 We're all here to discuss, what if you could live to 150? Just to set this up briefly, scientific advances have made it possible for people born today to live to 150. We're going to discuss whether or not that's really true. And of course, that raises some questions. What will a meaningful life look like? What stresses does this create for our existing systems and institutions? And how will business and society at large handle those stresses? This is a very hypothetical conversation. We're going to start by exploring the science just to lay the groundwork. And then we will talk a lot about the implications. Let me start by introducing our panelists and asking them to talk about their specific interests in this topic, why they're here with us. I'm going to start with Simone Schurle, who sits in the middle. She's an assistant professor for responsive biomedical systems. Well, I guess I just got that wrong, didn't I? The responsive biomedical systems laboratory, the Institute of Translational Medicine, and you're a Bronco Weiss fellow at ETC Zurich, and you're also one of the forum's young scientists. Will you tell us why you're here on this panel? Thank you, Amy. Yeah, so my research is on responsive biomedical systems. So in my lab, we design micro and nanoscale systems that we can apply in biomedicine basically for diagnostics and therapy. And so it's kind of supporting a shift of medicine to become more proactive and personalized and that, of course, directly will impact how long we live, how healthy we live. And so that's why that's, of course, its impact on longevity and why I'm here on the panel. Great. And next to you on the far side is Bob Kane, the CEO and founder of Luna DNA. Sorry, Bob. And you're also one of the technology pioneers. You're a technology pioneer for the forum. So why are you here on the panel today? So I have to say, I'm not exactly an expert on aging, but I have a unique perspective and a lot of experience. It's a topic that I've thought about, especially when we think about quality of life for many years. And that's important because as we live longer, we don't want to add years really to the end of our lives. We want to add years to the middle of our lives. We want to ensure that we get those years when we're more vibrant and active, and possibly we'll have to be working during those years to support the number of people, the populations at the time. But additionally, I've spent 30 years in genomics, 15 of those years at Illumina, and started a company after I left Illumina called Luna DNA where the idea is to bring together health, genomic, social determinant data in order to drive discoveries that help us understand how to improve our quality of life and how to live longer. And lastly, I'd like to say that I started a rock climbing gym business while I was at Illumina. And really, that was around quality of life because we need to stay active. And rock climbing allows you to be flexible. It brings in your core. It helps you with problem solving. And the way we set it up, there's a community there. And so when we think about that business, we think a lot about improving our quality of life and maintaining a long quality of life as we get older. Good points. And finally, next to me is Jerry Mueller, a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. Jerry, why are you here on this panel? Well, I've written a number of books on the history of capitalism. And I've taught a number of courses over the years on the interactions between the family and the market and the way in which changes in the capitalist market have changed the shape of the family and the way in which what goes on in the family affects people's achievement and so on in the market. And one of the projects I'm currently working on is a book length project on thinking trans-generationally in a personal sense. It's called Planned Grandparenthood. And I think that's the set of interests that brought me here. Terrific. And I should actually introduce myself. I'm Amy Bernstein and I'm the editor of Harvard Business Review. And of all the panelists, I know the least about this topic and I have tremendous interest. So I'm looking forward to this conversation. Let's start with the science. And I'm looking at you, Simone. Tell us what is going on. What do we know? What's happening that will enable us to live to 150? Well, so we know that aging is the primary risk factor to the major human pathologies, including diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular, and degenerative diseases. And we are the state in science where we basically try to tackle these death-leading diseases from, I would say, three directions. So there's the basic science and basically of a healthy living, of more knowledge and healthy nutrition that make us live longer. We know exercise is good for you. Sleep well, eat well, and exercise. Then there's another strand that's going to have a stronger impact in terms of how much does it really increase our life expectancy. And this is where new technology is coming in in medicine, which I'm also working on. So new ways of monitoring our health status to basically shift medicine to be more proactive, as I mentioned, to kind of be able to. And so to give an example with nanosensor technology I'm working on, basically, an obstructive systems that can roam through the body to detect if there's already an onset of a disease early on. So we can basically interact before you have symptoms and before a disease actually develops. So this is kind of a shift of more preventing and keeping us healthy. And then there's a whole strand of basic error of research that's really on aging itself. Because aging is the root of the source of all these causes of, as I said, a primary risk factor for developing these diseases. So instead of working on the diseases, working on actually controlling aging. And what we do know now is that at least the rate of aging, it's basically controlled through genetic pathways. This is what we