answer some intriguing questions first we have dr bill andrews who is the president and ceo of sierra sciences ah hello and hello aubrey good to see you good to see you so now we are all here as you can see we have quite a distinguished panel i was introducing dr bill andrews the president and ceo of sierra sciences as a scientist athlete and executive he continually pushes the envelope and challenges convention in his 35 year biotech career he has focused the last 23 years on finding ways to extend the human lifespan and health span through telomere maintenance as one of the principal discoverers of both the rna and protein components of human telomerase dr andrews was awarded second place as national inventor of the year in 1997 just joining us is dr aubrey de gray the biomedical gerontologist who researched the idea for and founded sen's research foundation he received his b a in computer science and phd in biology from the university of cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively dr de gray is editor in chief of rejuvenation research is a fellow of both the gerontological society of america and the american aging association and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations with us we also have ira pastor who has 30 years of experience across multiple sectors of the pharmaceutical industry including pharmaceutical commercialization biotech drug development managed care distribution otc and retail he is the ceo of biopork incorporated and executive chairman of reanima advanced biosciences and finally we have dr ilia stombler who is a researcher at barry lawn university in israel his research focuses on the historical and societal implications of aging and life extension research he is the author of a history of life extensionism in the 20th century and he is actively involved in advocacy for aging and longevity research at so thank you very much for being willing to share two hours of your time with us today as we delve into some of the most intriguing questions with regard to life extension research into rejuvenation biotechnology and the societal and political implications thereof my first question for you is this how would you characterize the current state of efforts to reverse senescence and lengthen human lifespans and bill let's start with your thoughts on this well my first i mean as far as the present state of things i would say it's going too slow we're way behind schedule but a lot of big breakthroughs have occurred especially in the area of like killing off senescent cells i'm very excited about the work that's going on there and looking forward to see what actually comes comes of it but still the efforts to try to prevent senescence by keeping telomeres from short shortening that's still not here i mean there are products on the market that you can buy that say that they keep your telomeres long but actually there isn't anything really there's there's one publication suggesting that one of them might actually lengthen telomeres a little bit but i think the data is questionable in my own studies i have not been able to find anything so far that is potent enough to actually stop cells from approaching senescence just possibly slow it down and that's been shown on lifestyle and things too but uh otherwise i think we have a ways to go i think the uh we just have to wait a few more years to see what we can put together in the future that's indeed thank you bill now abry what are your thoughts on the current state of progress in these efforts um well first of all i want to absolutely agree with what bill said initially we're way behind schedule no question sorry just make can i do a sound check can you hear me okay yeah absolutely good um yeah we're certainly way behind schedule but the good news i believe is that in terms of the reasons why we are way behind schedule um as considered basically over the past 10 years or so which is around the kind of period that i've been looking at time frames the only real reason is the lack of financial support i don't think that in the past 10 years there's been a single example where we have identified a new scientific obstacle a new thing that makes the approach to um postponing to lessons any more difficult than we previously thought it was and that's very very important because on the one hand it means that we only have one problem to solve the fact the problem of getting money in the door now the other hand it means that we probably won't be encountering any significant scientific obstacles any new ones in the in the near future you know the longer we carry on not finding such things the more confident we can be that we really do understand the nature of the real problem so that's good news um in terms of the specifics yeah i mean i as bill says there's a bunch of ways to go in terms of maintaining telomere length um of course there are various ways to maintain telomere length one can do it by extending the telomeres of self in situ or one can do it by replacing cells that have short telomeres with ones that don't using stem cell technologies or other other approaches there is always of course the concern that we want to ensure that we don't do any have any unintended consequences by extending telomeres and the one that everyone talks about of course is cancer but the point is we always need to be looking out for alternative ways to achieve a particular aspect of the of the goal and sometimes things will happen that may change our judgment as to which approach has the greatest promise i certainly think that we could say that about for example the creation of IPS cells 10 years ago and also the creation of CRISPR more recently we think have been quite significant game changes in terms of the specifics of how we go about deciding how to attack various aspects of the masses but if i look at the entire panel as i normally describe it the entire list of things that are that we need to fix and the ways in which we can fix them then i'm very encouraged i feel that we are now really moving quite significantly quite rapidly on all of these things even the really difficult ones and therefore that as society in particular those with deep pockets becomes more positive about this both in terms of its real its realism and in terms of its desirability that the fundamental difficulty that remains namely the volume of financing will become progressively less serious and we will make more rapid progress thank you Aubrey so we are behind but we have the potential to seriously catch up in the coming years and that is a bit heartening now i wrote what are your thoughts on this question yeah i completely agree with Aubrey and Bill's response i think from a you know from the different baskets if you think of science and technology we've definitely gone through that window and i don't think anyone would disagree that we're not making amazing discoveries and translating them now on a on a daily basis i think financially uh yeah i think there's a lot more happening from a funding perspective whether that is private equity or other sources that are beginning to come to the table and realize you know like many other things that come down the path in this industry that hey there's something here to to throw some money behind nowadays and you know you see that on the the smaller company level you see it with larger entities beginning to to get involved you know whether that be things like calico and human longevity so you begin to see sort of the typical pattern to that sort of the bio farm industry is is known for with regard to yeah the pathway of stuff that that comes down the the pipe from an idea to discover its ultimately translation you know the one thing that i think we all need to keep our mind on though is that um start the other ideas are always exciting and then you know this is an industry that you know although it's pretty big and has a lot of uh it's slow to move but nonetheless it catches on to new ideas and puts money behind them for a couple of years and something more exciting comes along you know priorities change but that being said i think um there's definitely the right translational momentum behind us now and i don't think um you know thinking the sort of the one major risk bucket which is regulatory risk for all of us is if that's a little bit down the roads i don't think too many of us have to worry about uh that at this point in time but we always have to keep that in mind too about how sort of some of these non-traditional technologies and ideas as they get into the registrational arena are going to be looked at by regulators and whether they'll be as advanced as we want them to be in their thinking five 10 15 years down the road um because regulatory agencies are full of really smart people but they too have to keep up with with science and technology as it's happening so but i'm i'm fairly positive uh uh on sort of industry as a whole uh and from a company perspective there were we're definitely making great moves all right thank you ira and ilia what are your thoughts on this question uh i agree with bill and obry and ira uh the progress still seems to be rather slow we see a lot of let's call it sideways expansion uh technical advances summit always every day and in many more and more places but they still don't add up to some kind of coherent or systemic intervention and also in terms of public acceptance the idea becoming more and more mainstream and more and more people take the possibility of aging intervention seriously but still it hasn't translated into any substantial funding improvement or or actual support or or effort so there's still a lot of way to go upward so if we speak in terms of exponential like uh investment we're still at the lower end where the investment is rather hardly perceptible but hopefully the quantity will become quality and the the curve will become steeper and steeper in time all right thank you ilia we are starting to get some user comments user aging reversed says obry is awesome as always so uh obry that's uh quite a compliment and uh bridging from that compliment i wanted you to discuss the question of how does the progress in uh your areas of research compared to your expectations approximately 10 to 15 years ago looking back at what you anticipated in the early to mid two thousands uh are we approximately where you thought we would be or are we farther behind than you expected we are definitely further behind than i expected i think that my expectation of the amount of progress that we would have made since let's say 2004 which i think was the year in which i started making predictions um it's about a factor of three i think i would have expected it to make about three times more progress than what we've actually made i do want to emphasize again though that i'm i'm really convinced that the only reason we have made less progress than i expected is the financial reason in other words i'm confident that if you'd asked me in 2004 how much progress we would make by 2017 and you had also told me how much money i was going to have to make that progress then i would have come up with pretty much the number the amount of progress that we have impact made um so uh the question then is you know what's that i mean let me elaborate on that a little bit because if you asked me the same question maybe five years ago i would actually have been a fair bit more cautious and more downbeat because there were certain areas of um of our work essential areas in which by that time by let's say 2013-2012 we had made nearly no progress in fact sometimes absolutely no progress since 2004 you know and that's bad uh the good news is that there is no such example now so that i would say that the two biggest examples that did exist back then are the the um the creation of backup copies of the mitochondrial DNA and the uh breaking of crosslinks especially in the epithelial matrix those are two of the seven essential strands of sand and even though we had a pretty good idea or we thought we had a pretty good idea of how to go about this we had not made any real progress now it's a very different story on the mitochondrial side um we published a paper a few months ago in nucleic acid research showing that we could now get two of the 13 genes that are necessary to work simultaneously in the same human cell um and we are obviously building on that right now um we are i i cannot say that we now have a generic solution that's going to work on all 13 we still don't understand the problem that well but we are moving very much more rapidly towards that point than we were before so i'm i'm going to say i'm about 10 times happier about the situation with that particular strand of sand than i was three years ago um it's the same kind of story with crosslinking um about 18 months ago we published a paper in science from our group Yale that demonstrated a method for um for synthesizing the main chemical structure that we wanted to destroy in order to restore elasticity to the exhaler matrix now this is a structure that was discovered in the mid 90s and everybody knew from the beginning that the only way to study it would be to develop this kind of synthesis method because if you are only able to get the stuff by extracting it from tissue you just it takes far too long and you get far too little material to be to be able to do the obvious things like um rating antibodies to it so people tried and especially when it was established in the late 1990s early 2000s that this is the number one most of the vertical structure that causes loss of elasticity um in human tissue you know it became a big priority but nobody could figure out how to do it so i think it's fair to say that the work that we funded at Yale has unblocked a log jam that existed in this essential field this vital field for maybe 15 years so again i'm 10 times happier about the progress there than i was three years ago excellent well