 or what you think is a wet run in terms of your ride. All right, greetings, ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I apologize for the slightly late start today. We've had a few technical difficulties, but hopefully we've resolved most of them by now because I am very eager to converse with my guest today, Adam Alonzi, who has spoken with me before about life extension. He is the author of the fiction books, Praying for Death, A Zombie Apocalypse, and A Plankin' Reason. He is also a futurist, inventor, do-it-yourself enthusiast, biotechnologist, programmer, molecular gastronomist, consummate dilettante, and columnist at The Indian Economist. You can also listen to his podcasts at adamalonzi.libson.com and read his blog at adamalonzi.wordpress.com. And actually, the reason why I invited Adam to join us today is for him to discuss some of the fascinating conversations he has had with entrepreneurs in the biotechnology industry. Adam, you have, by this point, had 25 episodes of your podcast and you've interviewed some luminaries, including Maria Konovalenko of the longevity cookbook, Alex Javronkov of Insilico Medicine and Elizabeth Parish of BioViva. So tell us a bit about what you learned from these individuals in any order or if you want to give a general overview, that would be great as well. Well, the major, I think we should start from the top down rather than the bottom up. I know as an Austrian, you might be opposed to the spot. I enjoyed, well, I enjoyed the bottom. And I say this the last. So the big picture is that not only are people in general, but also government and agencies are oblivious to that the age needs to be categorized as a disease. And they fail to see the role that aging processes play in the development of various diseases. So let's take gene therapy as an example, let's see. This is a great way to illustrate governmental incompetence as a problem with regulatory agencies. Not to say that they're all bad, but sometimes they take it away. In 1999, we prescribed gene therapy and this turned the FDA off to it. 2002, people with SCID were being treated with gene therapy and two of them developed leukemia. Now when you're talking about fatal or very disabling conditions and the person is doing it coalitionally, I fail to see the problem or why someone would be taking the issue with it. So the focus has been primarily on monogenetic diseases like sickle cell, fallocenia, and SCID. With aging processes, however, you're talking about many, many free genes and the ways that they're much more likely. For example, Bioseva is Perish's company. They are working on Alzheimer's and their approach is very different because typically you focus on the beta amylase, on the degree that causes neurodegeneration. They're looking into enzymes that help with the telomere, the telomere production, which in turn reverses the aging process and helps the brain clean up its own junk and there's only one way to get cat out but this seems like a really good one. Particularly since their attitude does not add into a bone check or even aogenic properties and that's a big concern. So gene therapy, you're trying to modify or delete or insert a gene. Probably trying to modify a gene. So that means that you have to get it into the cell and you have to keep the host from mounting any sort of defense response from it. So there is an issue with conventional vital factors because they're bound to do that. However, if you have a virus that the body has not encountered before or it's very unlikely that it's encountered before, it's not going to mount the defense. The other goal is for it to happen and have a permanent effect, which again is, well, I suppose that's not really the worst thing in the world because there are plenty of people who have to take the medication. And that's one of the other great ironies of the FDA shooting down gene therapy trials is that there are hundreds of thousands of people who take various medications every year that have some sort of deleterious effect on them and not kill them because they can never be the quality of life or in the long run harm them. On that very same day, and I'm sure as an actuator you notice, a number of people died as a result of over the counter drugs, as well as prescription drugs. A number of people died from alcohol, tobacco, et cetera, et cetera, and yet this gene therapy was pinpointed and shot down and I think that's partially because of the culture that it's not trusted. And generally the medicine, to some extent, is viewed either as an unrealistic from the future or something that's potentially harmful. Now with somatic cells, we have somatic cells, germline cells, and there's actually moratoriums on germline cells concern of the CRISPR technology which makes the entire process of editing genes much, much easier. Yes, it's interesting that it seems to me a lot of the hyper-caution that the FDA and similar national regulatory agencies have been exercising toward gene therapy is the result of a simple fear of the new. That is, as you correctly pointed out, a lot of people engage in activities that involve risk, even if the activities are entirely well-intentioned like taking a pharmaceutical medication as prescribed to cure an ailment, but many people even go beyond that, they drink alcohol, they smoke tobacco, and yet those activities are not prohibited, perhaps simply because they are the devil we know and unfortunately there is a skewed risk perception with regard to the metaphorical angels we don't know, the gene therapies that can save a lot of lives and certainly there could be adverse side effects. As you mentioned, in 1999 a patient died because of a viral vector that was used in gene therapy but conventional medicine also utilizes a lot of procedures from which people die sometimes and yet on balance those procedures do save a lot of lives, and of course it's desirable to improve the