June 16, 2026 • 55 mins
Mangesh hops a train to Boston, where he tries on a special suit that turns him into an 80-year-old, discovers the connection between elderly worms and high-end longevity supplements, and meets a scientist who’s growing brains in petri dishes (when she’s not throwing dance parties for mice). Plus: What really happened to Ted Williams’ frozen head?
- Learn more about AGNES and Joe Coughlin’s work at the MIT AgeLab
- Learn more about William Mair’s work with the Harvard Healthy Aging Initiative
- Read Lenny Guarante’s research on SIR2 and the mechanisms of aging
- Watch Li-Huei Tsai’s TED Talk about treating Alzheimer’s with light and sound, and learn more about the MIT Aging Brain Initiative
Special thanks to Azadi Records and Bliss Samsa for their beautiful tracks, and Botany for the score.
Episode collage art by Vahini Shori.
CORRECTION FOR THIS WEEK: Lenny was contacted by Sequoia, and a then-Sequoia partner is the co-founder and CEO of Elysium, but Sequoia is not an Elysium investor. The company is backed by other venture capital firms.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Will Pearson, Mango's co host on Part Time Genius.
Here with a quick warning before you listen to the episode.
Despite Mango's grandmother's greatest wish, he is one hundred percent
not a doctor and nothing in this episode should count
as medical advice. Also, as I mentioned being the co
host of Part Time Genius, I'm a little insult that
I wasn't asked to be this episode's quiz master, but
(00:31):
I'm sure with time I'll get over that. With that said, enjoy,
the people are good.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
I could I could have been the lawyer.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
The choice.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Is the scene tell the phone, stalk, cut and.
Speaker 5 (01:16):
Something.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
Oh you wonderful animals, thank you so much for coming back.
We are just about to start our Live Forever trivia show,
So everyone get out your puzzles and papers and let's begin.
Mary go ahead and kick us off.
Speaker 5 (01:38):
Question one. The topic is jellyfish. If you know about jellyfish,
this will be easy. What type of jellyfish can revert
to a baby polyp stage and live its life over
again into infinity.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
It's the immortal jellyfish, and the truth is nobody knows
why it has that superpower. It is just a sack
of goog less than a quarter engine diameter, and it
may hold the secret to eternal life. Next question, please.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
What legendary American comedy troupe saying, if you're too old
for dancing, get yourself a monkey land?
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Answer the Marx Brothers. Back in the nineteen twenties, a
French surgeon named Serge Bornoff began implanting slices of monkey
testicles onto human testicles, which he called rejuvenating by grafting
pipes spread fast. B. Cummings wrote Versus about it, and
so did Irving Berlin.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
Question three, This one's tricky. What sports hero turned mongesh
off of longevity? Possibly forever?
Speaker 4 (02:37):
I don't know why anyone would know this, but bonus
points if you answered Ted Williams. Because it is Red
Sox legend. Ted Williams sell me something good, and Fenway Park,
(02:57):
the home of the Red Sox, is actually where I'm
headed right now. I'm in a cab because I want
to visit the giant bronze statue of Ted Williams aka
the Splendid Splinter Boston legend. Though I guess my Cabby
could use a reminder. Is a baseball player?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
We have done enough?
Speaker 4 (03:20):
There are only two things most people know about Ted Williams. First,
he had a season high batting average of four O six,
a Red Sox record that still hasn't been broken. I'm
not a baseball guy, and even I know that's bananas.
(03:41):
The second thing people know about Ted Williams, he's a punchline.
Speaker 6 (03:45):
You might want to be cremated or be frozen like
Ted Williams.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Head because Ted Williams had his body frozen after he
died by a company who holds dead bodies and stasis
in case they can someday be reanimated. It's the ultimate
plan B for longevity. Heads. The company Alcore, actually launched
(04:11):
in the nineteen seventies with the idea of freezing people
after death as this insurance policy for the future in
the off chance science could get to a place where
being dead and frozen was a reversible condition. And to me,
cryonics has always seen like a bet made by science
fiction fans who didn't get science. But also it would
(04:32):
be one thing if they had just frozen Ted's body.
What Alcore did was way worse. According to a Sports
Illustrated investigation, Ted was supposed to be preserved in full
but when his corpse arrived, an eager beaver at Alcore
started severing his head, but by the time the error
(04:52):
was discovered, a technician was already mid slice. They debated
what to do, leave him like a human pets dispenser,
or finish the job. So they finished the job in
Froze's head and body in separate tanks. Not a great start. Then,
in two thousand and three, a Cryo whistleblower came forward
(05:13):
accusing the company of various atrocities, including mishandling Ted's remains,
and Larry Johnson wasn't just some employee blabbing to CBS.