thank you obry uh bill looking back at your expectations from the early to mid 2000s uh how would they compare to the current reality and uh what were the limitations if the reality didn't live up to those expectations well well first of all the word that comes to mind is disastrous um i in fact listening to obry talk reminded me of even before i got into telomeres when i was still at a company called burlex bio sciences i was working on uh trying to figure out a way to break up the advanced glycation in products that caused the cross-links i was working on something called the receptor for advanced glycation in products and and actually even interviewed to work with uh uh tony serami not uh was it tony serami i i think it was tony serami that was uh working uh on that in new jersey um but uh i i chose to go into telomeres instead but but back then when i was working i i would have never guessed that by 2017 that research hasn't been complete i would have thought by far we would have a solution to the advanced glycation in products which is a major problem in aging um and i'm going to reinforce again what obry said the problem is funding okay we all know what to do to test our our theories okay and some of these theories are so good i'm i'm i'd be surprised if they actually didn't work but you still have to test them and it's all because of the funding that's preventing it from happening uh in in the field of telomeres i mean when i when i was first working on telomeres in the early 90s i would have never guessed it would be the year uh we wouldn't have it done by the year 2000 it's uh again it's funding it's it's also like jaron corporation where i was working at the time they had uh decided to focus more on cancer than on uh life extension uh which was a big setback in my opinion and that's one of the reasons i started my company seara sciences was to continue that and you know for a while everything was going pretty well while funding was still something that all of us could get but uh you know it's been tough since 2008 i think obry mentioned 2014 so he he has funding since then that i didn't get i it's been since 2008 it's been really tough since the global financial crisis i i remember uh over 10 years ago speaking at conferences saying that i'm looking forward when to seeing when betty white who was i think 85 at the time would walk out on stage and look 24 again and that's when i would say aging has been cured or age reversal has occurred uh now i'm saying now that she's 95 i'm still saying the same thing but i'm just it's it's like i would say 10 years ago we thought we were one to three years away maximum of having something to test uh and uh still because of the financial issues we're still at that one to three years away 10 years later uh gene therapy when i was still a jaren corporation gene therapy was thought to be the way to go and you know certainly we'd have something done by 2000 uh by the year 2000 but then so many problems occurred with gene therapy and the idea that it in itself gene therapy was at a high causing cancer at a high rate and uh but fortunately there's new gene therapies available right now that i'm hoping that crisper and zinc fingers and uh other things will start employing to actually be effective there so i'm a little optimistic that one of the ways either uh drugs developing drugs or natural products or gene therapy is going to uh be still one to three years away if if we can get the funding so uh yeah it's it's i'm just surprised if i if i had to go back to the early 1990s and say you know my research would still not be completed by 2017 i would have said okay i gotta find a whole another way to start off it's the whole another way to research find funding first and then do the research or whatever that's it well thank you bill so it seems that a major uh funding push is needed to catalyze those remaining few years of research both for you and for Aubrey in order to make visible progress that the public could then latch on to and see this as an extremely promising field now ira what about your expectations in the early to mid 2000s compared to the reality today um it's a good question i wasn't doing this in the early 2000s but um the uh because i didn't get involved in uh bioquark until 2008 but i but we've been fairly happy with the the pace that uh those particular programs have been proceeding but the it's interesting you you mentioned back to the early 2000s and so forth and i was sitting here thinking for a moment what i was doing then and i was actually um i was actually in the middle we had actually just raised the tremendous amount of money at my previous company and we're conducting a um a large phase two uh study in collaboration with Pfizer and the NIH um there was a selective glucocorticoid receptor modulator uh it was a it was a wonderful study it was my first sort of exposure uh at the FDA to bringing a product through that was not a traditional drug um and it was an interesting uh time for me in the sense that it was the sort of an aha moment that when one thinks about uh some of this stuff that is being developed uh and realizes that once again you have to think outside it well in our opinion uh it's not all going to be you know small molecule therapeutics or uh heterologous proteins but there may be a range of therapies uh to get this thing done at the end of the day that it was a very nice you know it was very positive at the time that an agency like FDA was open to reviewing non-traditional drug substances um but yeah so yeah but i sort of thinking back just in general um yeah i mean it'd be it'd be lovely if other things that were happening back then um you know all had more uh money and resources behind them um and i think that this is just sort of an underlying theme behind uh a lot that is going on in this space and continues to and i think it ultimately it'll all get done it just it's up to all of us to creatively figure out ways to to fund it and it's not only going to be your traditional life science private equity sources and there's going to be you know orbeez uh had some very creative financing and so forth um there's going to be many ways to push this through and i think that's all you know upon all of us to um to to look at as many pathways as possible uh in order to successfully get it done yes and i definitely agree creativity and attracting funding and interest to this field is essential now uh this is one of the main reasons why the us transhumanist party exists to get the general public to be more aware of research done in attempting to reverse senescence extending lifespan repairing aid related damage and if the public can view those endeavors as favorably as they view the war on cancer or the war on heart disease or ALS today then uh i would be pretty confident that the funding would materialize now ilia with regard to your expectations 10 to 15 years ago and the reality today how do they compare uh well my impression is rather contrary to that of bill and obry actually uh early in the century i didn't expect us to get anywhere uh so i'm probably more difficult to be disappointed but early in the century the issue in terms of public opinion at least the issue was nowhere near near the surface just beginning to immersion the internet just a bunch of strange echo light discussing at the immortality institute uh in 2006 i was nearly thrown out of the university for even for entering the world life extension so i'm my impression is that we're way advanced in terms at least in terms of public awareness even in terms of technical development but of course it's far behind the schedule as everybody would agree and of course there is a long way to go but at least i see huge stride forward in the last 15 years very interesting thank you and i think it's noteworthy that public opinion tends to move slowly and even when public opinion shifts it affects policy and research and physical consequences rather slowly so perhaps that wave of acceptance is coming and it might manifest itself in the coming years anecdotally when i speak with people about the prospects for dramatically expanding lifespans be that to age 150 or indefinitely i would say about half of the people are mildly positive in their outlook about it mildly receptive many of them might still think it's somewhat of a science fiction possibility but they wouldn't mind and then the other half have these very typical reservations about well over population boredom dictators living forever and various let's say very tenuous arguments that are easy to refute if one thinks about it but in terms of what we can work with and the obstacles that we are facing what would you say are the most significant challenges and obstacles that you perceive today apart from the issue of funding for achieving serious reversal of biological aging anytime within the next few decades and i'll open this to anyone to start someone else that this time you just threw us for a loop when you said besides funding because the obstacles as i said before i i i think we know what to do and maybe it's public perception i was surprised that i spoke at a university recently and to a health a group of health students and faculty and when i asked anybody here not here at telomeres there wasn't a single person there that had heard of telomeres uh and it's it's i think it's perception public perception is is they just don't believe that this that a cure for aging or reversal of aging or life extension is possible because they've been you know quacks and charlatans have been saying this for 20 thousands of years and it still hasn't happened so i don't think anybody's going to actually take it seriously until somebody actually like betty white walks out on stage and looks 24 again then everybody's going to be involved but uh somehow we got to find a way of getting public perception and i will say that i think some really good things have happened recently to hopefully encourage that and one is genata you and zotan uh doing this uh transhumanist party i'm excited to see how fast it's growing i'm also excited to see the explosion that's occurring in organizations like people unlimited and putting on this rad festival uh last year which was i thought one of the greatest conferences on life extension and age reversal and and everything else related to transhumanism that i've ever seen and you know now they're spreading all over the world and got more conferences coming up even in the united states so i i'm hoping that that changes that they do can change the public perception but even though you said don't say anything about funding i think 99 of the problem is the lack of funding all right so um so i said that i thought we could go three times faster if we had uh no funding problem and i think i mean that you could kind of rephrase that statement as that two-thirds of the problem is funding and one-third of the problem is is science um i think that's probably about right i mean well of course we do know is that uh we don't need to convince all the public that um that this is a good idea and that this is possible we only need to convince enough people with enough cumulative dollars to be able to fund a really rather modest amount of research uh it's a small number so um you know i could we have the scientists there are definitely plenty of biologists who think that what we're doing is crazy and can never work but there are also quite sufficiently efficient number of world leading scientists who don't think that way who think that the various things that we want to try to do are indeed feasible in a respectable time frame so um the question then is you know why why would we not instantly solve the problem of aging if we had a billion dollars or a ten billion dollars to spend and of course the answer is that every pioneering technology does hit kinks on the road it's just that um you know pioneering technologists have some kind of intuition some kind of way to estimate albeit very speculatively how you know how substantial those kinks will be um yes i mean i mean there are definite obstacles um and we can point to them but those obstacles are of the same kind of magnitude the same kind of significance that we see in research that does not encounter the same degree of magnitude that i've done so i believe that we could strictly speaking say yes you know there are other difficulties but in order to say what those difficulties would be we would have to spend you know each of us would have to spend an hour giving a lot of background and explaining in in really deep technical detail where we had got to and what what remains and what the obstacles currently are um the short answer the only short answer is pretty much what they'll say namely we have an estimate of the um technical difficulty of what remains that's a measure of what the what the non-funding component of our problem actually is all right thank you Aubrey now Ira in terms of any technical difficulties or public perception difficulties or political difficulties that you perceive what would those be today i mean i think the main one we spoke about this last week the main one we focus on is at the end of the day um you know i use i know it's hard bills analogy in the past of these many sticks of dynamite um but you know if you know 20 billion or whatever the number if it fell out of the sky tomorrow we're able to extinguish all of those sticks of dynamite um via a combination of approaches and solve this problem in you know the year 2019 or something we still have you know you still have to keep in mind you know these are highly regulated interventions that um you know bump up against this well i don't call it firewall whatever but nonetheless they have to be understood by the regulating entity um and once again i have given some of these examples previously but you know once you get away from traditional drug thinking and although you have a lot of