know, as well as through biochemical processes. And there was a huge increase, basically, in the knowledge, thanks also to advances in genetic engineering with CRISPR, as we can now modify organisms to basically study these effects, for example, in genetic pathways. So a model organism that is commonly used in aging research is worms, the elegans. There are also other, like fruit. You can work us with fruit flies or yeast. Basically short-living organisms. Because then you can do the research a bit faster. And so with that, we can basically test all these hypotheses on genetic pathways, knock out a gene, and then see how it impacts actually the life of that organism you're looking at. Yeah. So I guess my question is, can the people in this room live to be 150? Right now, the people here, from my perspective and the knowledge I think we have right now, no. But I mean, if you look at, for the past century, we basically managed to double the life expectancy. So for the US population, in 1900, life expectancy was around 47, and it's now around 80 right now. And so I think this showed us just, and this was because we managed infectious diseases. And now we did huge leaps in cancer, which was then the next kind of big disease to treat. Of course, still lots to tackle here. But I think this just shows us how much has happened already in a century. And as we know that science and progress is just accelerating, of course, the forecast looks even more promising what we can achieve. Current forecasts, again, for the US population, some statistics of predicting by 2050, it's going to be reaching 95. But I think it's hard to predict because a lot of the aging research where we know more about the genetic path, where we learn more about genetic pathways, there can come some surprises, unexpected big jumps that we could make. OK, Bob, so you're an expert in genetics. What do you have to add? I expect that someday we'll have people who reach 150. I don't expect to reach that age. Because I'm 912 right now. I try. The way I think about it, though, is biology is very complicated and additional. I think that our decisions we make in our environment play a bigger role today for many of us than our biology, whether it's our microbiome or a genome. So for instance, smoking and lung cancer used to be the biggest cause of mortality 30 or 40 years ago. Today, it's probably diabetes in the United States. And so the decisions we make, as was mentioned earlier, around our diet and exercise, are going to have the biggest impact for most people. Additionally, what I know in terms of genomics is there are certain genes that have an impact on aging. Also, there's a chemical. I can get into one specific area that I know of. There's a chemical called NAD that's made in the nucleus of the cells. And it was found that that chemical is made less and less as we get older, as we get past 30. And that chemical relates to inflammation and cell repair. And so there's a lot of work going on trying to increase the NAD in our cells. It's not as easy as we think, because it's in the nucleus and you can't simply take NAD. It won't get to the nucleus. But there are many promising efforts going on to try to work within the biological pathway to increase the NAD. And there's a lot of great experimentation that's occurred that shows that with increased NAD levels, we actually have some reverses in aging. All right. I just want to shift directions a little bit and ask a fundamental question. Why is this idea of extending life even desirable, Bob? I'm not Bob. I'm sorry, Jerry. I'm looking at Jerry and saying Bob. So I think in many ways, the idea of living to 120 or 130 or 150 seems to me to be highly undesirable. Indeed, a kind of nightmare scenario in terms of how people think about their lives and the things in their lives that give meaning and purpose to their lives. The late German sociologist, Rolf Darendorf, talked about the fact that in a healthy society, people have a balance between opportunities and linkages. So choice, opportunities to pursue professional careers, social mobility, and so on, but also linkages. That is, what are the bonds that connect us to others and that for most people actually give the most meaning to their lives? And although some people do leave their mark in the world through various forms of creativity, be it entrepreneurial creativity or scientific innovation or artistic creativity, for most people, they leave their mark in the world by have one of the main ways, at least in which they make their mark in the world, is by having children and nurturing them. And if all goes well, having descendants after that, that is becoming grandparents. So if you conceive of your life as not just a segment that begins with your life and ends at death, but as part of a larger narrative that you're descended from someone and you are going to produce descendants in the future, that creates a way of thinking about the whole shape of your life and about the possibility of human renewal across generations. So the notion of extending our lives to 150 seems to be based on the tacit assumption that more is always better. And the death is a kind of defeat, but it's not. And if you think about your death as something that is going to happen, it helps you to think about what shape you want your life to have. So you don't have to live longer and longer to do more and more. There's certain periods of life when you're preparing for adult tasks. There are certain periods of life when you're conducting those adult tasks, and there's a later period of life when if all goes well, you're gaining some pleasure from what you've accomplished in that middle stage. But the notion of pushing life longer and longer and focusing our attention. So purely on health and fitness means you're sort of governed by Fitbit. And I don't think that notion is a very healthy one. In addition to that, I think there's other negative implications of this in terms of human creativity and so on. But