safety and efficacy of these procedures but shutting them down is not the proper way to do that, experimentation is the proper way to do that, and it does seem to me there should be a push to change the culture to at the very least permit terminally ill individuals who don't have another choice to try out these approaches and they might work, they might not work but at the very least these people will be permitted the autonomy to fight for their lives and something very beneficial might come out of this for future generations of patients who might be in similar circumstances. So I know Elizabeth Parrish is a very outspoken advocate of this and I'm curious as to your impressions of your conversation with her with regard to her methods as well as her approach toward the public discourse do you think she is in a good position to sway the public discourse and perhaps even sway some U.S. federal regulatory agencies to recognize the validity of what she's trying to do? She and I talked for three hours total, someone on the record is who we are it was one of my favorite podcasts, one of my favorite guests so I may be a little bit biased in my opinion but I certainly think that what they are doing is going to change my myostat and inhibitor alone won't draw an enormous amount of attention from well from ordinary equal topics their cholesterol, the founder a little bit better and shirtless to athletic agencies who want to do whoever is running or playing with balls for them and once you have people playing with balls then it becomes serious and some people die and some people bad enough they can deal with those guys playing with balls that really counts so that's what the publicity could be good or bad for gene therapy it would probably seem bad in the short run but it was bringing it to the public eye and if it was being reused it would begin to be perceived to somewhat safe or at least to socially acceptable now it's a go ahead regenerative medicine on the amazon kindle store and I will send a link to it unfortunately with the kindle store I read a lot of books and I don't recall all of the authors names he mentions that cosmetic surgery in many ways is leading the pack because people are more inclined to pay for these things for instance using a person's own fat cells for breast augmentation or thigh augmentation and this might seem somewhat trivial but grafting cells from one place to another is quite a feat it's going to have a lot of applications as you go along and I think maybe gene therapy will do the same thing people will get purple eyes and brain hair or we see it showing a lot of diseases now do you think there is a bit of a public relations obstacle to acceptance of genetic modification per se simply due to irrational fears of the sort we have seen around GMOs, genetically modified organisms and food in spite of the fact that the use of GMOs as food has been shown to be safe empirically trillions of portions of genetically modified food have been consumed over the past 25 years nobody has died nobody has a documented case of illness from it even some former hardline opponents of genetically modified foods have considered the evidence and have determined that these are not a threat even when some green peace activists are deciding to accept GMOs there is still this perception of franken foods among let's say the unenlightened masses for lack of a better term and much of the let's say thriving of the GMO industry occurs simply because a lot of people just buy food they don't have a way of recognizing this is genetically modified they eat the food they are fine but if you ask them in discourse what do you think about they will say franken foods are bad they can kill you how do we overcome this terrible irrationality this visceral resistance to anything that seems to be quote too much tampering with nature to get people to accept tomatoes or rice that has been genetically modified how do you get them to accept themselves being genetically modified I think in the end it will come down to a matter of keeping up with the differences if one kid is getting shots to improve NDF production and spraying and suddenly understanding algebra you better to believe that little Billy's parents are going to get shots for him people from Johnny it's something that will become necessary and it might be just be available to wealthy workers there on the other hand a simple CRISPR operation can be done about $30 most of these things are not terribly expensive and it's likely that we will see a biotech revolution coming to the bottom up and a lot of people literally can't wait 5 or 10 years for all the trials to get through and a lot of people cannot afford that $3 or $4 billion to get their procedure approved if I'm one of the scientists mother or wife or daughter has disease you better believe he's going to do whatever is available to him and not bother to ask the FDA for his approval and this ties with terminal ill patients which is something I talked about too clearly if someone is going to die they're willing to take whatever the chances are and they need it because it's become a zero sum game for them it might cause some temporary pain but the ultimate evil is still dying so they have the they obviously have a right to be tested on and this is beneficial to the other people because the results will be taken and in 2000 they'll say well this nanoparticle system worked well it didn't invite genes to suppress these oncogenic factors and the cancer has cleared up and in fact in 2002 it was a fairly successful trial for the Chinese myth glioblastoma a very deadly form which I cannot pronounce right now and it cleared up now not to say that this is going to be the case but it will be cancer if we take it on a case by case basis and then we would end up in a different country and we would be able to treat each and every cancer that comes along with a good deal of precision