smart people sitting around in the regulatory agencies they you know everyone has been involved in drug industry has those cases show up with a wonderful you know phase three study and people at the agency sit around to say you know what yeah i want you to perform another 500 patient study uh it happens all the time it's the reason why big pharma spends what 200 billion dollars every year on their r&d and it's just and and new chemical entities and new biologics are plummeting it's just harder and harder to to get stuff through and so i think well not a hurdle because this is something and i spend you know we spend a lot of time at at bioquark thinking about and creative ways of doing this and you know we openly will say you know it we're a us-based company and we have a us-focused program and we're going to have to go to fda at some point in the future but uh you know there's 200 other countries out there and this is a unique time in the year 2017 where uh if you're not exploring beyond you know you're where you are um you're probably doing yourself and your company at the service um and you really need to think you know we could use the terms of regulatory arbitrage where those situations are that can you know once you do solve this x problem whatever it is aging complex regeneration what have you um how you get to market um in an efficient way and ultimately um you have to actually you have to think creatively about this and and ways of solving it um because it is i would say formidable but it is an issue and you really have to understand that um you know the smart people will tell you that as much as for instance in our case the united states represents of the global pharmaceutical and healthcare spending nowadays uh 10 to 20 years out there are many other countries brick plus 20 other developing countries that are coming online very fast and if you ignore them and you only follow sort of the old model of raising 100 million dollars and trying to push your compound through in the united states um you may be doing a disservice and you may need to think about turkey and panaman thailand and other places uh where maybe your drug is not a drug and maybe there are as a three year at a market time frame as opposed to a 10 year at a market so you know a lot of these things which as once again they're not insurmountable but you have to in a 2017 world uh be cognizant uh and and and come up with a plan on how to to focus beyond sort of your your home territory yes indeed uh very good advice to entrepreneurs and researchers in this area ira now ilia i also wanted to ask you with regard to any technical and attitudinal obstacles that you perceive and i would also like you to frame your answer in the context of the improvement in public perception that you've observed over the past decade and a half in terms of what you think contributed to that improvement in public perception okay yes indeed there are still large obstacles both on the technical and perceptual side on the technical side i would name one uh we speak about the cure of aging but what does actually mean uh there's still no great definition what aging is in clinical terms uh how do you diagnose it and without such a diagnosis it's very difficult to to uh to provide an intervention that that's i think is still the one of the major technical drawbacks uh and in terms of advancement uh this problem is getting recognized that's the major advancement uh we speak about recognizing aging disease actually uh seniority or aging is already in the icd already in the international classification disease uh but nobody's doing anything about it because nobody knows how to diagnose it and how to provide uh uh indications for it so uh basically what the double show is uh is one thing and it's a recent global strategy and action plan on aging in health is they want us to develop the sets of criteria for healthy aging they call it but we can call it just aging uh basically to show what do you mean by by aging how to measure a success of intervention into it so that i think is a major advancement uh a couple of days ago published a paper on recognizing aging is a treatable medical condition in aging in disease so you're welcome to to to refer to it it is all those policy frameworks that we can exploit and in terms of public perception a lot of people begin to understand that intervention to aging is possible but still there's a block a cognitive block between understanding it and doing something about it so i guess uh the big challenge will be to to transgress in this block to somehow getting people from uh from from the mind to the hearts and hands i don't know how we're going to do this but this will be a challenge yes indeed thank you ilia by the way i did read your paper and i would highly recommend it to others as well i will try to post a link to it after the conclusion of this panel discussion it's a fairly concise paper but it outlines the issues quite thoughtfully i think so with regard to public perception uh i'm also seeing a lot more people becoming aware that this is a problem or at least an interesting area of discussion not just in the popular press but for instance in actuarial publications uh i'm a property in casualty actuary by specialty actuaries tend on the whole to be quite cautious and conservative not in political terms but in terms of let's say treating major changes with skepticism and yet i have seen multiple articles in magazines published by both american and british actuarial organizations discussing for instance aubrey's research or the possibility of living past 200 or past 500 or past 1000 and of course for life and pension actuaries there's a great deal of interest right now in even the gradual expansion of life expectancy that we're seeing today so all of those are hopeful signs that we're getting people who are not generally ahead of the curve in technological innovation but who are intelligent who are extremely professional who are extremely thoughtful to recognize this space uh i wanted also to mention a comment by a user in relation to what we've discussed aging reversed says most people i talked to including religious people are okay with not aging they would like to have a young healthy body for a long time but eventually they would choose death and uh another user super thin guy uh states that that attitude assure irrationality tell them to come to you when all they need to do is die aging reversed replies it's okay if they really do want to die eventually the important thing is they want to have healthy young bodies instead of aging our common ground is to be young and healthy not to be immortal well i i want to live indefinitely i want to live for as long as i possibly can uh but it was interesting during rad fest in 2016 which bill mentioned i was selling copies of this book uh death is wrong the illustrated children's book on indefinite life extension and i was approached by a very conservative christian older gentleman and i actually managed to get him to purchase a copy of the book but he was disputing my uh core premise that death is wrong and he said well it's the natural way of things it's god's will but he supported incremental victories against disease and incremental expansions of lifespan so eventually after about 15 minutes of conversation i asked him would you be fine with science and technology figuring out a way to make us live to be 200 or 300 and he said yes so at that point i told him you and i are allies at least in the short and intermediate term and once we get to that level you might have a different perspective on how long you want to live but in the meantime we share very similar goals so that may be a way to get people on board who might not be immediately comfortable with indefinite life extension but who might be comfortable with incremental life extension of course for me that's just a mechanism to get more people to accept what i want which is indefinite life extension but i am curious as to your thoughts with regard to persuasive tactics and what you found to work and not to work okay um yeah let me chime in on a couple of those things uh i want to first of all come back to what you said about actuaries because i have the good fortune that these days i do get invited to speak to actuaries and people in the life insurance industry and independent industry and so on quite frequently and um i'm not quite so sanguine as you were saying Gennady um it is true that when i talk to groups like that these days i get a much more serious hearing than i used to the decade ago it's clear that these people want to think about this they understand that it's not something they can completely ignore that's good certainly and certainly that it reflected in what you said about the um uh you know this this kind of idea appearing in publications from such industries but there's one big red flag which is that actuaries get paid by people like life insurance companies pensions companies people who have already made very large bets on the continuation of past trends so those people really don't want me to be right and the actuaries therefore have a really a really huge vested interest in not thinking too hard about what i'm saying because if they did they might come to the conclusion that i am right and uh then they would be out of a job they wouldn't be saying what the people that pay them want to hear um i i know this sounds terribly cynical and and so on but you know i've had a number of fairly honest conversations with such people and i'm afraid of a great deal of truth in that um i want to comment on your last point about religious people i think that was very encouraging the conversation i want to give you the version of that that i tend to use which a little bit different essentially what i say is hang on lost i heard god was omnipotent right which means that he's perfectly capable of striking somebody down with a thunderbolt however healthy they are um and therefore i when i speak to religious people i always start out by emphasizing that we don't work on longevity we work on health and the longevity is a side effect that is under god's control as to whether it actually is a side effect um but therefore what we should really be focusing on is the fact that people don't like being sick that sickness is the number one cause of suffering in the world and i don't know of any religion whose holy book does not say in one way or another that it is our duty to try to alleviate suffering so i make the rather strong argument that it would be a sin not to work on all of this um and i try to get away from the longevity aspect that leads me to the last thing i want to say about what you just said namely that i think it's actually very curious to have an opinion about how long one wants to live because you know i i some of you probably know that i've made the comparison with having an opinion about what time one wants to go to the toilet next thursday it's it's like you know you're going to have better information on the topic nearer the time i'm happy not having an opinion about whether i want to live to a hundred at least about one a thousand because i know that what i really want is to be able to make the choice when i'm 99 rather than having that choice progressively taken away from me by my the time i have yes and i do think the idea of giving people the choice is a powerful one and it could persuade a lot of people of course uh virtually no transhumanist or life extensionist believes that people should be forced to uh prolong their lives or live indefinitely that's kind of a canard that some people have put forth but it does bear emphasizing that this is a means of individual empowerment it's a means of gaining control over a significant aspect of our very existence that we haven't historically been able to control now before we move on to comments by others i wanted to point out a few comments by wendy stolier of she says life insurance companies would love it if no one ever died just like car insurance companies would love it if no one ever crashed premiums forever but you never have to pay out anything it's perfect and on the one hand that would be great for profitability in those particular lines of business on the other hand i think in a lot of established industries and this is also true of the insurance industry there is fear of short-term disruptions which could be quite major if products have to be restructured uh or all all of a sudden uh a particular operating model no longer reflects reality so there are these short-term fears there's really a one-word answer to wendy which is hedging insurance companies have life insurance but they also have annuities you know and there's corresponding examples across the board yes yes indeed so with an annuity if somebody continues to live for tens or hundreds of years longer the insurer will have to pay out i do wonder though in a world where we do have a radical life extension we're also going to have radical technological progress in other areas and so much abundance that perhaps the income those insurance companies would be able to get from other sources would dwarf any of those old annuity obligations uh but in any event i wanted to hear the other panelists thoughts on effective persuasion techniques iran bill yeah i'm i'm actually got to confess i'm so impressed with abry's toilet analogy that i forgot what the question was uh but what's that so this strategy for dealing with what for persuading people to be more receptive to the possibility that life spans might get dramatically longer in the future boy it's uh that's a tough one i i all i can think right off the top of my head is the it's it's you know some of the people like the religious groups and stuff um it's not necessarily the religious groups as the individuals uh and sometimes trying to talk to the individual is is uh pointless it's never going to get anywhere uh but you know