by and large, I think I'm all in favor of medicine and I'm all in favor of public health and the things that have helped us to live longer. But the notion that we should devote so much of our resources and so much of our attention to living indefinitely seems to me to be perhaps misplaced. So Bob, you've given a lot of thought about what makes life meaningful. So talk a little about that. Yeah, so generally, I agree, but I don't think the problems are inherent in aging. I think they're problems we just have not faced historically. And coming from genetics and genomics, maybe I can think of it in a different way. I look at Darwinian evolution and we have evolved as a species to deal with different stresses in our life, stressors, whether they're physical, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual. And if you take those away, we start to deteriorate. And so talking about sort of your physicality is a good example, but it also has to do with emotional and spiritual. If we don't have a purpose in life, sometimes life loses its meaning. And so we need to now develop new purposes in life. As we age longer, we need to find things we're passionate about, for instance, and be able to rise up, accept challenges, and go after those challenges, and hopefully create value, and do it in a way that brings meaning and purpose to our life. We need to have intellectual challenges in our life. And so I think that there's this idea if you don't use it, you lose it. And I think that's a challenge we just don't know how to address as a civilization. And it's a challenge that does cause a lot of issues today in terms of mental health, for instance, and in other areas. But I think it's a challenge that we can address. And I think it does bring into question about how we raise our next generation of children to be prepared to address these challenges and others. So Simone, you have some thoughts. Yeah, I think I want to resist a little bit in the notion of, A, so why would our purpose, why do we have less, or so you think that the purpose is not enough for 150 years, the purpose we have now, or why does that change if we live longer? We all have now a purpose, and it would be just we have more time for that purpose to unfold. And then I think it's a lot depending on, so I would be excited to live until I'm 150, under good conditions. And that's why I'm excited about my research, and it keeps me pushing to basically enable us to live and to maintain a good health until late age. And I think it's almost an intrinsic desire of humankind. I think the imagination of longevity and the Alexia of eternal youth has been in history for, and I can refer to you, Jerry, forever with us, this kind of idea of it and fascination. So how do you make this, what is the meaning? Go ahead, Joe, you have something to say and I have a question for you. Well, so here's where I disagree, Simone. There are trade-offs in life and across lives. And resources that are going to be devoted to keeping me alive to 150 are resources of time and money and energy, and to some degree natural resources as well, that are not going to be devoted to having children, having grandchildren, perhaps great-grandchildren. So there are real trade-offs in terms, as I say, of resources. And so it seems to me that, in a sense, the desire to live to 150 is kind of narcissistic. That is to say, it places too much emphasis on us as individuals and less as us as part of some larger ongoing process, including the familial process. But not confined to the familial process. What if you don't have kids? Right, right. So as I say, other people make connections in the world, make linkages in the world through modes other than having children, obviously, and clearly. But for most people in the world, that is one of the most important ways of forming such bonds and linkages that give meaning and significance and emotional warmth and so on to their lives. And that entails transferring resources to them, including your time to take care of your children, or maybe even your grandchildren to some degree, and also economic resources. So I think there are real trade-offs. But I think, on the other hand, we can have a discussion of whether we want to live longer or not. I think it's anyways happening. I mean, it's already happening. So this is just the other side, maybe. Sorry, and we anyways have to get prepared now for how we deal with it, whether it's going to be 150 and how many decades from now. But it's the situation. We are experiencing the fastest rates of age increase since 1960, as we're having right now. So maybe we can also shift. Because I guess we all have different aspects on an idea of whether it's desirable. But it's happening. It's happening. Yes, it's happening. And it's not going to slow down. It's just going to speed up. Well, OK. So Bob, you have some interesting thinking about the implications for child rearing. But we have to think about how we bring up our kids differently. I think traditional education, for one thing, it's a bit outdated. The education system doesn't evolve that quickly. And then if we look at the exponential technologies that are introduced to our world today, the education system doesn't necessarily address how to be comfortable in a world with these technologies moving forward exponentially. And people are uncomfortable in this world as a result. Then if we add on to this the fact that we're going to live longer, have multiple careers, and have to specialize in different things, and be lifelong learners, then that adds more complexity. And so I guess I'll just quickly break it down into four aspects. And one is really wisdom. It has to do with the traditional foundation in education. Another one is well-being. We have to help our kids understand how to maintain their emotional and spiritual well-being and develop resilience in their lives. Another is service. I think that we need a local and global perspective installed in our children. And a belief in