yes and I think it's very important to emphasize all of those diseases that let's again call them the unenlightened masses fear will arise from genetic modification can actually be cured by genetic modification so if you're afraid of cancer gene therapy may be a promising pathway to getting rid of a lot of highly intractable cancers that plague hundreds of thousands of people today now one interesting comment that Elizabeth Parish made in her discussion with you is that her initial trials of the gene therapies will be conducted outside the borders of the United States and she didn't really elaborate at least in the reporting where they would be conducted but it's clear she perceives rightly a lot of obstacles from the FDA and she is frustrated with those so do you think there will be enough jurisdictions throughout the world that are amenable and hospitable to this kind of experimentation and if so do you have any hypotheses of what those jurisdictions might be or if there are alternatives like say cruise ships where some medical procedures can be performed today without FDA oversight or even in the slightly more distant future sea steds which are essentially floating modular ocean communities outside the territorial waters of any sovereign country so there's a baseline set down by WHO and a couple of other worldwide questions about what canon should be done I would suspect that has not already passed through I did not familiarize myself with all of the laws that there will be some sort of worldwide precautions taken against CRISPR on the other hand as I mentioned earlier it's very cheap and straightforward to do definitely easier than zinc fainting which is pain in the ass of course so if it comes down to doing things in clandestine fashion you could do them in Mexico in any place where you put sway in legislature or there is no legislature to sway I did not ask Liv because as you know I am a battalion of the sun we cannot ask people about their offshore and the German half of me just says well I saw nothing at all but I have faith that she will find what she needs she is very dedicated to what she's doing passionate and as you know she started off taking care of sick children and this is what inspired her and I later realized that by studying old people we are really going to help young people by studying the age deep learning is something that Alex is involved with which I am on call and it's a little beyond the scope of this talk to go into the technical details but one thing I do want to say about deep learning is that it's frequently misrepresented as a model based on how humans learn this is not only misleading it's wrong because we don't really know how to learn something we have some very edge cases but we don't know and we certainly do not process things as quickly as a computer can so a team recently fed in data from five autistic people it's not an apple size but they share a common phenomite so they do it more likely to hit the target they found 30 genes the 30 new genes are complicated with autism in one run I'm sure if you did a statistical analysis you could shoot a couple of holes and what they found but that's not really a point that's very impressive and that's a lot of problems broken then if you start to analyze the proteins the genes producing if you start to simulate then you can get a clearer and clearer picture and then nobody has decided that it will have to do with my own genes at the very least it seems that deep learning and really any technique that allows one to rapidly process large volumes of data can give one some promising ideas of where to look and where to devote more attention even if some apparent correlation doesn't hold up from a causal perspective after added scrutiny at the very least you have some candidates and if you rule out a few candidates well you advanced your knowledge that way and furthermore now instead of trying to look at a needle in a haystack you may be looking for a needle among a set of a few needles and a few units of hay a few straws that might look like needles superficially so yes in silicone medicine is a very interesting enterprise I saw some of their videos I was impressed I was impressed by their teams graphic design skills as well and I was also impressed at their explanation of what they were doing they seem to be able to sum it up very nicely within a few minutes and hopefully they'll be able to get a lot more investors interested in their endeavor so what do you think in addition to Viva and in silicone medicine that we discussed of Maria Konovalenko and her longevity cookbook it recently earned $50,000 on Kickstarter and they are now at the drafting stages but they're actually going to bring some bioinformatic analysis there on essentially what kinds of recipes have been shown at least to be correlated with longer life spans what do you think about this effort and its prospects I think that most of us are guilty of this if we want something badly we want it to all happen at once and that's why all of these various different schemes are so popular lose 90 pounds in five days that sort of thing but of course that's not how things work Maria's cookbook was wonderful because it raised general awareness and to some extent she was preaching to the choir but a cookbook is something that everyone needs it's accessible and she is in many ways a pretty face she's also very bright I don't know if I'm going with that well you were saying there is a temptation to reach for kind of quick fix solutions and you think Maria Yes I think it was wonderful on the public relation side I lost my train of thought because I was thinking about how to find the circle denseness which is what project is like that so let's please this strongly and sort of puts it against conventional arms Alice is looking for a model of tools that are helpful this way we're not going to develop gene therapies that help every