i had the great experience of one time getting on to an airplane and seeing that the woman i was sitting next to had the most elaborate habit i've ever seen you know with the nuns in the catholic church where and she turned out to be a senior level person in some catholic business organization in utah and she and i had a wonderful conversation and she ended up writing a chapter in my first book about 10 years ago but uh what she was saying was that the catholic church endorses what we're doing uh she said that god put us in the garden of eden uh where we were immortal and then when he kicked us out he wanted us to find our way back and she said that i and people like aubrey and others are instruments towards finding the way back and so she encouraged that and and i was so stunned at that because i had talked to christians and catholics and stuff like that beforehand that were negative to this i was so stunned i asked her if she'd write a chapter in the book and sure enough she did and and uh uh it's uh it's something i don't worry about anymore and i've learned from other religions uh too that that you know when you talk to the key people they're actually uh quite interested and think this is a really good thing they're not opposed to it at all um can i make one comment uh ira did make a comment about uh my analogy to sticks a dynamite uh and i just want to acknowledge that that's actually jeff bulls he's the one who uh came up with that idea and uh i just i think about it all right thanks all right and now i think this is a good time to mention an observation that ilia made in his book a history of life extensionism uh in the 20th century and that is a lot of historical thinkers that advocated for radical life extension did so from very different political persuasions ranging from libertarians to monarchists to socialists to uh even fascists and they all uh from either a religious or a secular standpoint found ways to support the project of dramatically lengthening human lifespan so i'm curious uh ilia do you think that explicit political or religious ideologies are more epi phenomenal in terms of uh let's say being any sort of predictor of a person's view on the desirability of life extension or do you think there is still some sort of correlation some sort of greater probability that someone with a certain outlook would be more receptive toward life extension and if these ideologies are largely epi phenomenal then what do you think is it fundamentally that makes a person more or less receptive to these goals great question first of all i do believe that religions generally are completely compatible with the pursuit of life extension i published a series of articles on this the last one on the compatibility of christianity with life extension and the early of hinduism and judaism and islam so not a problem at all in each religion you can find undercurrents supportive and opposing these pursuits that we just have to reinforce the undercurrents it supports in in in this in this terms in this way everybody can be for us but there's still large perceptual blocks in every persuasion in every denomination among atheists among among religious and that has to do probably more with the things that obry mentioned uh i'm less worried about convincing people that it is possible uh our cast is very strong so if we want if we are a lot of time we can convince people that's possible my worry is how do we take a person who is already convinced that it's possible and make him do something for it that's the the main category of people i'm worried about because a lot of people understand that it is possible and is desirable and people with money people with with facilities people with skills they still don't do anything about it and the reason is probably has to do with with actual with actual economic interests as somebody said you can be sure a person will not recognize the truth if his salary depends on not recognizing it i don't remember who said it probably obry or somebody it's upton sinclair actually so so you can talk with a person about life extension from from dark to dawn but if his salary you know is not affected by it if you know he's living he's living his survival um there's nothing to do with it he's going to dismiss you and that's the major drawback for for for our advancement uh you can speak to to people's ideology but there's so much you can do with ideology you still need to develop a sort of incentive so i people would actually want to invest the time and effort and and money into this kind of pursuit and that's the main drawback yes indeed uh it's interesting too a lot of wealthy entrepreneurs and investors are at least extremely interested in the possibility of living longer for instance mark zuckerberg has just launched his project to cure all diseases in the 21st century and it would be interesting to see how his money and his influence will affect this space and of course google started calico in 2013 calico has been quite secretive about its actual work uh so i can't really comment on anything that they're doing uh but i also wonder will anything materialize from this now that uh these individuals with resources have started to do something about it even though they haven't quite told us what that something is uh now as a way of moving into the us transhumanist party's uh area of operations namely politics uh what do you consider to be key political reforms and uh societal and attitudinal changes that are associated with those political reforms that you would advocate to accelerate the arrival of effective treatments to reverse biological aging and length of life spans well let me let me say irid i'm okay did you want irid to go first i uh anyone who wants to begin okay so i i i'm i'm hoping that people like jim o'neill actually get put into the being the head of the fda uh who i think is going to be more favorable towards the idea that uh uh we've got to get drugs at work on the market there's too much politics and uh let's say personal feelings and things like that involved in getting getting drugs approved uh that work and sometimes they they don't get approved uh and i think they got to get approved faster because you know i forget the number but it's 9 000 or 900 000 people die a day augury would know that number uh but uh uh it's we we they got to move faster and i think i hope i hope uh donald trump brings in somebody like jim o'neill or somebody yeah somebody like that to do that yeah i i completely uh concur on that topic um this uh this country desperately needs uh alternative pathways to uh to move therapeutics or interventions for such like threatening ailments uh faster than the uh the methods that we have nowadays which pretty much amount to you know expanded access trials and what have you and um you know we need to take clues in the united states from from what we see going on around the world uh whether that be uh conditional registration uh like to have in japan now for cell therapies or whether it's uh the more proactive governments that are espousing uh medical tourism in various parts of the world um and you know some of these areas which you know may have been thought as uh as fringe topics in the past whether they were adaptive clinical trial design or n of one clinical trials what have you i mean you only have to look now at uh at china and and what merc did a couple months ago where basically you know they collaborating as a fifth largest drug company in the world collaborating with the chinese government to make you know one of their monoclonal antibodies which approve for one indication on the mainland available for any other oncology indication on this small island off the coast of china and you know this concept of alternative or more rapid development pathway possibilities for so-called no option patients uh makes more and more sense and it is you know it's no longer a niche and we really you know once again going back so from the u.s perspective here really needs to think beyond uh the existing models um and we we just forget that you know some of the greatest developments of all times in this industry penicillin insulin aspirin opiates smallpox vaccine and so forth and they happen decades before the fda even existed um and so we really need to take a lot of this into account as we think about sort of the gold standards the gold standards now which you know i don't know what the tough study is you know it's a two and a half billion i think now for new drug entity and really think about how we come up with alternatives in this country uh for getting things down because the continual increasing cost of development combined with the contigual drop and and what's coming to market is not sustainable and it's just it's going to it's definitely not going in the right direction and you know at least in the u.s we you know always thought of ourselves as a leader in this particular field but i gotta tell you you look around the world and governments elsewhere are are thinking outside the box and making the right moves uh and we really should be paying attention to that yes thank you ira and definitely the cost of getting a new drug introduced available to patients including even terminally ill patients in the united states getting that cost contained is extremely important and furthermore it seems to me in a lot of other areas where more rapid progress has been made uh it was made through iterations through entrepreneurs trying many different approaches often all at once discarding the ones that didn't work adopting the ones that did work even if it wasn't immediately intuitive why they would work and yet in the pharmaceutical industry and in the field of emerging medical treatments at least in the u.s it might cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars for one of those iterations in which case one can expect progress to be quite slow uh now aubrey i wanted to also your thoughts about political and regulatory obstacles and how to overcome them sure um and i guess um my uh so let me declare my relevance to the u.s i obviously i'm originally british but i know permanent resident of the u.s is one for a citizen and i spend almost all my time here now um i think the important thing to remember is that there is a difference between what a political part a minor political party in terms of actual votes can do in the short term versus what they might be able to do in the long term it's certainly i'm all in favor of the appointment of techno visionaries to senior roles within government whether it's in whether it's in an elected capacity or in an appointed capacity um however we have to remember that there are a huge number of checks and balances in the way that policy works um both the formal ones you know like the interactions between the three arms of the u.s uh for example and also more kind of de facto ones where people um listen to each other and what this means is that there is a huge bias in favor of the status quo in general the people who have vested interest in the status quo greatly outnumber in terms of fear numbers and also in terms of power um the people who have vested interest in change so um you know we must not overestimate the impact that for example the appointment of Jim O'Neill to the head of the FDA would have you know it's easy to say oh this would be wonderful it would change everything in fact you know i i think realistically you know it would be a great thing it would probably have a relatively limited impact in the near term and what this all revolves around i believe is the fact that the one component of politics in which there are no checks and balances namely the opinion of the general public the people who actually matter to elected officials at the end of the day we all know that elected representatives have one priority in life mainly to get re-elected and if we don't and they will not do things that they perceive as vote losing therefore we always have to focus on the general public first and recognize that the way they've got the way the policy changes is overwhelmingly a consequence rather than public opinion changes now what that means in the near term i think for a progressive organization like the us transhumanist party and i think this applies across in any country that has a digital democracy at least and that maybe even beyond that what that means in the near term is that a party that has a limited degree of support can leverage that in not just the corridor of power but also the media to gain more support and i think that that always needs to be the priority for any certainly for the us transhumanist party to think how can they use their position as an established party but a small one to gain greater exposure and legitimacy and credibility for the efforts that the people like me and bill and so on are um engaged in yes thank you aubrey and indeed i completely agree with your advice for the us transhumanist party efforts at public outreach discussions like this one but also deliberations about what the ideal policies might be for advancing a future where emerging technologies are readily available and widespread that has been my focus over the past three months it's interesting there is a user a invocare lemon who commented we need to organize as a party have a platform promoted that is in fact what we have been doing over the past several months holding votes on platform planks suggested by the members and trying to formulate the kind of vision that we want to articulate to the general public the policies that we would support to help advance technologies both in the realm of rejuvenation biotechnology and in other realms for instance space colonization vertical farming blockchain advances and privacy artificial intelligence and i agree leveraging public opinion is extremely important now i wanted to make an observation of something i i hope that cure for aging and cure for disease and cure