Dr. Eric Topol

Yeah, no, we've seen some of that.

When we did this Welderly study, Welderly was our term for super agers, they had to be over 85 and never been sick, no medications.

And so we even saw some people, like you said, Katie, 99, two packs of cigarette a day still.

I mean, but what we learned when we did whole genome sequencing,

is that these people, they didn't have anything in their DNA that was different from the elderly, the people that had the typical disease pattern.

In addition, they didn't have in their family story.

So like, for example, Lee, the patient 98, her parents died when they were in their 50s and 60s, and her brothers died.

40 years earlier than her.

So the question is, why are these people in the elderly often the last person standing in their family?

And it's not mostly genes.

It turns out it could be luck, but that's probably a very small percent.

It's probably everything that points to the immune system.

You get to 85 plus years,

when you have a resilient, intact immune system.

But as it turns out, once we start getting into our late 50s and 60s, our immune system, in many of us, starts to really lose its protection and goes haywire and stimulates a lot of inflammation.

And that's when we get into trouble.

So you don't see that in the DNA.

You only can see that by doing specific immune system testing, which we don't do in the clinic yet.

No, I mean, it's a travesty because these are very experienced people, years of vaccine expertise, and who knows who's going to replace them.

And it was just unjustified, unnecessary.