single ailment immediately and I really hope that we find gene therapies for a set of massages so to speak that improve our quality of life like myosat and inhibitor I mentioned but for some time we're still going to need people doing organic chemistry, synthesizing these little molecules or simulating them on a computer and finding the few other drugs like, it's a lot of bandages in the saturn model these are very interesting drugs and I hope to have one of the makers on the project soon to have type of bone and momma hospitals to choose from so it's very helpful to people with osteoporosis and people with sarcopenia both are extremely common in elderly people and in fact they begin earlier than most people started to observe loss of bone densities and muscle masses early in the 30s coming to find begins around the age of 24 according to recent start editing these are frightening things yes 24 well that is disturbing yes indeed I'm a few years past 24 now and it is now becoming quite a bit more urgent for me to get these technologies out into the market for general public consumption sometimes soon sometime within the next two two and a half decades because if I am able to live the same number of years again as I have lived already I will be 56 years old and so by that time serious signs of senescence will have set in already and I would like to see some serious reversals available to me at that point so I really do hope that there is a suite of solutions that is made available by that time I think in terms of Maria's project what she is trying to do is get people in a sense to build that bridge toward the revolution in gene therapy toward longevity escape more generally so that people don't perish from let's say the more basic types of causes for instance if one were to eat deep fried foods every single meal of every single day probably by one's mid 50s some serious cardiovascular adverse effects are going to set in so it is a question though of whether there is anything more than common sense that can help guide people in that in the sense that yes one can eat in moderation one can eat a balanced diet in terms of diversity of ingredients one can try to balance one's calorie intake and calorie expenditure one can try to exercise so the interesting question with regard to the longevity cookbook is there anything beyond that is there anything that this let's say Aristotelian wisdom that is accessible to anybody doesn't capture and that even if somebody were to follow it but miss out on some other details of emerging research there might be some adverse side effects so what do you think about that we shouldn't rely on or rather we should not depend on things medical advances to say well it's because they may or may not be there or we may or may not be able to report at least not in the next decade so I look at conventional pharmaceuticals and nutritional precautions as just that precautions that we have to take in order to ensure our survival however what we have to work with is largely a role of the diets for instance and father does not need anything like an ideal diet but has no health problems and he is into babies high carbohydrate high fat so we study people like this and really this has a parallel in psychology Carl Rogers for instance rebelled against the Freudian obsession with pathology and we have a humanistic psychology now let's study healthy and happy well adjusted people and maybe we'll figure out what we need to do from here and I believe with deep learning and people who have lived beyond 100 years old we can begin to piece together what exactly is letting them do this Alex is somewhat critical of comparative biology studies which is last I checked what Maria is involved with and Romanian friend of my uncle who is putting together a textbook on the subject to me animal studies show us what we could possibly do to engineer ourselves against in essence a bird doesn't operate like a plane but it serves as inspiration and in fact that's a poor analogy because we are much more similar to birds than birds are to planets birds so when you look at different species of similar sizes and similar families like the crow and the parrot you think well what's the differences what's going on here there's some very long-lived birds even though they have high metabolic rates in some of them we found different lipid bilayers thicker ones that present oxidative damage we look at something like the naked mole rat we found high density hyaluronic acid that appears to have very potent anti-carcinogenic effects this is certainly not a dry well and it's a fun one because who doesn't like to play with an animal I actually think one of the portions of my children's book death is wrong that is likely to be most effective for kids is the listing of some exceptionally long-lived animals who don't appear to senes because I think once young people or anybody reading this book get exposed to the possibilities what is out there in nature already they could realize well the human life cycle isn't the only one that's out there and you mentioned naked mole rats they're another fascinating case because they live for about two to three decades if I recall correctly they don't get cancer and compare that to the typical lab mouse who lives two to three years and with some caloric restriction treatments can live up to four years a little bit longer with some genetic modification it could live for a little longer than four years but there's just this vast gulf of difference almost an eight fold difference in maximum life spans which is just fascinating and definitely a fertile ground for further study and I also recall even if one visits a pet store and sees all the different birds that are available for sale there are the little parakeets that can live for five to ten years and then there are some parrots who can live up to 90 years and that's fascinating too because they are quite