something greater than themselves, and because that can help them with meaning and purpose in their life. And finally, communication and relationships. So our ability to communicate with each other, to connect with each other, and to work on teams to get things done is going to be critical for success in the future. Right. OK. So you mentioned, we'll think about education, careers. Jerry, you have some thoughts about the implications for women and their careers if we live much longer. Right. So actually, the kinds of considerations that I have in mind are already highly relevant, because as Simone rightly said, on average, we're living a lot longer than in the past. Longevity has been going up to some degree since about 1800 and more since 1900, in part due to improvements in nutrition and public health. And actually, medicine has less to do with it than those larger things, but now medicine too. And now, life expectation already in advanced industrial societies is into the mid-80s and is certainly going to extend somewhat longer in the time to come. And I think in many ways, we haven't caught up with that in its relationship to the other most important thing that's been going on in the last 50 or 60 years, which is the movement of women into full-time work. And the increasing pattern in most societies of what we sometimes call assortative marriage, that is people tending to marry someone of roughly the same economic level, educational level, and so on. And it's created a life pattern where that in some ways is not conducive to human happiness if you think that having a family is an important part of human happiness for many people. Because if both a husband and wife have to get an education and then get higher education, I mean, get advanced education, get professionally established, then they're well into their 30s. They start looking around for a partner. They find a partner maybe. Then they're into their later 30s. Then they're into a period of declining fertility. So this has ramifications not just for women, but for men. And I think so many of our major institutions are structured on an outdated premise. That is, there's gonna be a kind of gendered division of labor where the husband is going to be in the workforce full-time and the wife is going to be the homekeeper. That was the case for a while from about 1800 to 1950, but it's often not the case any longer. And to prove yourself in almost all professional fields in law, in science, in scholarship, and so on, you have to do it mostly in your 20s and your early 30s, which is precisely the period when women are most capable of having children and when the men who also want to have children and who are married to them would be able to have children. So we have a situation now where there's a gap in most advanced industrial societies between the desired level of fertility among educated people and the attained level of fertility. That is, they have fewer children than they would like and sometimes no children at all. And I think we have to think about restructuring. There's no, since we're living longer and longer and lots of us are going to be working 20 or 30 years from now well into our 70s and maybe beyond. There's no reason why people have to start the most active part of their professional life when they're 22 or 25. They could start when they're 35 and then they still have 35 or 40 years of work and sort of human capital formation before them. So I think with the longevity that's already occurred and the increasing longevity that to some degree is certainly going to occur, we need to think more broadly about how institutions ought to adapt in terms of people's personal happiness, in terms of sort of wasted opportunities in business for making use of a female intelligence from labor power and in terms of public policy. I mean in China and in many other industrial societies, as you know, the level of fertility is way below replacement. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but when it gets as low as it is in places like Japan and Korea and some degree Germany and so on, then you have problems arising, not just in terms of active workers supporting pensioners, but a society that becomes older and older is in some ways less innovative and creative and there are other problems involved too. So all of this then has public policy implications as well as implications for businesses and people's personal happiness. But let's go back to what you're saying about the implications for women and I wanna ask someone how that hit her. I think that's a very important point and you're absolutely right in this. I do believe that if we are with the effects on longevity that also probably the fertility might, so we might be able to basically also have kids later so that also shifts then with that. If we are actively really changing or controlling aging rate, if you come to that point that we actively doing this on a cellular level. But I think in terms of the shifting basically, the infrastructure, kind of the societal conditions we are now in and then I support absolutely the idea we have to make changes in education as well in the work system of how basically what becomes accepted or what becomes possible or what we also kind of promote. So I think that's an importance that we already should take now. As I mean, I can only say in academia it is we have not, it's particular in the STEM field. We're not so many women and the problem is to this career or basically having family while being a faculty is still under current conditions, how to combine. And so we need different environment where we can basically accommodate the needs of women for that. I wonder if living longer will bring opportunity to address this challenge. And so the way I think about it is if we have a society that's living to 150, there's gonna be more than 100 years that individuals will have to spend in their career. Which means that taking time off to take long vacations, taking time off to raise