He was a former paramedic who had actually been Alcore COO.
Johnson said it all started when they wanted to move
Ted's frozen head to another container.
Speaker 7 (05:31):
Obviously, the head round is not going to set upright,
so they got a tuna fish can. They set the
head on top of the can and then filled the
vessel with liquid nitrogen. Well, obviously, after two or three
days of being in that state, when they pull you out,
that can is stuck to the top of the head.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Obviously, but even if you're a cryonics buff, what happened
to Ted Williams was particularly off putting.
Speaker 7 (05:56):
A technician grabbed a ranch a monkey ranch, took a
swing at can, missed it missed the can, hit the head,
draw back again. A second swing hit the can, send
a fine across the room.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
The company denied the allegations immediately, but the damage was done.
Ted Williams became a laughing stock. And my excuse to
keep disbelieving. And I'm not alone.
Speaker 8 (06:25):
Just bury it.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
Who wants to come back to this mess with the
fucking mess Just die already. Ted's not the only reason
I'm in Boston, though. This place is the heart of
some of the most cutting edge longevity science. That sexy
supplement NAD first got its start here. It's home to
huge leafs and gene editing, and human trials are going
(06:49):
on here that could reversely coma. There are over a
thousand biotech startups between Boston and Cambridge. And if there's
one thing a life in trivia has taught me, it's
that you gotta check the facts. So I'm here to
see for myself. From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts, I am
(07:10):
Monga's Tatiicular. This is Skyline Drive How to Live Forever,
(07:41):
Chapter one, Suiting.
Speaker 5 (07:43):
Up Before biotech, what were people in Cambridge busy making candy?
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Cambridge used to be the center of American candy manufacturer.
Main Street was dubbed Confectioner's Row and just a few
of the products invented here include Necho Wafers, Charleston Chew's,
Sugar Daddy's and Junior Min's. I wish I was here
on a candy taste test mission, but I'm almost as
(08:17):
excited about what I am here to do to get
turned into an eighty year old.
Speaker 9 (08:26):
So bungee is going from the waist to behind your
hamstring to your ankle, and this is again like reducing
that range of motion.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
And the next thing we get at is some stiffness
in the joints.
Speaker 9 (08:37):
So we have braces that go on your elbows that
will do first, we'll do your knees, and then also
a neck brace.
Speaker 10 (08:43):
So you'll feel a little bit restricted without this.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
I've come to the mit Age Lab because I'd heard
that doctor Joe Coughlin and his team have invented a
so called aging suit. In my head, I was picturing
some futuristic spacesuit where you dial up the gear on
the age you want to be. But it turns out
it's more like a bag full of vans and weights
that you wear under a bulky jumpsuit. The weights weren't enough.
Speaker 11 (09:10):
Next we have these weighted gloves, so again we're thinking
about joint stiffness, maybe some arthritis in the hands.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
Joe and his team call it AGNES, an acronym for
age gain now empathy system, and the idea started from
this is a thing play. Joe and his team. We're
trying to get a better understanding of how the aging
body works. So after some pizza and discussion, they all
put on myriad restrictive vans and stood around a mat.
Speaker 8 (09:40):
To play twister. And so we had my students, my
staff with engineers.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
Falling over one another on red, yellow, green, and blue dots.
Was transformative. The team understood on a bizarre first and basis,
how the elderly move. And since then they've helped create
better design for seniors, including how to get in and
out of a new car. And those few bands got
upgraded to become the bag of empathy that is AGNES.
(10:10):
And now it's my turn to play. In ten minutes
of putting on hand weights and ankle weights and arm
weights and standing in modified crocs on uneven foam blocks
and having bungies and belts tied from my limbs to
a helmet. I went from forty seven to well, Agnes.
Speaker 9 (10:29):
You're almost there.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
So what I age am? I right now?
Speaker 5 (10:37):
This is not necessarily the healthiest older adult. Like we're
getting at a couple of unmanaged chronic conditions.
Speaker 9 (10:43):
You might think late seventies, early eighties.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
But again, yeah, really varies from person to person.
Speaker 12 (10:49):
Drop it.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
I put on some glasses that blur my sight considerably.
I have no peripheral vision, and my body feels bound up.
But I set forth to conquer the world, or at
least this floor. I'm not consciously like trying to walk slower.
Speaker 6 (11:08):
Just trying to, you know, kind of balance.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
If the process of growing older and feeling your body
deteriorate is like boiling a frog, a gradual change that
slips past awareness, then putting on Agnes is the feeling
of diving into that sculding pot and understanding instantly what
hot is. That's actually the purpose of the Age Lab.