closely related genetically at least as closely related as we are to other species of primates so it's quite interesting to note that it's not even so much the lineage of an organism that matters but even within more closely related types of organisms you see huge variation among maximum life spans so it is it is very curious and very intriguing for me now what do you think in terms of applications let's say there are intense studies of naked mole rats and how it is that they manage to avoid getting cancer how it is that they manage to avoid senescing it as rapid a rate as ordinary lab mice to what extent would a similar intervention in humans work or are we just far too different from the mole rats and the mice modern methods you could conduct a two, three or ten year study closely examining what's going on with everyone's genomes well I should say epigenomes how things are being expressed I'm not sure how fruitful that would be and I know it would be extremely costly and time consuming because there are many variables to adjust for and people in general are notoriously reliable when reporting things like alcohol consumption how much they exercise etc which is one of the reasons why I scout a little bit at most longitudinal studies I prefer I could do things that are hard basic and microscopic and anyway so you mentioned I think a subject that we should expand upon and that is the ability of ordinary people that is to say people who aren't affiliated with large corporations who don't have university research budgets who are essentially do-it-yourself enthusiasts to perform research and I'm curious as to your assessment of how far that research to date has advanced biomedical science and its prospects for the future in terms of discoveries being made broadly available in terms of treatments being developed on the basis of those discoveries where do you think that area of research is right now and where do you think it's going to take us? right now well let's go back to before I was born exactly before you were born in the 1980s it was pretty costly to do most things and you had to have a great deal of expertise you needed a laboratory etc etc same case with the 90s same case up until quite recently now we have things like Arcturus and BioCloud CRISPR so anyone with a computer with the ability to program and some fairly basic molecular biology skills to do what's necessary you don't need all of the nasty potentially expensive or dangerous reagents to prepare the southern blocks and this block and that block I only vaguely remember them from watching the biology textbook you don't need a million dollars to sequence a hundred DNA base pairs you can get that for a couple bucks and you can get it shipped right to your house as the convenience of living in this age the main concern for most agencies and rightly so is what people can potentially do with this technology I think the obvious retort is that as many people as possible need to understand how it works how to combat any man-made pathogens whatever may come about although although people like Hechidinsky are fairly rare someone who is that methodical who is that malicious and who is also suffering from a form of psychosis just don't crop up all that often and I'm hoping and fairly certain that as time goes on we will also progress in our understanding of mental health as I mentioned in the deep learning experiment we are uncovering the molecular mechanisms behind autism we are uncovering the molecular mechanisms behind depression bipolar personality disorder sociopathy psychopathy and once we've done that if those people want to see treatment or if they've been recommended to see that because a lot of them probably would not do it up there on the court they can get the help they need they can get the treatment they're all better I'm inclined to agree with you it seems to me the overwhelming majority of criminals and let's say evil doers are not brilliant nefarious masterminds who are plotting something in secret some sophisticated grand scheme to destroy the world or take revenge on humanity those are essentially cartoon supervillains but the overwhelming majority of real criminals are quite crude and unimaginative which is why they resort to violent crime in the first place which is why they haven't been able to find productive peaceful occupations for themselves but yes they can lash out viscerally at other human beings they can attack with a gun a blunt object but in order for them to carry those schemes out with any success they have to be very simple basic types of schemes that can be stopped through a modicum of intelligent and I use the word intelligent with emphasis law enforcement so not police just brutally subduing anybody who looks at them funny but rather say intelligent techniques for patrolling in the right areas setting up environments in such a way as to deter criminal activity doing some good background research on people and figuring out who is actually the greatest threat in a particular area so it does seem to me that the prospect of some malicious biohacker doing something in a remote cabin in the woods or in a garage somewhere that's going to start an epidemic or let's say disable a large amount of our infrastructure it's very implausible just like to me it seems that somebody designing a malicious terminator AI or nanobots that will precipitate the gray goo scenario is similarly implausible just because the vast majority of researchers are fairly refined individuals who do think about side effects and who do think about risks and who do work with other researchers with the intention of achieving something constructive and of course there would be a desire to build in some safeguards and to collaborate with the rest of humanity rather than opposing the rest of humanity and I think this is an interesting bridge that you've explored in your podcast which is artificial intelligence