for death and all these kind of things come from the united states i definitely become aware of the fact that the public perception about these kind of things is far greater in the southeast asia communities new zeal and australia um i'm i'm actually worried that if we don't do something to turn things around here in the united states that that's where it's all going to happen and it's a small world now uh you know i a lot of my medications supplements and stuff like that i buy directly from new zealand or south korea uh and have no problems getting it here and so when so if one of those other countries do come up with the thing that we all are dream of having i don't think anybody in the united states is gonna but not ordered from the other country so so i i think the united states has to turn around fast or be left out now i wonder though if other countries do develop these advances and they are widely available if trade remains fairly free with uh low tariffs easy access say via an online order would it really matter if the south korean or chinese entrepreneur makes the medicines that might help lengthen life standards as long as they're safe and made under high quality conditions in my view that is actually a big reason to support cosmopolitanism and free trade and to encourage research efforts in other countries to work in parallel with research efforts in the united states and actually i would be very interested in ilia's perspective on key obstacles in both u.s politics and politics elsewhere since as someone living in israel uh you would have a different perspective an outsider's perspective but perhaps in some sense a fresh perspective that you could offer regarding the status quo in the united states thank you very much gennady indeed uh my perspective is a bit different and i may even run counter to iris suggestions and bill suggestions it i come i come from a country which is an intersection of africa and asia so my first question is how anything that has been done in the field in the united states is relevant for those parts of the world i mean not for japan and singapore but for most of asia and almost for the entire africa we need to develop some kind of specific policies to to make those therapies available we recently published a book a group of scientists i'm proud to have a chapter on the life extension public health policy that's a new book by the royal society of chemistry uh on anti-aging drugs from a basic research to clinical practice and i'm trying to argue that we need policies to make those these therapies available to everybody but these books actually cost three hundred dollars where i'm arguing for it so we do need to do to do something about it i also come from a country that has socialized medicine and also one of the best public health systems and one of the highest life expectancy in the world at least for women so i'm not entirely sure that radical softening of regulation or deregulation is the way forward to provide effective therapies i would rather advocate for for better more science-based criteria especially preclinical criteria before we go into clinical trials or human trials but still we we need to raise this issue at least for discussion there's also the obvious issue of public entitlement i would advocate the establishing massive publicly funded programs for research and development of life standard therapies as that would give people entitlement to the results of such therapies rather than leave everything to the private sector so this these are policy i would advocate more relevant to israel and which was recently developing countries uh very interesting thank you ilia and of course transhumanist political attitudes exist on a wide spectrum on the one hand many transhumanists including myself are libertarians on the other hand a lot of transhumanists also advocate for making the anti-aging treatments available broadly to the public including through governmental means for instance when the transhumanist party conducted its vote on the transhumanist bill of rights uh members pretty much overwhelmingly favored some sort of system of universal health care without specifying the details of that system and aubrey one of the points you have made in many of your appearances is that once effective rejuvenation treatments become available the costs to governments of deploying those treatments would be significantly lower than the costs of paying pensions possibly indefinitely to people who are biologically old and who are frail and who might be hanging on by a string it would be more economical perhaps to cure them of their ailments than to just pay them pensions in their present state would you like to perhaps cheer more of your thoughts about the question of how much government involvement would be desirable or optimal in promoting the widespread dissemination of life-extending treatments sure yeah i mean um you've covered part of it um i think you know um you know i'm always torn here because to me the straightforward humanitarian argument is ironclad completely obvious to me that we are so we are so fond of our health that we are so determined that we hold such a priority on staying healthy and on our loved ones staying healthy that once these therapies are available uh it's just going to be impossible to get elected unless you have a manifesto commitment to make them available to everybody um you know even in a country like the usa that really is not fond of taxation um but of course that argument even if i believe it it's not necessarily persuasive especially in the us where people think well that's just not how it works the only thing that matters to people is prosperity um and therefore a lot of taxation and so i feel that actually a more forceful argument right now is the mercenary economic argument part of which you can only just gave um the the fact that it's going to be less expensive to to to to roll these therapies out universally to anyone who's old enough to need them rather than keeping people alive in a per state of health um the reason that's only part of the argument is because actually you know being being in a per state of health is risky people are not likely to live significantly longer than they do today if they if and when they're in a per state of health what's going to matter is the other aspect of the um economic argument um the first one is that the expense that's involved even in keeping someone alive in a per state of health for the time that they are today typically is massive it's like 90 percent of the medical budget in any country in the developed world goes on some aspect of the ill health of all day the second thing which i think is absolutely important to take into account is that it's not just the elderly themselves who are costing money the kids are the elderly and i suggest you know keep it simple you know they are less productive than they would be because they have to spend time and effort and so on looking after their sick parents you know this is a very important component to the economic argument probably the single most important component however if the third one namely that an able-bodied person is in a position to contribute wealth to society irrespective of how long ago they were bought and therefore if we can actually get this to work then who cares about pensions um rather coming back to the question of prosperity that you mentioned in a different context earlier um everyone's going to be far more prosperous just because there's going to be so much more ability to get stuff done and this is not even taking into account the other things that are obviously happening in parallel improvements in automation and so on so economic argument is so strong that one i believe can genuinely make the statement that it would have that it would be economically suicidal for any nation not to make this um investment to ensure that these things are available to everybody who's old enough um pretty much as soon as they're available to anybody so that final point i want to make which is anticipation this is all very well but if these therapies come along suddenly and um people haven't thought it through there's going to be a hell of a lot of chaos i mean you thought the industrial revolution was fairly chaotic you've seen absolutely nothing so to me it's very very important that policymakers and everyone with the ability to make a difference to um preparedness for all of this understands the argument that i just gave early and when i say early i mean really early because actually what i really mean is not just anticipation but anticipation of anticipation in other words there's going to be a point and i believe this point could occur within five years when the general public suddenly flips when the general public suddenly realizes fucking hell this is coming and it won't be here yet it'll probably be still be a decade away or not but it'll be coming everyone knows everyone will know it's coming probably and therefore the expectations of things like how long they're going to live and how long they're going to stay healthy will completely change pretty much overnight the result of that will be their choices of how to spend money what kind of insurance premiums they want things like that are going to change pretty much overnight so when i talk about anticipation of anticipation i mean that the policymakers and the people who run life insurance companies and so on have to anticipate the point when the public anticipates the arrival of the therapy yes indeed uh thank you abry for those comments and certainly one of the major roles of the us transhumanist party in the coming months and years will be to prepare the groundwork for that anticipation and to prepare well-reasoned policy positions on how we could uh practically solve any of the issues that arise once the rejuvenation therapies arrive and also how to take the opportunity take advantage of the opportunities that those therapies will afford and one of the uh ways in which public anticipation can be developed and channeled into let's say reasonable perceptions of the future is for people to be able to imagine what would it be like to receive these treatments and this is where my next question to the panel stems from what key technologies and methods of delivering treatments to patients do you think would need to be developed in order for longevity escape velocity to be affordably achieved society why and i'd like you to think about this from a patient perspective let's say somebody is middle aged circa 2030 or 2040 and he or she says uh i want to take 10 years off of my biological age and assuming uh your respective research endeavors are quite successful by that time what would that person's experience be like and where would be uh the opportunities of making that experience quite affordable for the average consumer let's see well let me let me let me if you're looking for somebody to start um let me i'd like to first just comment first something to add on to what Aubrey was saying and that's that the us is relatively very oblivious to something called the silver tsunami um but when you go to southeast asia and countries other countries over like new zeal and stuff like that you talk to people and you find out that they are very aware when you talk to government officials very aware of the fact that by 2050 there are going to be so many old people in nursing homes uh hospices things like that needing caregiving that um there there won't be enough people to take care of in fact it's estimated by 2050 for every person there will be in a nursing home there'll be one person in the workforce uh and you know that's just not enough i'm hoping something like robotics comes along and provides a solution to the caregiving problem but really what we need is a way of making people not get old keep them healthy and keep them in the workforce and so if somebody wants to knock 10 years off their life you know one thing is to think that's good for society to do because uh they're they've become less of a burden to the government and caregivers uh to actually stay healthy um the uh uh but you know that's pretty much all i can comment on that at the moment so any thoughts about the patient experience though what would that be like would the person uh say go to a clinic get some shots take some pills or have a surgical procedure what what do you envision the delivery mechanism for the rejuvenation treatments so i think there are two things that need to be addressed here one is and it really emphasizes the similarity the lack of any kind of transition and the other one kind of emphasizes something that is a transition the one that emphasizes from the patient's point of view lack of transition is strictly speaking your question with delivery this is just going to be done with injections and pills and uh possibly in some cases at least in the short-term transplantation surgery just the same way as today's medicine is delivered the fundamental difference in what will be in what is being delivered because we are i believe certainly that the um defeative aging will very much need to divide and conquer strategy in which we have to do lots of things for the same people um and so you know that when you when you make when you do an injection it won't be just one type of stem cell for example or one type of engineered dna there'll be a lot of different things being delivered but the patient won't know that or at least they won't won't experience that it'll just be an injection um the big difference the huge difference from the point of view of the patient is that mostly and in fact ideally these things will be delivered to people who are not yet inhibiting symptoms so they will be preventative of course as you know the way i didn't describe sand if that it kind of hits the sweet spot between prevention and treatment in the sense that it's preventative by virtue of being able to