They're warmly decorated rooms set up as test living rooms
(11:34):
and kitchens. There's even a cherry red Volkswagon bug name
Miss Daisy, which feels like a less fun version of
Mario Kart, where you're trying to drive on ice and
snow with the reflexes of an old person. It's all
a built to help us understand how the elderly navigate
this world and improving quality of life for everyone. Joe
(11:55):
tells me.
Speaker 8 (11:56):
You know, whether or not we can get mice to
live two hundred years and there where we get to
live one hundred and fifty, that's great. That's folks down
the street here that are doing that.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Joe's saying, he isn't one of the scientists and wet
labs at MIT and Harvard. He's on a different mission.
Speaker 8 (12:11):
I want to be able to make sure that you're
happy with those hundred years that you have already.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
Honestly, that's what I want too, not necessarily living longer,
but living better in the years I do have. As
Joe puts it, we already have thirty to forty years
of longevity, greater than we did in nineteen hundred.
Speaker 8 (12:29):
The fastest growing part of the population is eighty five plus.
Older age is the greatest achievement of humankind, and yet
we still look at it as a problem. I'm hoping
that increasingly people are starting to see this as an
opportunity rather than a problem to be solved.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
I wander around in the suit. It is a strange feeling,
not just the weight of it and slowing down to
this degree, but also I have such little awareness. As
I move around the floor, I realize I'm treating it
like a workout class. My minders are giving me simple
challenges and I am panting along, just trying to keep form.
(13:11):
That idea of wearing this for a day is just crazy.
Speaker 9 (13:15):
I wouldn't recommend that. Yeah, it's a little bit different
than the body you're used to.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
Yeah, I feel like Batman, not the superhero part of Batman,
just the fact that he can't turn his head without
turning his whole body. Everything about this suit is labored.
Speaker 9 (13:32):
Yeah, I noticed you're like looking at the ground, maybe
taking shorter strides.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
That this isn't how I normally walk. My minder send
me to the coffee machine. What are those fancy machines
with lots of pictures of options on a screen. I mean,
I guess that the top left one was just a
regular coffee, but I really couldn't read it. Yeah, everything
is a series of educated guesses. Here, I assume black
(13:59):
coffee is up the top left, but I can barely
see anything, so I'll drink whatever it serves me. But honestly,
choosing the coffee isn't even the hard part. It's all
the mechanics pulling the cup out of the sleeve, trying
to balance while sitting on a stool that you reached
back to kind of ease your way into the chair. Yeah,
(14:20):
I both want to take the coffee, and I'm afraid
at some point I'm gonna split. I have never thought
about how hard it is to sit on a stool before.
But you have to have some awareness of where the
stool is behind you. You have to know how to
lower yourself at the right speed. It is hard to
do with a cup of coffee in your hand. So
(14:41):
in the end, I placed the coffee on the table
and then use my hands as reference points, one on
the table, one on the stool to lower myself gently,
and I stick the landing. But there is no standing
ovation for what feels like a very gymnastic feet.
Speaker 12 (15:02):
Wow, shouldn't be winded from taking a lot at an office.
Speaker 4 (15:09):
And finally, the Peace Day Resistance take the stairs down
and take Agnes to the streets. My God, the stairs.
(15:30):
That first step is a leap of faith. I'm so
conscious of where that first stairs, hoping that I can
land it square on these foam padded shoes, and gripping
the banister poorly with both my arthritis induced hands until
my foot touches down. It feels like forever. I slowly
(15:54):
get more confident, but never really enough to not be
clutching the handrail for dear life. When we finally get
downstairs and out the door, I am so grateful for
the cold December air because I'm drenched in sweat. I'm
trying to regain balance as we slowly do a loop
around the building, But it turns out balance isn't the
(16:16):
only thing I lost, my sense of It is funny
that my first I don't know how long have I
been wearing this, Like like ten minutes?
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Much longer?
Speaker 5 (16:27):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Really a little past eleven?
Speaker 4 (16:30):
Oh wow, I've been wearing the suit for nearly an hour,
and I'd lost track of time.
Speaker 9 (16:36):
Sometimes we have folks put the suit on and they're
thinking about someone in particular in their life, like a
family member or someone they work with, and feeling like, wow,
I can kind of understand a little bit of what
they might be experiencing. So I'm wondering, like, if this
is making you think of anybody?
Speaker 5 (16:54):
You know?