you've interviewed Louisa Rana of Robots Without Borders and he has a very and I will use this flatteringly efficient kind of startup organization in the sense that he doesn't really seem to focus on making a profit at all he just wants himself and his colleagues to work on developing a viable AI from the resources that are already available and put in a lot of time put in a lot of effort to do it but I was curious with regard to your impressions of your conversation with him and his methods and how those methods are different from what has historically been pursued in AI research well as I said to Louisa Rana a girlfriend shortly after the podcast he's a better man than I am and that's for sure he is altruistic he genuinely wants to help other people and he seems to be completely indifferent to making money he also has extremely optimistic view of what AI can and will become without dealing too far off the biological sciences I also spoke to him about his partner Eureko who I am going to have on the show soon about the potential implications of artificial intelligence and system research already we have computer programs that can analyze radiographs x-rays most doctors would not need to examine this kind of bone x-ray let's say for finding a tumor with good accuracy one of the problems that occasionally computers make very stupid mistakes that are difficult to understand I was talking with Peter Rothman once and a podcast that unfortunately was bungled up by recording software I had at the time about facial recognition software he made for banks it was over 99% accurate but somehow it mixed up two very dissimilar looking people you still need this bit of human assistance and guidance although these programs are better and better all the time in terms of what we were talking about earlier about different approaches one of the other reasons why I am not entirely in favor of the gene therapy only approach or a regenerative medicine in general a little bit later is that these organic compounds the different drugs that people take are not necessarily bad in and of themselves they can be improved through delivery systems the delivery system is as or more important than the knowledge we are ingesting and this will be done through nanotechnology this ties in with paper I collaborated on with a doctoral student University of Minnesota in the summer if you can deliver the drug in proper doses to the specific organ going back to what I mentioned about SARMS earlier we are not going to get the negative side effects that are associated putting it all over the body in massive quantities that makes sense yes and I know that there have been experiments in the recent past with the use of nanoparticles for instance to deliver targeted cancer treatments so that instead of doing this massive area damage that chemotherapy does you can actually target only the cancerous cells and leave the rest of them alone right and in fact there were two that I know of that are patented right now and are being used which is a great start but we will see an explosion in nanoparticle design and particularly computer assisted nanoparticle design which is something that when I last checked on Google Scholar there were a few papers but not nearly as many as there should be so a promising field of research for people to get into if they want would you say the barriers to entry are so modest that a DIY enthusiast with a few thousand dollars and a space to work and access to the cutting edge research could make a significant contribution okay in my teams I've done some backyard organic chemistry I won't go into that but the amount of knowledge we need for a lot of nanoparticle systems is beyond what some guy out of high school will have but if you have a bachelor's degree most of them are well within your grasp and I've only seen a few sympathies that would require more training than that so as long as you're not a moron you have your hoodie for your oxygen although even if some of them chemical are particularly toxic and it's fine if you're in a well ventilated room you can do it hello Adam it seems that we lost you ah you're back there are hazards the same as working with very small materials and about a year ago I read about someone being hospitalized and looking in a college laboratory but this was for industrial applications for nanoparticles but I would definitely recommend anyone listening to look at the sympathies and they might be surprised by how straightforward they are that's very interesting and again a path that someone who has perhaps received a bachelor's degree in biology and wants to make a contribution could look into now on the topic of artificial intelligence before we go on to regenerative medicine do you think an AI similar to say IBM's Watson which after it won its Jeopardy game was repurposed as a kind of medical assistance software it processed a lot of the cutting edge medical literature and is now being used to help doctors diagnose conditions with some human intervention perhaps some human correction if there is an illogical result as you mentioned could happen so what do you see as the potential for this human AI collaboration in both researching and developing biotechnological treatments for ailments and then deploying them in a clinical setting if you have say a difficult case a patient who's manifesting some strange symptoms doctor can't quite figure out what it is but he uses this AI assistant to do some very rapid research and at least provide a few hypothesis oh it could be condition X that you haven't considered yet my main concern with any computer system particularly one that's being used for medical purposes is what sort of papers you're feeding yes for instance I was looking at in physics paper but you found who is a physicist I thought oh this looks pretty cool I said no it's bullshit it's just a big pile of shit I thought well okay and the truth is