people who are not yet sick but it's also treatment in the sense that it repairs damage that has already been laid down um but from the point of view of the patient it's definitely preventative right so um so that's a big difference preventative medicine is not really a thing at the moment there are only a small number of prominent examples of things that people are happy to take when they're not yet sick statins maybe um ACE inhibitors for hypertension not really very much and even then it tends to be when they think they're probably about to be sick you know when they think they're getting getting to the edge of going downhill so we need to change that we need to change attitudes in society in a manner that makes people comfortable with treatments that they would be taking maybe every five years in top cases for maybe oral administration of certain things maybe every week um but we'll be doing on faith that if they didn't they would get sick sometime in the future that's a that's an attitude that it's difficult to instill in people and we really have that challenge the method of delivery the method of delivery is really going to depend on the treatment itself almost every in research nobody can predict whether it's going to be inhaled uh injected swallowed uh a patch because it depends on the actual drug or treatment you come up with and which is the best way everybody would prefer oral except doctors would like to get money for given injections but orally you know everybody would like to have it oral but if you find out that the drug or natural product or whatever doesn't survive the stomach then you can't do it oral um and or you know you have to work out ways to make it so you can but that's going to pretty much depend later on on when we actually have the treatments you know i would i would agree with with olivary and bill on that i think um you're going to have a bunch of um administration vehicles that exist today um that you know some which many which will be drugs some which you know we use a statement uh regenerative healthcare as opposed to regenerative medicine some which may be classified as dietary supplements some which may be food medical food um you know who knows i think they're you know once again the answer is going to come in a range of approaches at the end of the day but i think on a positive note um once you step outside of sort of sort of the traditional biologic realm of things uh you see uh some movement into uh non-traditional therapeutics and some of those might be at the table i mean there's been a major push it and my former employer uh at GlaxoSmithKline set up a fund for so-called you know electro-suitical uh development so you know basically how you know looking at how they get the drug out of the picture and basically only focus on the the signaling event and you know can it be done with uh electricity can it be done with light can it be done with magnetic waves and so forth so um there may be an interesting set of uh let's say biophysical tools uh at the table um that you know we maybe haven't thought of yet um and at the same point you have um you know there's other areas that just you know exist nowadays i'm not saying they'll be part of the puzzle but uh keep in mind you know a couple of years ago both uh you know it's the US both you know leeches and maggots were formally approved by the FDA as medical devices for the healing of uh you know the non-healing uh skin wounds so um there may be weird stuff out there that also uh comes to the table along the traditional but at the end of the day for the most part it will be more in line with what you see nowadays yes thank you ira and ilia given that you've discussed the need to make a life extending treatments available worldwide including two populations say in sub-saharan Africa today who may not have a lot of resources how do you envision those treatments being effectively delivered to people whose incomes might still not be particularly high at the time uh well guinari i think you said the key term earlier that's the biological age we need a robust and reliable measure of biological age before we even begin to think about intervention because otherwise i'm seriously worried that a lot of treatments will be sold and given don't provide any benefits so that's the very basic requirement to provide a reliable clinical definition what i go into diagnose you know it's not just about the changes of biomarkers because everything changes with age everything can be biomarker it's about the actual evidence-based clinical benefits and i think that's the major requirement before making this therapist and then other considerations come into into place such as the costs how are we going to afford those those biomarkers in in africa or in asia or are we going to spend billions of of of public's funding on treatments will be available to to seven people in california right so so but still i believe that we need to to set this priority of the clinical definition of of biological age or physiological age as as a predictor of age-related diseases something it can be evidentially modified by interventions i think it will be the main step toward disability okay so it took an hour and a half but i think this is actually the first instance where one of us can actually significantly disagree with another of us and i am too so i'm actually not sure that biomarkers of biological age are going to end up being very important i think that there may be a transitional period during which they have significant value but that period will be transitional and relatively brief simply because there will only be a short period of time when the availability of these therapies is in a challenge in other words when we can only supply them to a certain number of people i believe that because these therapies will be overwhelmingly preventative it's going to end up being easier to just provide them to everybody even when they may be biologically young enough not to need them yet rather than figure out who needs the most and and and go from there and the reason i say that is simply because the actual effort involved in reliably figuring out who needs the most is going to be very substantial it's actually really difficult to figure out how soon somebody's going to get sick and i don't think it's going to get much easier so there may be some advances in that but i have a feeling that on balance it's going to end up being easier to just skip the diagnosis there and give blanket solutions and let me add that uh you know i've been working on trying to figure out biomarkers of aging since the early 1990s and one thing that i have just concluded to myself is that you know aging causes a lot of diseases but all these diseases can happen without aging and so i think that one way to look at it is like well focus on the diseases and we'll find the biomarkers for each disease and treat those but when it comes down to aging in general i i'm 100 convinced that the best biomarker of aging is to look in the mirror it is i you know even though i'm a telomere biologist and think telomere length measurement will be something useful i don't think it's going to come anywhere close to being able to just look in a mirror or look at how you feel because we you know we we see aging people keep saying we don't have clear definitions of aging but i can definitely walk down the street and i can say that person's old and that person's not old uh and so so it might just come down to that because aging might be too complex to actually turn it into diseases to specific biomarkers we just have to realize that aging just increases the chances that all these diseases occur so practically every disease is going to be associated with aging so we just focus on aging in general without the actual biomarkers i so i always say like i said before when Betty White walks out on stage 24 years old again we are going to know that we cured aging i do want to actually elaborate on one aspect of what bill just said because i wanted um highlight some specific research that has been done in the recent past and some specific research that is right i know has not been done and really needs to be done um so with regard to the way that people look as a biomarker of biological age um there was a study done a few years ago now by um by uh a group in europe that demonstrated that there was a huge correlation i mean ridiculously essentially what they did was they looked at twins and they asked people they showed people one photograph of each of the twins and asked a bunch of people who looks older without telling them they were twins of course and um the correlation between that and subsequent risk of death was ridiculously high but the shortcoming of that study was that they did not factor out in fact they kind of deliberately didn't factor out people who were really sick in other words people who were going to die really soon because they wanted to see a separation of you know the the mortality curve for the young for the perceived younger person and the mortality curve for the perceived older person as quickly as possible what we need to know what we desperately to make is whether that correlation bears up if you look at people who are quite a long way away from death and that as far as i know is simply not being explored obviously it's something that can't be exploring quite the same way one has to go back to photographs that were taken a long time before the study was initiated but still it seems to me to be something that would be hugely valuable and i don't think anyone could very interesting and i definitely agree that there are certain obvious physiological signs of aging and there could be some obvious reversals as well that would send a very prominent signal to the general public that this problem is being effectively worked on now along these lines of course one of the major barriers to living dramatically longer is being encountered by super centenarians today around age 115 116 and that is senile systemic amyloidosis that seems to be what is preventing people from breaking Jean Calmont's record of 122 years and i'm curious as to your thoughts regarding where you see progress or lack of progress in that area and where do you think it would be possible to focus on in order to solve that particular problem just so that we could have a proof of concept of someone living to 130 potentially which could really attract public attention so i probably better take this because we've done a bunch of very specific research in this area and the research was inspired by a terrific non-biologist who's one of these kind of orthodidact like me named Stan Primmer who is by profession a computer programmer but he worked closely with the gerontology research group several years ago and in particular focusing on their interest in super centenarians and once the autopsies of half a dozen super centenarians gave rise to the result that you can either have just outlined Stan put a lot of work into identifying ways forward and what that ended up resulting in was two quite substantial research programs that we at science research foundation initiated the one that I should probably focus on is the one from Texas in which we were trying to identify antibodies that would address the problem of of senile systemic amyloidosis the problem that we had that we had to address was how to eliminate the misfolded form of this protein transferrin which is the major component of the amyloid in the heart that kills super centenarians and it would we need to basically use this antibody to get rid of the misfolded version but not to get rid of the version that had an important physiological role we were very successful we published the proof of concept study with that work in 2014 in journal of biological chemistry and I'm very pleased to say that that was sufficient to allow us to move that whole project into the private sector uh there's a company named covalent biosciences which was formed by the research the professor there along with a bit of success it appears and they are but they were actually originally getting going on the basis of similar work they had done on Alzheimer's amyloid but the main thing that they've got now from us is this uh senile cardiac amyloid and I believe it's going to be a very major deal they are for anyone who's listening who is thinking about investing in something that's important in this area I should point out that these people are very much looking for additional investment and anyone who's interested in learning more about that should write to me at the sense of thought um I wanted also however to mention something that is not very well known about senile systemic amyloid which is its role in the health of people in general not just people who reach extreme ages I believe that this is still represented by only one study so it very much needs to be extended but it's an extraordinary result that I believe should and I believe the result I think I think the paper that reported it is solid the result is what people have done is they've looked at they've looked for mutations inherited mutations in the gene encoding this protein transtheratin which is the major component of amyloid in the heart and they have looked for ones which are protective in other words which reduce the propensity of this protein to form amyloid they found them by a rather roundabout route involving the examination of families that have mutations that do the opposite thing that exacerbate the tendency to aggravate and therefore that cause early onset health problems but it doesn't really matter how they found them the fact is they found them and what they were able to do was to show that in the general population in other words in people who do not have any bad mutations bad alleles of this particular gene the people who have one copy of the gene that's got this protective variant live seven times longer on average