a family is gonna be a smaller and smaller proportion of our career and I think it brings opportunity. Mm-hmm, Jerry, you're having a thought. So we're already in a situation where people who are not that old, who are in their 60s, say, or 70s depend on not just not only their children but their grandchildren to work the devices that they need for day-to-day life. What about when you're 130, who are you going to call upon? Your great-great-grandchild doesn't sound like a very pleasant scenario. Yeah, so there's an assumption running through a lot of what we're talking about today that old age is going to move higher, it's gonna sort of move out as we get older. How's that gonna happen? How are we gonna have those, how are the middle years, are the years from, say, 40 to 90 or 40 to 110 going to be healthy, productive years? Bob, I'm looking at you. Well, I think it's a combination of science, it's a combination of understanding how our decisions affect our lives. So, I'm almost 60 and I don't see myself slowing down at all. And I'm hoping that with one day, somebody else in my position 50 years from now will have science to help them, too. Oh, we have to talk, Bob. But, I don't necessarily have science today, CRISPR technology or ability to increase NAD levels, but there are other resources at our hands that depend on the decisions we make and diet and exercise, family structures, things like that and creating the right challenges in our life so that we can thrive. And so, the way I look at it is, I don't think we're gonna get to be 90 years old and in a nursing home and live another 40 years. I think what's gonna happen is we're going to be in our 40s and a little wiser and a little bit more along in our career and then we're gonna change careers and we're gonna have another 30 years in a career and maybe change careers again and we're gonna get an opportunity to have maybe multiple lives in that middle portion of our life. All right, I'm gonna ask one more question and then I'm gonna open the floor to your questions. So, you talk about multiple careers, but the fact of the matter is that we live in a culture that is infatuated with youth. How are we gonna continue to create more opportunities for people as they get older? Because it is, if you are out of work and you're 55 in the United States at least, finding your next job is, it takes a miracle. So, I'm wondering how we're going to shift values and attitudes. Yes, Simone? Well, I think I could envision or I envision a model of where we, coming back to the lifelong learning where we could basically have a system where we have an educational part, you work, you have another educational part, you work. So, you're always, because right now it's then at 50, it says, oh, well, what that person learned 30 years back is now not, it's outdated. So, you basically keep updating continuously and to that extent it just becomes normal that we shift careers that is this kind of just completely different model. I find it right now incredible that we kind of, I mean, we have education, different systems, some actually go leave high school and have had lost education at 16 and then there's no connection back to that and you keep on working until retirement and that's just, these models will not be, I think this will just not be sustainable at all and I think it will help on many levels our society to keep on education as we live to handle actually technological progresses and be capable ourselves and not asking our grandchildren how to deal with the technology but basically to continuously keep updating the knowledge. And I think this isn't only a challenge of growing older, there are exponential technologies out today that are obsolete jobs faster and faster and at an accelerated pace and so you could go to school for a certain position and within a few years of leaving school that type of job may no longer exist and so we as a society have to understand how to retrain ourselves and how to become lifelong learners in order to keep up with this pace of exponential technology and I know a lot of people in different parts of the world want to slow down technology because it makes them more comfortable but again, it's not something we have control of, the technology will move faster and that's completely separate from aging is gonna cause us to have to understand how to retrain and adapt a new career. All right, I have so many questions but I wanna see what the audience has to say. Yes, I think I see a question in the back. Is someone, yes, back there. There's a microphone walking over to you. Hi, I'm Inz Ryan from Editer and Chief of Hospitals Japan. I have a question for Professor Miller. How does extending life affect inequality in the world because if someone gets rich, will they stay rich for 100 years or 200 years? Will we be able to build a system that can for us to have second or third chances? How does life extensly affect inequality? So look, very broadly speaking, in the history of capitalism, here's what happens. You already find this in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Things that begin, new innovations begin as luxuries. That is, they're expensive, they're available to a relative few. As time goes on, there's money to be made in making those luxuries cheaper and available to a larger and larger percentage of the population so that they become what are considered to be necessities. And Smith in The Wealth of Nations already makes the point in 1776, what many English people at this time considered to be day-to-day necessities were luxuries some generations ago. So think of, if you have, perhaps one or two of you have a cell phone. 