there are a lot of papers that are bad for methodological reasons or due to dishonesty on the research's parts unfortunately we catch them and one that I think of that I'm thinking of right now is a Deepak Das who fell over to a lot of research on mesveratrol we found that his papers were not exactly up to snuff and that was a big humiliating ordeal for him I'm sure one day we can make a computer that would do that they'll have that same human intuition of looking at a paper and saying this does not fit somehow on the other hand if it's going through papers that are in the house that have been put together by a particular corporation for one reason or another or just by someone who wants to publish as much as possible and look very good doing it it might come to the wrong conclusions the problem of course is not with the machine but with human beings who are producing these crappy papers and that's definitely a big concern which is to say there are some incentives within academia for anybody who wants tenure or even tenured professors who wish to maintain a certain reputation or funding for their positions and departments to keep publishing keep putting their names out there even if let's say their research is a bit lackluster or they've tried something and they fail I think it's this publisher parish pressure that contributes to people trying to crank out a lot of mediocre research as opposed to really focusing on genuine breakthroughs, genuine contributions I think it's a lot more honest and a lot more commendable for someone to publish a paper saying I've worked 20 years on this problem and unfortunately I've tried X, Y and Z and it didn't really bring about any results that are for instance better than the outcomes of the control group if it's say research into medical treatments I think that's actually an approach that contributes more to science because now you at least know that somebody has tried something and it didn't work now you at least know about an avenue that perhaps isn't as fruitful as was initially thought but yes I agree there is pressure to produce something remarkable and everybody in academia feels that pressure and unfortunately there's not enough recognition or respect for the scientific process where I think even the failures as long as there is an earnest and a valiant attempt need to be commended to some extent and the people who are willing to devote themselves to these paths need to have some sort of reward even if they don't massively revolutionize the field so to speak so I do concur with you and of course real science is difficult the scientific method followed methodically requires one to have a certain let's say sense of deference to the truth some might call it humility I don't really like that term but it's a recognition that one doesn't know everything that one might fail and that the point is not to succeed every time but the point is to search for the truth so I'm sure we have time to discuss this thoroughly let's talk about regenerative medicine of course for me that's an area that I want to succeed in a dramatic fashion it seems to me the most proximate out of all of the approaches we've discussed and of course gene therapy is a part of it but Aubrey DeGray has his sense program a seven pronged approach where he identifies seven types of damage that constitutes an essence and it seems like there hasn't been an eighth discovered in three and a half decades so we have in a sense a catalog of perils that could be combated so what do you think about the prospects of regenerative medicine as a whole and sense in particular and how the sense project itself is likely to fair and contribute the first innocence of regenerative medicine or first foray into it go back to the 1950s and this involved using a solution of about 10 15% dextrose injecting it into a target area and getting the tissue to regenerate and this is still used often on by some practitioners for spinal issues it's been attempted for burns and some that but they will I mean it's far from imperfect and it's closer to homeopathy and chiropractors than it is to genuine medicine but it was a start now we have stem cells we have third potent stem cells we have things that are definitely going to make a difference unfortunately again it's hard to target a particular organ it's hard to inject what you need right into someone's heart and make sure it stays there in this instance again it requires more research into how it's going to interact with the body how it's going to do what you want to bioprinting on the other hand tissue fabrication organ creation is promising because right now we have many many more people who need organs and organs they are waiting lists are absolutely obscene and this is another field that was difficult to do until recently now it can be done by almost anyone on a small scale you can modify a standard canon and print skin cells where if you really ambitious you can put together a bladder I wouldn't recommend trying kidney or a liver just to that and I was fortunate enough actually to get a free 3D printer recently so shout out to Leslie oh excellent excellent should be here in about two weeks well please do keep me updated as to what you're going to do with that 3D printer even if it's as basic as printing a little figurine of something I am very intrigued about the prospect of this technology essentially disseminating into households becoming available for individuals even to manufacture little trinkets but of course as you mentioned the 3D printing of organs is something that promises to be extremely beneficial now there have already been efforts successful efforts to print say tracheas, bladders these kinds of hollow organs and I believe a 3 year old child's life was saved when a team at Wake Forest University replaced her trachea with a 3D printed biocompatible trachea she was born with a genetic defect where her trachea wasn't