and this is talking about life expectancy at birth so we're talking about the whole population not just people who already reached a hundred or anything like that seven years now that is a mortality rate doubling time that means that other things being equal the average likelihood that someone who has this allele would die in the coming year is half of the likelihood that someone without the allele would die in the coming year if the two people are the same age that is mind-blowing I mean that is way off the scale it's a considerably bigger difference than having a poe thought for example so it's obviously very important to study this more and that's not yet been done very interesting very interesting indeed and I would certainly be interested if you could send me some links to this recent research that I could share with our members afterwards I would be happy to do that now thank you I wanted to get to some audience questions in the time we have remaining and there was a user early on named atheist transhumanist who posed a potential disagreement between Aubrey and Bill though in my prior conversations with Bill I got the impression that it's not quite a disagreement but this user characterized it as such he says I'm not sure which approach is better lengthening to a mirrors or keeping them short I know that Bill says lengthening them doesn't cause cancer but Aubrey's approach is different so what's with that uh Bill and Aubrey well first of all let me say that Aubrey and I agree that we don't know for certain what's going to happen okay we're both supporting each other's efforts I'm a strong supporter of everything that Aubrey's doing I've even in the past said that if he wants to make some cells that have the telomerase gene knocked out I will be the one that will make them for him I don't know if he's found somebody else to do it since then but you know the question is what is the right answer and we all we want to live longer I I mean if Aubrey's right I want him to prove his right as soon as possible because I think it's going to extend my lifespan but right now all we can do is make best guesses and sometimes there's an advantage to not having everybody focus on the same thing uh let's let's focus on different things I personally believe that short telomeres are the real bad guys I believe that short telomeres induce mutation rates so high that they become a major cause of cancer they become a major cause of why we uh why cancers survive treatments they become a major reason why uh let's say chemotherapy and stuff like that you can kill 99% of the cells but because of the high mutation rate due to the short telomeres the some of those cells survive but the short telomeres also increase the chances that telomerase is going to get turned on okay so so uh in fact in almost all cancers the fact that they have incredibly short telomeres is suggesting that first the cell became cancer which is lack of growth control and then they became telomerase positive because of the short telomere so I believe that keeping telomeres long is a way to fight cancer but you know we won't know until we actually have something that lengthens telomeres let's say we won't know for certain I'm I'm I'm at a higher than 95 percent level confident that lengthening telomeres would decrease the risk of cancer not increase the risk of cancer but let's say that there are models for each way okay let's say there's a great model in fact let's say there is there there actually is a really good model as to why keeping telomere short will kill off cancers and that's because it because some drugs especially some of them I'm an inventor of that actually inhibit telomerase has been shown to very effectively kill off cancers but it's it's also these drugs are finding you know with the melta stat for instance they're finding that the cancers are coming back because the mutation rates are they're coming back using a different method of keeping the telomeres long called the alt pathway so so I believe that that lengthening telomeres would decrease the risk of cancer and I you know I'm not going to say Aubrey believes the other way around but I believe that there's definitely a model for it but if the question is you can either have telomerase on or have telomerase off you can have long telomeres you can have short telomeres you can't you can't get a choice maybe you could find some compromise between the two and that would be good but you get that compromise you still have to induce telomerase and so it still makes it worthwhile for us to pursue that but you there is no third option you can't I mean you can't not have you can either have telomerase on or telomerase off unless they both cause cancer which one is the more likely one to cause cancer and that's the thing that's got to be addressed and we're not going to know really 100 percent certain until we have a drug and start testing it but I predict that when we do have a drug or a gene therapy or something like that that works we're going to find the risk of cancer decreases immensely but boy I there's no way I'm going to say that anything that Aubrey says to oppose that is wrong it's just a science still yeah Bill has has has summarized the situation very well I would say I just want to add a few things that may help the you know the audience to understand the situation so of course the obvious thing that anyone coming into this kind of question would say is well okay there are these two hypotheses let's just do the obvious experiment and figure out which one is true and of course you know we're not dumb we know that that's how science works the reason why any controversy any um um to any pair of opposing hypotheses survives for a long time in science despite being a high profile controversy in other words something that people talk about a lot is because there is no obvious experiment there it's always because there's some kind of plausible reason why each obvious experiment would actually not tell you the answer so to give an example in this case um it may very well be that a drug which extends to lemurs would have a short term beneficial effect in reducing cancer because it would rejuvenate the immune system well and the immune system is a really good um component of our natural defensive against cancer but in the longer term it might have a permissive effect in allowing cancers which have the other mutations they need um to move ahead without having to do their own um mutating telomerase arc or not so much of it so this is definitely only a hypothesis but the point is it's quite a parsimonious hypothesis that's ordinarily difficult to eliminate by any near term quick experiment so this is really why these kinds of controversies persist in terms of the what we should do about this uncertainty I think Bill has absolutely nailed it the key thing is to have a diversity of approaches we pursue an approach based on trying to completely abrogate the ability of cancer cells to extend their telomeres at the cost of also abrogating the ability of non-cancer cells to extend their telomeres which we propose to address using stem cell therapy we have a major project that is focused on the alternative pathway that Bill mentioned the alt pathway that doesn't involve telomerase and actually that's a project which we're hoping to spin out into a company fairly soon so again if anyone any investors out there want to hear more about that please write to me but the key point is that the main reason we are focused pretty much exclusively on the approach of abrogating telomere elongation is because other people are doing the opposite going to help to extend telomeres and to address any cancer problems that may arise by other approaches whether it's cancer immunotherapy or whatever if everyone else were doing what we are actually doing the abrogation of telomerase approach then we would probably switch we would probably actually focus on the extension of telomerase because nobody else was doing it did we lose genati i think it back oh am i back yes hello yes we can hear you genati but we can't see you oh my apologies tremendous apologies my internet connection momentarily disappeared this is probably a problem that has lingered from yesterday in minden about 10 miles south of where i live a garbage truck backed into a fiber optic cable and cut off the internet connection to the entirety of south carcin city so i hope everybody was able to hear alvry's response comments on that because they were great yes genati anyway well yeah i wasn't able to hear those comments but it seems like this broadcast is continuing and uh let me make a request uh of wendy stoliarov if you're still watching uh type something in the chat to make sure that you're still able to see all of us okay uh i guess let me refresh here because we are we are all still connected and i want to oh excellent excellent she can see us so we can continue uh i am going to watch your response aubrey after this concludes but uh we can proceed with further questions since we still have time in the panel remaining uh there has been uh an outstanding quantity of user comments and a few of them related to uh the politics of transhumanism especially as it pertains to recent events in the united states one of the questions i had prepared for the panel is this one are you concerned about any current political trends and how they might affect the progress of research into combating biological aging and uh a lot of commentary has been made uh on that both bill and ira have expressed some hope with regard to uh jim o'neill possibly taking the fda in a more libertarian direction or a direction of accelerated approvals for emerging treatments on the other hand aubrey expressed some reservation in that regard because one person even in a prominent government role may not be able to change the institutional culture as a result of checks and balances and there were other comments that pointed out certain dangers perhaps of associating transhumanism or life extension too closely with the trump administration or any of its appointees given that trump is historically unpopular he may have other policy positions that are detrimental to emerging technologies and there may be a backlash against him in the coming years and hopefully transhumanism and life extension will not be swept into a kind of indiscriminate backlash that's certainly uh something that i am very much interested in preventing so i wanted to ask everyone on the panel uh are you concerned about not just the trump administration's actions but what seems to be a general rise in reactionary populist and nationalist politics uh that may have a negative effect for instance on international trade or immigration or even scientific research well i'm the least politically minded person here but let me just let's say that uh i do know from previous experience that that donald trump has been interested in investing into anti-aging research so i have high hopes that no matter what else goes on politically i think that there might be a benefit to the anti-aging research industry i'd be interested in seeing you know putting aside these are the regulatory topic that we all spoke of previously i'd be very interested in seeing sort of what direction things go in the uh the national and international financial markets as far as uh money flows and uh specifically on the on the private side because um you know we are at a an interesting point where sort of the traditional death valley of biotech has gotten a bit wider in the sense that you know there's there's less big pharma companies out there nowadays than they're used to they require a very large top line growth for wall street which moves their investments later stage which moves the institutional private equity folks later stage and sort of that valley has gotten bigger you know we've seen a lot of dynamics especially on the say of the stem cell front in the last 10 years where there's been a lot of companies that have in my opinion been rather quick to go from the private to the public markets to raise financing and it's going to be kind of interesting to see uh you know we see we've seen the markets do some crazy things in the last couple weeks but really sort of how those international financial flows are going to continue and what direction they go into and whether sort of the the older model of earlier stage investing will begin to spring up in a more active fashion as it did in the in the 1990s as opposed to what we see with regard to the earlier stage what the valley of death funding because this is really in my opinion looking out at what goes on I think it's wonderful when these but you know these billionaires put their money in certain projects and the Zuckerberg initiative is great I always argue that you know it probably be much more efficient to give five to ten million dollars to a thousand biotech companies to get them across the valley of death to move to later translation as opposed to the mega projects but it's going to be interesting once again from a straight financial perspective what happens in in the U.S. in the coming months yes indeed it will certainly be interesting whether it will be beneficial or harmful I suppose has yet to be seen now Ilya you again have a distinct perspective on this given that you can observe the U.S. political situation while still being relatively insulated from it what do you think about emerging political trends in the United States and perhaps in Europe and how they would affect the progress of biotechnology and life extension indeed beside the fact that from Israel I'm also a little bit left-wing as you could see probably I'm not sure the current administration will be very beneficial for for for health longevity generally I'm not sure how taking health insurance from millions of people can be compatible with the goals of life extension despite whatever therapies they may fast forward