Speaker 4 (16:58):
I feel like a jerk when I think about it,
about how impatient I can be with people moving slowly
on New York sidewalks, or even sometimes with my mom
not understanding why she's anxious about little things, when I
can see now that even just sitting or tackling things
around the house is so much harder than I ever imagined.
(17:21):
Wearing agnes, immediately you understand just how inadequate this world is,
how it's not designed for people to age or have
different abilities. Joe tells me that the crosswalk sign and
countdowns and cities are based on the time that a
college sophomore should be able to cross the street. Think
about how many people that leaves out.
Speaker 8 (17:46):
We need to think about how do we make environments,
whether it's our homes, our cars or streets, our stores,
our hospitals, age ready. So I'm trying to think about
how to make our kitchen age ready. If we remodel
the bathroom. I have to tell you, the doorjam that
we have is too narrow. And God forbid that either
I or my wife have to use a walk or
a wheelchair. We're not going to be able to get
in there, can't use the bathroom. Congratulations, welcome to senior housing.
(18:10):
So it's kind of given me a wake up call.
That's perhaps driving my spouse nuddy, but it's also I
like where I live. I want to be able to
build it to stay where I live.
Speaker 4 (18:49):
Chapter two, The Hallmarks of Agent. We keep talking about it,
but what even is it? We know what it looks like.
Your hair grows gray, your skin SAgs, and you add
candles to the cake, But what is actually happening? I
(19:11):
asked our Signs producer Mark Allen, and he said, simply,
everything wears out for me. The best way to understand
that is to do my dad's favorite activity, lie back,
preferably in a recliner, and listen to music. My dad
(19:38):
didn't care about fancy clothes or name brands, but he
was a total audiophile. When he passed, he left me
his vintage Macintosh receiver and his Altech Lancing Valencia speakers,
the first things he saved money to buy in America,
(20:00):
and as an album peaks out from its packaging, it's vulnerable.
Purists cleaned the albums like a ritual before and after
playing them. They know how dust and dirt and the
oil seeping from our fingertips slowly affect our record's play.
They keep their collections out of sunlight and away from radiators,
and also too much moisture and too little moisture. And
(20:22):
even with all that care, the integrity of a record
will eventually warp or scratch or break down, lasting just
a human lifetime for rarely more. In twenty thirteen, four
longevity scientists published a landmark paper that gave us an
answer to that question, what is aging that we're still
(20:43):
using and refining today. They identified what drives aging, both
at the cellular and molecular levels, and they call these
drivers the hallmarks of aging. At first they named nine hallmarks.
Today scientists say there are twelve. By the time this
comes out, there may be more. What's stunning is that
(21:03):
we start the aging process in the womb, and over time,
no matter how healthy you try to be, more and
more goes wrong. That's what the hallmarks are trying to track.
There's telemere attrition, where the tiny caps at the ends
of your chromosomes begin to phrase so much that your
cells stop dividing, and suddenly heart disease and blood clotting
and liver disease enter the picture. Then there's loss of proteostasis,
(21:28):
the quality control. When you're young, every misfolded protein gets
cut like bad takes in the studio. But over time
the system looted at fear, glicklitches and warp notes stack
up until the whole mix gets muddy and boom, you've
got Alzheimer's. And that's just too.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
There's ten more gnomic instability, epigenetic alteration, chronic inflammation, contis function,
the able work out a faiety in cell exhaustion, all
get interested work, mutation, can cellular it's the essence. Can
you hear this? What's happening? It's happening in your body too.
There are so many ways your body starts to go wrong,
and the hope is the more scientists understand, the more
(22:07):
they'll be able to counter the deterioration.
Speaker 12 (22:10):
But until then we'll just have to deal with the
natural wear and tear of living, accepting the quiet ways
our bodies break down until the music stops.
Speaker 5 (22:28):
What longevity influencer is sixty feet long and weighs one
hundred tons.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
Answer the bowhead whale. In two thousand and seven, a
group of Native Alaskan whalers found a harpoon tip in
the neck of a bowhead whale dated back to the
Victorian era, which means that whale lived over two hundred
years two hundred eleven actually Chapter three Men in Black.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Yes, yes, shee dope.
Speaker 9 (23:03):
Maybe he's fit a skin.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
He had a boy west Night hid away?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yes, yes, she dope. Maybe he's been of skin.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
He hit a boy to west Knight getaway.
Speaker 9 (23:18):
Yes, yes, she dope.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
So when you get tenure, you no longer have to
worry about not getting tenure. Okay, So it's a real
liberating situation. So I thought, wow, what would be good
to work on?
Speaker 12 (23:31):
Now?