working properly she saved her life and she's now able to live a healthy fulfilling life and I think it would be remarkable if this technology progressed to the point where we could print lungs, hearts stomachs the kinds of organs that if you lose today it's virtually impossible to live a healthy life anymore to say the least even if you can be kept artificially alive for a few months so yes it's another promising area so you can have gene therapy making improvements to organs that are already there or fixing damage and then you can have these bioprinted organs just wholesale replacing the organs that might have been damaged and the synthesis of the two approaches can definitely improve health so I am interested also where do you think Aubrey de Grey's role in this comes in in terms of his foundation he has a couple million dollars a year of funding Peter Thiel is supporting him he's doing some research let's say on the low hanging fruit of areas where others aren't as heavily focused so he's not I would say doing the cancer research or the stem cell therapy as much because a lot of others are trying for it but he has other projects like mitosens and glycosens and lysosens that are interesting as well do you have any thoughts about his work well he is the elements of the extension loop and so of course we have to tip our hats to him the book by him I read most recently was his mitochondrial theory of age which was published a little while ago and it's probably changed his views a bit since then and I'm sure he's well aware that the mitochondria is not the beginning and end of aging we know that the mitochondria and the naked mole rats for instance shows quite a bit of damage so that it's not what's behind their negligibles in that sense but we also know that protected mechanisms like the 1D bird that I mentioned against oxidative damage are important we also know that oxidative damage is a key part of the aging process and it's implicated in aging but also we're ensuring information which is another thing that has to be closely monitored and I'm hoping that more and more biometric devices will be developed so we can make sure that our information levels are not too high because of course with chronic information the signs and symptoms are not going to crop up until it's too late until you develop diabetes cancer, depression or a whole slew of polygenic disorders that are associated with de Graves model it's pretty complete unfortunately I don't have the list probably just right here on hand it's a good theoretical model but science doesn't follow a clean precise trajectory based on a single proposition by anyone likely we're going to see things coming out here and there so it's going to be just as important to be a synthesizer of this information as it is to be someone on the front lines in the laboratory absolutely and I definitely agree after all it's one thing to articulate a road map it's another thing to develop effective solutions to every road block that one might encounter along the path and certainly Aubrey de Grey makes a point of this we don't even know a lot of what we don't know about human metabolism it's such a complex process so his focus knowing that there's so much we don't know is on repairing the damage figuring out ways to approach senescence as an engineering problem as opposed to just a knowledge problem which is a lot faster so I think his principle contribution apart from just identifying the road map shifting the focus from first trying to understand everything and then figuring out a way to alter the metabolism in order to slow down aging which is a lot of what the research prior to de Grey has been focused on instead towards saying ok we are going to learn some more facts about human metabolism and how it works over time but that's not going to be fast enough to save us so instead we should focus on engineering the solutions to the types of damage that occur to each and every one of us over time so I really appreciate our multifaceted discussion today we've touched on many areas from gene therapy and bioinformatics and regenerative medicine even to a bit of artificial intelligence a bit of the state of scientific research and some of the incentives that researchers face to how DIY enthusiasts and researchers can help out so I would like to give you the last word or words in this conversation what would you like to touch on in greater detail from any of the areas of our discussion I think it should be ended on a positive and long lasting note which is that each one of us in some way is contributing to the process if someone is in material chemistry it may seem as though they're not doing anything related but their breakthrough could come about and create a sort of polymer new material that could be useful on nanoparticle modulation if someone is involved in this media their influence could be critical in public acceptance so each and every one of us regardless of what we do can play some role in putting anti-aging research at the front and giving people to understand that it is a necessity and an inevitability well I absolutely agree with you I've said before it's not a question of life extension it's a question of when and whether it will be soon enough for us and I really hope that the combined efforts of some of the brightest minds, some of the most forward-thinking minds among us can help us reach that and if in any small way our discussion today has contributed to it has piqued somebody's interest has encouraged somebody to look at what is out there right now and to look at opportunities for anybody to contribute as individuals I think this discussion would have accomplished its purpose I will certainly continue to be very interested in your work Adam and to listen to your interviews of luminaries and biotechnology and other fields I thank you for joining us today and with that I wish you a good day thank you for having me