50 years ago, I think one or two, a few people in each country, the head of state perhaps, had a portable phone and it was this big, and a phone that, a device that had the computing power that is in your current cell phone, took up about the size of this stage at least, right? And cost over a million dollars. So this is one of many more recent examples of what starts as luxuries becoming available to more and more of the population. So I think that's going to be true inevitably with a lot of these improvements in health too. They're going to, the richer people are going to have access to them first, richer societies are going to have access to them first, but over time, they will become cheaper and more widely available. Next question. Yes, I see a hand back there, yes. Thank you, I'm Timothy Ma from Hong Kong. My mom is now aging 100 years old. And I'm worrying that I'm also having the same life as her. Why? Because I think internally, we are not well prepared for aging. And externally, the whole global world is also not preparing for the aging. So my question is how we can really prepare for the age friendly society, not only on employment, further education, job opportunities, physical health, and even the finance model as well. So maybe our expertise can give us some advice. How we can be well prepared for the age friendly global world to come. I think that, that's a tough question. I think that over time, we'll have to start to change how we educate our children to prepare our children. But for us ourselves, I think we're going to have to realize that we have to make decisions differently. We have to move outside of our comfort zone and do things differently. And I guess the way I think about it is, so we all look at our lives in two different ways. We all have this narrative about our life and how we would like it to be. And then we all have decisions we make on the experiences in front of us, the experiential self. And I think in order to prepare for aging, this sort of long term narrative self that talks about preparing for aging is going to have to more and more really control our decisions if we want to be prepared. And we have to give up some things, whether it's desserts or whether it's taking five minutes every hour to walk around, things like that. And so I think that's part of it. I don't want to minimize the medical impacts of aging today because they do exist and there are certain things we can't address and there are certain things that many years will go by before we can improve on. But I do think we still can make a lot of decisions in our daily life if we really want to prepare for being more fit and having a better sort of mental, physical, emotional quality of life when we're older, but we have to be willing to put aside sort of the experiential self a little bit in the daily decisions in order to have the discipline to prepare ourselves. Any other thoughts from our panelists? I think that there's also from a technology side, there is really a lot in development going on basically for example supporting elderly, living independently through basically smart housing. I think in all that there's also just this development coming on top of it too which will help us to basically have a better life when we're getting old to still be independent and can live at a home wage system, basically digital supervision in a way. And I think there's just from several directions improvements going on and again I cannot say it often enough. These models are also latest so keep on learning and there are lots of open lectures or basically courses that the retired population can take at university to basically keep on training yourself. And I think this outlook is more positive. So I have two very disparate thoughts. From a technological point of view, the thing that would improve aging the most right now is finding some kind of a cure for Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia because as our life has extended as our lifespan has extended, as you know a higher and higher percentage of people get these diseases that come with aging and that are in many ways the most sort of debilitating and negative aspects of aging. I know a lot of people have been working on that but it's quite striking that from what I've read and so on there's actually been very little tangible progress on finding a cure or alleviation of what is really in many ways the great health problem right now I think involved with aging. Second comment is entirely different. I think you should think about the problem of aging when you're 20 and 22 and one of the things you should think about is do I wanna have a robot taking care of me or do I want to have people in my life who I have a close ongoing connection to possibly because I've given birth to them and I've given birth to somebody who in turn has given birth to them and who therefore have a sense of attachment to me and how am I gonna get there as opposed to living with the robot which is not quite the same thing. And let me just add that I agree, I didn't address one the societal challenges and economic challenges of aging because I don't really have an answer for that so I guess I moved on to other issues and in terms of the mental health I think a third of us are predicted to have a mental health, whether it's Alzheimer's or dementia as we get older and that's a major issue and in fact I'm not talking about it today because I'm not promoting LUNA DNA but the company that I'm involved with is really focused on trying to work with people to gather the genomic, the health, the data about their lifestyle in order to try to unravel these problems and so there's a lot of effort going into dealing with these very, very complex problems and I'm hopeful that we'll start to make inroads in the next decade. Yeah, I wanna make one more point that I think we should really not only think about the expansion of life expectancy, there's also an index for the healthy life expectancy and that keeps increasing as well and we have a whole, it complete, so I recommend to read a book of Joe Coughlin from the MIT Aging Lab who describes the longevity economy and kind of what we're experiencing because also of this healthy life expectancy increase that we shouldn't think only about, yes, we're gonna get older and it's gonna be terrible