Ian Sample

speaker

2,123 appearances 29 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 4d ago

Ian Sample’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Science Weekly · Can a world-first gene therapy reverse ageing? · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

That's exactly right. matched

And so the hope with cellular rejuvenation is that if you can clear those markers, that epigenome, if you can clear it to some extent, and if you can actually rewind the clock back on these cells again to some extent, and what you're doing then is you're essentially taking an old cell matched

and you're rewinding it back in time. matched

You're rewinding it back to an earlier stage of its development when it is operating as a younger cell, okay? matched

And so that is an extraordinary thing to try and do. matched

The really key work in this was done pretty much 20 years ago to the year, actually, by a scientist called Shinya Yamanaka. matched

And he was really interested in why is it that stem cells in early embryos are so versatile? matched

What I mean by versatile is those cells, those embryonic stem cells can grow into pretty much every cell in your body. matched

Why is that? matched

But I spoke to a guy called Paul Knopfler about this. matched

He's a professor of cell biology and human anatomy at UC Davis, University of California, Davis. matched

He's in the School of Medicine there. matched

So I'm going to spell this out a bit more because I think this is really cool. matched

If you think about when your mum's egg was fertilised by your dad's sperm, and actually having said that, maybe you really don't want to think about that. matched

Bear with me. matched

Let's just move on quickly to a fertilised egg, a freshly fertilised egg. matched

What does it have to do? matched

That fertilized egg has to produce all of the cells in your body. matched

So you have to get rid of the epigenetic markers or nearly all of the epigenetic markers on the sperm and on the egg to enable that fertilized egg to have this flexibility, okay? matched

And you also want to get rid of nearly all of the epigenetic markers that have just built up over your parents' lifetimes, right? matched

Showing 1181–1200 of 2,123 · page 60 of 107