to to the market and do we see the same the same trend in other places we see it in Russia we see it in Europe we see it in Israel as well I would call it populism it is hard to to to to believe for this government of Trump is populist seeing that the people who are in the government but it is definitely a bit of reactionary it is definitely a quite right wing and we see it all over the place all over the world and I'm worried I'm seriously worried but not worried too much because you know I'm an historian I'm an historian of aging research and I see how trends rise and fall how different ideologies you know switch places in life extension survives them all you know it survived communism and survived fascism because science is on our side so I think we should we should just weather off this this backlash of erection yes well I hope we will all be able to weather it and persevere in our individual endeavors and try to persuade more people that not just embracing life extension but embracing a wide array of other emerging technologies is the way to go and the way to solve a lot of these economic and societal predicaments that we have today Aubrey what are your thoughts on the current political situation yeah I mean I think the most important thing to bear in mind which Ilya has already stressed is that problems that come from political change tend to be problems that we can weather you know even if we look back into biotechnology crises of the past we can see that they weren't particularly massive the most obvious one is probably the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research in the US from 15 years ago you know we've got to remember that it was pretty damn bad it was not fun that that people couldn't get money for this and they had to fight it off and it did have knock on effect that you know big pharma other big companies in the medical research world were of course apprehensive that the ban might be broadened and that had a chilling effect on the extent of investment in that area over and above what was actually prohibited but you know how much did it really slow things down in the end not all that much probably and I believe that if a similar something of a similar magnitude were to happen today the impact on the rate of progress would actually be even less because of the growth of globalization in the whole medical research world the availability for example of the much greater availability of access to research facilities in Asia and so on so I think I think it's important not to get too worried about it but putting it the other way around even if the government can't do too much harm to the kind of work that we do it can do an awful lot of good in other words it can do a lot of harm by inaction by not being able to survive and we we therefore absolutely must continue to double our efforts to maximize the extent to which people in the distance of power across the country are actually exercising that power in our interests. Yes indeed thank you Aubrey now I know that our two hours are coming to a close even though we've had a few interruptions and technical difficulties I wanted to get your closing statements with regard to not just the key points that you think we can all take away from this discussion but also with regard to what late persons who are sympathetic to your goals can do in order to hasten their realization how do we make the effort to defeat aging as popular and as widely supported as efforts to defeat cancer ALS and heart disease are today because that to me seems to be the predominant challenge of our time where the US transhumanist party can really make a difference in affecting public opinion. I think one of the first things that has to happen is that the whole perception of the anti-aging industry has to change and I think that comes down to the people that are leading that industry and unfortunately the field of anti-aging as always has had more quacks and charlatans than any other field that exists and so we need to actually come up with something that works and it's kind of a catch-22 because in order for us to come up with something that works we need public perception to help us get the funding so that we can do it. Somewhere in that catch-22 there's got to be a break okay and we are still moving forward as fast as we can when I say we I mean me, Aubrey and everybody else in the scientific community are moving forward as fast as we can even with the low funding and hopefully that can lead to something that's going to be a major breakthrough in aging that may not be the ultimate cure for aging we might have to go further as Ira pointed out there's multiple sticks of dynamite I think putting out any of those sticks of dynamite is going to be a major breakthrough and allow us to reach that escape velocity even better so I think that changing the perception is one thing but I think it's got to come from the scientist first succeeding at making getting something that works. Yeah I agree with what Bill said and I want to make two main points I guess in closing one with regard to what the party can do and one with regard to what people in general can do. On the side of the party I think well as I emphasized earlier there are kind of different goals if one thinks short term versus long term I want to focus on the short term. One thing that I think everybody understands about politics is that language is far more powerful than it ought to be but you know precise terminology you know that whole thing that I was talking about earlier about the planning of federal funding on embryonic stem cell research it only happened because scientists were careless in muting the word cloning you know when they could have perfectly well said nuclear transfer from the beginning and it would never have happened. So in this case I think the challenge which I guess is pretty obvious is the word transhumanism and you know everyone knows that this scares a lot of people it gives the wrong impression that it was an impression that people don't like to hear. We have a challenge to fix that. I'm well known for somewhat distancing myself from that word but there is hope. Another word that I have emphatically not distanced myself from but have instead you know made it my business to rehabilitate is the word written nation which ten years ago was very much focused exclusively in most people's minds on cosmetics and you know making people look better which of course is a very substantial departure from what I mean by the word. But these days that battle seems to be pretty much one. I was astonished when at a conference a very high-profile very mainstream gerontology conference in Florida that I went to a month or so ago speaker after speaker was freely using that word to mean what I mean by it you know to mean actual reversal of biological age that's repair of damage and so I feel that that battle has been won but I want to you know I want to make sure everyone appreciates that it took a hell of a long time to win it and so that must not be you know de-prioritized as a goal of the continuous party if that's the thing that you're going to stick with. In terms of what people can do well I think we covered this pretty well early on in the in the discussion about how the shortage of funding is far and away the number one barrier to the rate of progress. Now of course not everyone is a billionaire and not everybody is in a position to do much directly but everybody is in the position to do something indirectly in some cases you're in a position to you know put on a podcast like this you know where people like like the people on this panel are able to raise the quality of debate get people to understand how important this is and what's possible you know people can invite us to conferences people can you know do a lot of different things in terms of advocacy but it's all about money and the thing I always point out is that the less wealthy you are the more people you know who are wealthier than you might ask you if you if you actually take the trouble to talk to them so what I always say to people is the fundamental difficulty that anyone has when they talk about pioneering technology especially serious anti-aging medicine to someone who is less progressive than they are is the less progressive person immediately and very desperately tries to change the subject if they really badly don't want to talk about it you've everyone needs to learn the ability to stop people from changing the subject and to actually make them as uncomfortable as they need to be made in order to grow up and pay attention to the importance of this issue. Yes indeed thank you Aubrey and I think this is excellent advice in terms of the word transhumanism. Zoltan has communicated to me that it does tend to attract a lot of media attention and a lot of recognition as a party that is really on the cutting edge in terms of pursuing the technologies of the future. So my inclination is to stick with the word but essentially engage in the same kind of image rehabilitation that you have successfully achieved with the term rejuvenation because I think it is an extremely let's say hopeful term transhumanism to transcend the limitations of existing humanity and there is a whole sophisticated philosophy underneath that term that I think a lot of members of the public do not understand but for instance Max Moore articulated very eloquently in the 1990s and the spreading of that philosophy into a new paradigm kind of replacing postmodernism with transhumanism could really dramatically alter public attitudes. Now the question in my view of course is how to approach it in a manner that let's say isn't seen as only a fringe that is seen as respectable that is seen as inclusive and that is seen as capable of making a difference within the mainstream. So that will be my challenge for the coming years but Ira I wanted to ask you for your closing statement as well as what lay persons can do to help advance research that could contribute to the lengthening of human lifespans. Yeah I mean I think it's all about staying educated and knowledgeable about science and making sort of science and technology sexy again. Forget about Kim Kardashian and what she's doing and forget about all this other nonsense that you watch on YouTube focus on these issues because they're close. You know I'm coming at this from a very positive perspective as Bill Aubrey-Elia I think you know we are a lot closer than we've ever been before and it's really a matter of sort of getting everyone focused on the end game and sort of this understanding and I think I mentioned this in the past I think too often the general public has always heard the message there's something exciting going on and it's gonna be 20 years before it happens and it doesn't happen. I think we're a lot closer than many might understand and it's really about getting that interest and getting that excitement in motion you know outside of the sphere of people that can afford to invest in these things but keeping the awareness high keeping science and technology sexy and fun and interesting and just you know letting the public know about a beautiful future that is really within graphs now in 2017 more than ever before and getting them excited and on board. Yes indeed and this is something that people with multiple skill sets can contribute to artists musicians writers both the fiction and the non-fiction people who design computer games people who make films can contribute to the kind of vision that you've articulated. Thank you very much Ira and now Ilya for your closing statement what do you think the key takeaways from the discussion are what can lay persons do to help accelerate the advent of life extension and for you since you've delved into the subject in-depth what key lessons do you think the history of life extensionism can teach us in this respect? Well I agree with everything that was said the thing to do is simply to do to get involved to study to advocate to bend together with like-minded people the possibilities for such communications are growing I would say even exponentially you know there are online communities there are local communities and I absolutely agree that the issue needs to become political because after all the funding is mostly held in the hands of politicians whatever the billionaires may be able to contribute whatever the crowdfunding may be able to contribute the finding is still in the hands of the politician and we need to get to it so the politics of life extension can be a bit right-wing a bit left-wing but we need to put this issue on the political agenda this is indeed probably the main the main issue more important than the land more important than you know that even some other issues this is about our survival this is about our life and I think this awareness must grow thanks to us thanks to such a panel thanks to everybody and in terms of lessons you know history teaches that nobody learns everything anything from history so every time every time we discover we discover the will you know you asked did you expect how the reality fits your expectation you know people expected the cure for aging 100 years ago and a thousand years ago and we're still not here but at least now we may have a decent chance you know we may be closer than than our ancestors so I hope we grab this chance yes and I hope our discussion today has brought us a little bit closer in terms of raising public awareness illustrating key fields of ongoing research where progress could be made tying them to the political contacts tying them to the societal contacts I think this has been a great discussion we have persevered through a few difficulties but the remarks made by everyone today are outstanding and I was proud to host this distinguished panel on behalf of the United States Transhumanist Party thank you very much thank you Gennady thanks so much thank you and everybody else