Venki Ramakrishnan
speaker
313 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 25 Apr
Venki Ramakrishnan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And that, I would have thought that was almost science fiction, but recently in the last few years, a number of papers have come out doing exactly this in mice. And showing that the symptoms of aging have improved in these mice. But of course, reprogramming cells raises the risk of cancer. It also raises the risk of how do you do this in a body in a holistic way?
Because our different organs age at different rates. And how do you ensure a kind of systemic recovery? rejuvenation, if you like. I think people don't like that word. Some people like it. Just to popularize it. So it's a challenging but hard problem. It's another way to maybe tackle some aspects of aging.
It's unlikely to, although that also has a real scientific basis. And many decades ago, people actually connected a young mouse with an old mouse.
By connecting their blood systems together. And some decades ago, people found that actually the old mouse benefited from the young blood And the young mouse actually deteriorated as a result of the old blood. And so this was an amazing finding and, of course, raised all sorts of questions like what's going on in blood and what are the factors in blood.
Maybe there are factors that prevent damage or factors that cause damage in old blood or maybe activate stem cells in young blood. There could be a number of scenarios. And so there's a huge field that's looking for these factors and trying to identify what is different about young and old blood. And of course, of the many differences, not all of them will be relevant.
So they have to figure out which factors are actually relevant to aging. And then they have to find out how they work. And then they have to figure out if they could actually use it in some therapeutic way. But the amazing thing is as soon as this... these findings were published by Randall and others at Stanford, they started getting all sorts of weird phone calls from creepy people.
And there were all these companies that sprang up which would collect information blood donation, well, they would buy blood from young donors and then sell them at presumably at a huge markup to, you know, rich old people who wanted a transfusion. And there's no evidence that any of this actually worked in humans, you know, and certainly not over the long term. So that's how it is.
And that's a... I have to say that's characteristic of the aging field. Scientists will make a completely bona fide discovery. in animals, the original scientists often, but not always, okay? I should say there are a number of scientists who are also, you know, have a kind of agenda. But by and large, scientists will be somewhat cautious and want to proceed rigorously.
But then outside parties will jump on it and then try to commercialize it or hype it up. or use some sort of supplement that they think will activate this phenomenon. So there's a huge amount of hype in the field. And I've tried to kind of try to separate the rigorous science and the biology from the hype.
Because even knowing the rigorous biology, there are lots of things we can do that will help us age more healthily. So it's not as if You know, there's nothing we can do, and we have to wait around for this industry to come up with something. There are things we can do now, and then potentially there may be more powerful things later.
Yes, that's very perceptive. So that was a question people asked that maybe the young mouse was actually acting like a dialysis machine, for example, cleaning out the old blood because its organs and kidneys were better and so on. But what people did was then they took actual young blood from the young mouse without connection. and gave it to an old mouse and did vice versa.
And there, it's interesting, they found that the old blood actually was more deleterious to the young mouse than the young blood was beneficial to the old mouse. And that perhaps why these transfusions
aren't quite having as big an effect as you as as you might have hoped you know brian johnson the tech billionaire who spends i i guess i'm told he spends like two million dollars a year on various longevity treatments and diagnostics And clearly, he has an agenda. He says he thinks of himself as an experimental animal out at the forefront.
And he wants to try all the stuff and be an aging pioneer, if you like. Anyway, he did this intergenerational transfer where he took blood from his son, gave it to himself, and then he gave blood to his father. So it's a sort of three-generation. I joke he was keeping it all in the family. Anyway, but after a while, he was also measuring all these various markers of aging.
And I think he came to the conclusion it wasn't having much of an effect, and I think he stopped.
I think, well, there are a number of possibilities. I think to me, cellular reprogramming is perhaps, if it pays off, one of the most powerful ways of doing it. But I will tell you, you could reprogram many tissues perhaps, but reprogramming the brain is going to be a real challenge because the brain doesn't naturally regenerate.
There's only a very small amount of new neurons being synthesized compared to things like skin or blood or even liver. And of course, when neurons decay, or become dysfunctional, how you would reprogram them or even replace them, it's not at all clear. And you would have to do this in a way that, you know,
maintains the connections between neurons and their states, because that's after all what determines the workings of a brain. And I think that is going to be a huge challenge. And there is this worry that we're all getting older, we're staying healthy. Eventually, if it means that we're going to come down with dementia, And, you know, the incidence of dementia is growing tremendously.
It's already the largest killer of an old age in the UK. You know, it surpassed other causes. That could be a ticking time bomb. And so I'm optimistic that we'll be able to improve health in many ways in old age. I'm not so optimistic about this, you know, eventual thing of extending life dramatically. I think that's going to be much harder than people think.
Well, cellular reprogramming is, you know, I mentioned how you start with a fertilized egg and it slowly develops. And as it develops, the cells become more and more differentiated into different types. And And eventually you still have stem cells, but then those stem cells are differentiating into the final tissue. Those final tissues can only divide a certain number of times and then they die.
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