Name: How to Slow Aging (and even reverse it)
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T18:22:19.000Z
Duration: 21 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Part of this video is sponsored by LastPass. More about LastPass at the end of the show.

This is a video about research into slowing the rate of aging

So, before I filmed this I wanted to know:

What do you guys generally think about such research?

where I found that the majority of people were supportive and thought there should be more of it

but there were some important concerns and I want to address those here

at the beginning. I mean the most significant concern was:

if we're looking to extend human lifespan,

sick years where we'll be in bed with Alzheimer's? Nobody wants that, and that was clear to me.

But the professor that I was interviewing for this video, professor David Sinclair, points out

that as you get older the risk of horrible diseases, things like diabetes and cancer,

and arthritis, all those sorts of things... it increases exponentially.

And so, if this research is successful the whole point of it will be to

I mean, if you really are tackling aging,

then you should also see that those age-related diseases do not set in so quickly.

So, the point of slowing aging and extending human lifespan

is to extend the healthy lifespan, also called the health span.

The other concerns I saw were that people were saying:

"Well, this could be used only for the wealthy and increase inequality"

or "It could increase the population of the Earth causing..."

"...more garbage, more CO2. Where are the resources to feed all these people?".

I think these are valid concerns, but they're not part of the scope of this video.

So if you want to discuss them in the comments, feel free, but the point of this video is to address:

can we slow aging in humans? Can we extend the lifespan and the health span?

And what does that look like? How do we do it?

Okay. So for this video I traveled up to the 'Bodega Marine Lab',

which is north of San Francisco and there I got to see some 'moon jellyfish'.

Now what's fascinating about these 'moon jellyfishes' is that some people consider them immortal.

So all these jellyfish have this complex life cycle

which is basically like a small sea anemone and then they'll go through a metamorphosis

and become a medusa. And the medusa stage is what we generally think of when we think about a jellyfish.

And in most of these species the polyps are generally able to asexually reproduce,

and they can regenerate if tissue is cut off of them or if they're damaged,

and they don't have any clear evidence of senescence, which is the term for biological aging.

So they appear to have some degree of immortality.

No one had reported their ability to do this until... I think this was 2015.

So do 'moon jellyfish' hold the key to slowing aging and extending our lifespan?

Before I got into making this video, I would have put this sort of research in the same category as

downloading your brain, your consciousness into a computer. Like, I can see how maybe that would work

but I don't think we're anywhere near that.

Because we don't even understand how the brain works or how memories are stored,

so that seems like serious science fiction, so

I would have put, say, extending the human lifespan to 120, 150, and beyond in the same category,

but after reading professor Sinclair's book and doing an interview with him,

I think it seems much more possible and in fact plausible

that we'll make some progress over controlling aging in our lifetimes.

Now, if you want to slow aging, the first question you need to answer is:

Why do we age in the first place? I mean, what really is aging?

I've made a video in the past about telomeres.

These are the end caps on your chromosomes. And every time a cell divides the telomere gets a bit shorter.

telomeres are kind of like the tips of your shoelaces and they prevent the chromosome from fraying.

But there are other signs in older bodies that you have old cells.

There are an accumulation of things, they're called senescent cells.

They're essentially these zombie-like cells that just go on living in your body and inflaming the cells around them.

There's poor intercellular communication,

there's mitochondrial dysfunction, those are the powerhouses of the cell.

There are these 8 or 9 different features of older cells and they are the hallmarks of aging.

But the question is: are they the cause of aging,

or are they kind of the result of a deeper root cause?

In the middle of the last century, the hypothesis was that

it was damage to our DNA, mutations to our DNA that happened over  the course of our lives

evidence since then has suggested that that is not really the case.

and you can clone it into a new organism.

And that organism appears to live about as long as non-cloned organisms of the same species.

Now, the first sheep, Dolly the sheep, had a short lifespan. She died early.

But cloned animals; you can now clone a monkey,

you can clone dogs, in fact Barbra Streisand, the actress, she cloned her dogs,

and they are expected to live a normal lifespan.

So in that way it seems like all the information is still there in the DNA.

So if we're not losing information in our DNA then what is the reason for aging?

Well, professor Sinclair suspects that it's a loss of information,

but not the information in our DNA, in our genome.

No, professor Sinclair suspects that the loss of information is in our epigenome.

Every cell in your body has the same DNA,

but, different cell types have different epigenomes.

They have different ways of packaging that DNA,

coiling up, you know, a lot of it so that it's not read,

and leaving some parts of the DNA spooled out,

so it's easier to transcribe and turn into proteins and run that cell.

turning on or turning off different parts of the DNA.

The way it does that is with proteins called 'histones'

that, essentially, the DNA is wrapped on,

So there's these chemical signaling markers which are placed on the DNA in certain positions.

So the idea is: when your body is first forming, the epigenome is what tells your cells what type of cell to be.

professor Sinclair's hypothesis is that we are losing information in the epigenome.

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How to Slow Aging (and even reverse it)

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