because we're gonna all be sick, we're all working, there's so much effort in basically making these years as being healthy so reducing the cost overall, of course it's costly for us to get there but then in the end there will be less, the idea is to have less healthcare burden because we're preventing the sickness and right now kind of in what we see a lot in what's going on in the six, when you're age 60, 65, people are fit, people are excited to explore, they travel, there's a huge market that's kind of not as considered as it should, it's actually a time where you don't have to work anymore currently, I mean that will need to change to finance and support that but it's the time where all of a sudden, yeah, even new hobbies get explored, my mom started to golf recently, she never did that so this is now the time and kind of, I think this is just also a really a more positive outlook we should have on this topic. Okay. More questions, yes. Oh well, should we give someone else a chance? I just want to give a supplementary information, there will be a half section on 10, 45 about aged tech, that's what Professor is talking about, robotic for elderly people. Okay. Hub E, yes. Hub E, okay. And there's someone down here who has a question, down here, someone coming, okay. So you've, hello, can you hear me? Yes, yes. So you have talked a lot about the middle years trying to increase the quality of life during those middle years, from a hard science perspective, how much of the science that's helping us to prolong our lives is also trying to understand how to preserve, I guess, the relative youth of our bodies. So yeah, that's exactly that kind of research where we are now understanding more of, basically we can take control over the rate of aging, which would then allow us to basically slow down the process, which would then, if you take on early on, if there will be medications, I mean, currently aging is not defined as a disease, but the WHO actually declared just end of last year that aging is a condition that is treatable. And as soon, and there's a huge kind of push from scientists in the aging research to define aging as a disease that is treatable. And when we come to that medication will be, so then the FDA can come in to basically go into medication approval because then it's a disease we can treat. But, and then moving to that, it will be basically, and there are any NAD trials going on, and there's kind of some opinions going in the direction that NAD would then be something to take as a statin at an age, you know, 40, 50, when kind of the degeneration is kicking in more heavily to then work against that. Yes, Jerry. Yes. I think this is really a perverse way of thinking about things. Aging is not a disease. It may be useful in terms of getting government grants to define it as a disease, but if you actually think about aging as a disease, I think you have a real misconception of the nature of life. Aging, the aging of our bodies in the aging of our minds is a natural process, and the question is how we come to terms with it and how we shape our lives accordingly. So I can assure you that I have less mental capacity now than I did when I was Simone's age. And that, and my children have greater mental capacity now than I do. And that's fine. I have less active intelligence, less fluid intelligence, but I do have some more accumulated wisdom and knowledge. These things balance themselves out over time, but the notion that we should, that aging is a disease, either our mental aging or our physical aging, I think leads one really to misconceive the shape of one's own life and the shape transgenerationally. I mean, I see my grandchildren who are three and who are six months old and three years old, they have amazing mental capacity, the amount of stuff they're learning all the time. And it's a fantastic thing to see, but I appreciate that. I have gratitude for that. I have a certain awe for that in part because I'm not thinking all the time of Jerry, how much slower are you in terms of thinking than you were when you were 35? I would add to that though, that the pace of our understanding and the pace of technology is moving faster than evolution can keep up with. And so if we look at where evolution really is, it's back in the days where we would have children in a village maybe, and once we had our children, our role in society was to take care of our grandchildren maybe, as basically the middle generation went out and did the hunting and gathering. And in that sense, we didn't need a lot of the facilities that we need today. And evolutionarily, a lot of our capabilities start to shut down so that we require less energy and we start to wither away and make room for future generations. And I think there's a good argument that that was a product of evolution and we have moved past that. And in order for us to really allow evolution to catch up, we have to force the changes ourselves. And so I don't think any of these areas where we lose capability are inherent. And I can go back to NAD as an example, as one example where evolutionarily, we start to produce less and less of that. And interestingly enough, people with more NAD have a better ability to repair cells, for instance, to repair broken bones. It has to do with being sort of nearsighted and using reading glasses. And it's shown that increasing NAD can reverse some of these effects. And one last thought is interestingly enough, you can increase NAD through diet, fasting and caloric restriction and through exercise. And so supplements aren't really required, but supplements can also be a big benefit, the right ones, and we don't have those today. Jerry. Yeah, so I think that this idea that there's this greater and greater gap between our natural biological capabilities and the role of technology is in many ways is often sort of the opposite of the case. So I'm 65, I'm not as good as I was when I was 35 or 45 at remembering the names of books, right? And I'm an academic, so it's important for me to be able to cite the names of books. But there's this technological development called Google. If I can remember some of the words in the title or one of the words, one of the names of the authors, I put it in there and the technology compensates for my biological diminution. Yes, let's see. Yes, I see a question in the third row at the end, I think, second row. My question is, I'm from, my name is Shivram, I'm from Bangalore. I wanted to know what is the probability of figuring out a cure for aging in next 25 years? And if you want to do it, how much resources do you need? Like in the sense of money, like is it one billion dollars, 10 billion, one trillion? How much do you need and what is the probability of reaching there in the next 25 years? I think that's a very hard question to answer. And I would rather like to refer you actually to a newly founded Academy of Healthy Life and Longevity because there is so much, you can also use now Google to look for answers and you will find a lot that is just wrong, I'm sorry, because there's a huge interest in public in longevity and there's, of course, but there's also so much misconception and it's hard to differentiate between actually clear scientific evidence and just claims that have no foundation. And so we rely also on basically centers where we know when you go there and what you look up there is actually correct. So in that sense, I would rather refer you to some of the leading researchers in the aging science that is really related to genetic reprogramming, NAD trials that are ongoing and kind of all under genetic and biochemical processes where we're just at the beginning of understanding how we can influence aging to find the answers. And I would add that if we do use disease as a model for aging, then what we call aging is really just a clinical bucket that a lot of different symptoms are lumped into and it's really not one thing, it's many, many, many complex things. And so when we talk about a cure for aging, I think we'll start to check them off and we are already, that's why we're living longer and I don't think there's a sort of a panacea out there that's gonna allow everybody to live longer. I think that we'll continue to check them off and some findings and discoveries will be more beneficial than others. Jerry, you have, oh, I'm sorry. No, I just wanted to add to that. I mean, we are now at a state where we kind of identified some of the major hallmarks of aging, but the complexity of the interplay of these different hallmarks. So we have also, of course, a bit genetic changes on yourself because of your environment, but there are then intrinsic genetic changes and so on, so there's just a lot that still needs to be unlocked and to be seen. I just wanna say, if you meet somebody who can answer your question about how much it will cost to solve the problem of aging and how long it will take, hold on to your wallet. So I'm just seeing if we have one more, yes, I see one more question right there and this will be our last question. Thank you. So this needs to be a bit of a split in the panel I'm detecting between Jerry and you other guys and one of the things that seems to split is the idea of aging being a natural process, right? And I'm interested in the idea, it may be natural, but does that mean it's desirable? And it was natural in 1900 to die at 47, is that good? So I'm interested in whether that idea, and also it's similar, Jerry, you were talking about family it being the center of everything, it seemed to be a strong thing you were commenting on. There are other ways to derive value and other linkages, right? So there may be, when we age 150, maybe the linkages will be different and so I'm just interested on the opinion of the panel of that, you know. Any thoughts? Well, I just wanna say, your fundamental premise is correct that not everything that's natural is desirable. The question is whether there's something morally desirable in to some degree living one's life in keeping with certain natural processes or whether we want to really live unnatural lives. So why shouldn't we all be cyborgs, right? And there are of course people around to advocate this. And so I think there's some, I think you're right that not everything that's natural is desirable, but one can go too far the other way and I think the trick is to find some sort of middle ground. Just also what does it mean when we say it's natural? I think it deals also with this, we don't know yet why this is happening, but at the moment we understand and we get control and we can't get control of it, why would we not change? Because if the desire, and I would like to, maybe who doesn't wanna live at 250 if you would have a high quality of life, you would look younger or you would keep on looking young for a longer time and overall be still active and know basically good brain capacity or cognitive capacity who wouldn't wanna live until 150. I feel we even have the thought of afterlife because we don't wanna give up the idea of not living anymore or some have the idea of afterlife. I mean it's, so I just feel it's interesting that we're not, that there's so much opponent or that's not moral to think of if we can do it why shouldn't we live longer at good conditions? Well, I'm afraid we're gonna have to draw it closed and I think that's a great question to set our minds thinking. What I'm taking away from this is that we need to think about how we think about aging. Is it a disease? Is it a natural process that we need to embrace? What needs to happen in our world in terms of not just science but government policy in terms of business and all the other functions and institutions of our world to enable these healthy long lives? And then one question I'd have that I don't think we can answer tonight or today. Is what we're talking about going to be a rich world phenomenon. So with that, I'm gonna draw this to a close and thank you all and thank our panelists. Thank you.