Speaker 4 (23:34):
That's doctor Lenny Guarantee, a professor at MIT and a
pioneer of longevity science. He laid the foundation for several
hallmarks of aging, and also he sells longevity supplements. Lenny
is in his seventies. He's fit, bald. He tells people
he's biologically six years younger than he should be. Also,
(23:54):
he's kind of a character. He thinks white T shirts
are dorky. So he only wears black. He'll tell you
all the reasons. Beethoven's seventh Symphony is superior to the fifth.
So he's got takes. And just like everyone who got
into studying aging before it was fashionable, he was considered fringe.
Speaker 6 (24:17):
I was walking down the hallway one day and my
department chairman walked by and he said, what's new? And
I said, I think I'm going to shift my lamp
to working on aging, and he doesn't double take.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
What But after playing with yeast, yes, yeast, he discovered
what seemed like a real breakthrough. They found a protein
called sir tou that played a key role in yeast longevity.
But don't get too excited about sir too because that's
not what the story is about. Instead, we're focusing on
an ingredient sur too uses to affect longevity, a little
(24:56):
molecule called NAD. That's the real star here.
Speaker 6 (25:02):
And NAD been known for over one hundred years. It's
involved in metabolism and cells. It's involved in mitochondrial function.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
Eventually, Lenny shows that by boosting the NAD levels, he
can lengthen the lifespan of not just yeast.
Speaker 6 (25:18):
I said, jeez, we just did a simple intervention in
worms and made them live longer. And this chap he says,
just what the world needs, long lived worms.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
But over the next ten years he starts moving up
the food.
Speaker 6 (25:32):
Chain, first in worms and then in mice. And at
that point I was really interested in turning attention to humans.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Yeast definitely, worms, sure, mice maybe, but humans. That's a
kind of expensive that takes a higher level of backing.
Speaker 6 (25:52):
And I got a cold call from someone from the
business world. That's a company all Sequoia.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
And this is where we get into the supplements. The
Sequoia he's talking about is Sequoia Capital, the famed VC
firm that backed such little known companies as Apple and Google.
Now they're backing Lenny's use for NAD which he's figured
out how to harness effectively for anti aging.
Speaker 6 (26:20):
So that was a product that was launched and the
company which is called Elysium Health.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
But money really changes what you can do and what
you have to do. Now Lenny could finally run tests
on humans and he figured out a way to restore
NAD levels in the sixty plus set. But Lenny also
had to make money for Sequoia. It's not like walking
around Mit telling your department chair you're going to make
worms live longer. So Elysium goes to market and it
(26:52):
feels lux like the eight hundred dollars a year baby
Apple and Goop never had.
Speaker 6 (26:58):
From the beginning, we've hadustomer feedback, and the most common
feedback is that their fingernails grow faster. And people report
a lot of things that are not so verifiable, like
they feel better, they have more energy, But the fingernails,
when you see it, you have to believe it. It's
(27:20):
right there in front of you.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
That's the frustrating thing about longevity science. You won't actually
be able to tell if you've lengthened the users' lifesvens
until you wait out their expected lifetimes. And also, people
are really interested in anything that might do something which
can lead to a certain kind of flooded market.
Speaker 6 (27:40):
Part of the reason when I got into aging that
my department had was less than enthused is because the
field had been riven with snake oil salesmen up to
that point. That's the history of the aging field. I
guess I'm responsible for the craze that we're now seeing,
(28:03):
which still seems to be an exponential phase of growth.
Speaker 4 (28:07):
So here we are in the supplement's gold rush. Where
As Lenny says, sometimes people don't get it quite right.
It can mean taking something that has no real effect,
but it dashes your hopes and waste your money. It
could be a small inconvenience like a tummy ache, or
could give you salmonella through a green powder that was
eventually recalled where it could kill you, which is what
(28:31):
happened with a cholesterol supplement that led to eighty debts.
Those both happened in the last two years. And I
don't have the energy or intel to read up on
what advisory board each little bottle on the shelf has,
so I guess I'm back to judging by the label.
Speaker 10 (28:58):
Hey quiz guy, you take an huh skeptic.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
Uh not nad. Doctor Primus actually didn't mention it in
his Mountain of advice. But since you asked per cuban
C three complex MEGAD three and MK seven fullic acid
B twelve, MEGAZOQ ten ubiquinol immune devents bills which have
zinc and elderberry fish oil Omega three.
Speaker 5 (29:21):
Stop geez.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
Oh, And there's a green powder I mix into a
glass of water and drink most mornings.
Speaker 12 (29:30):
And how do you feel?
Speaker 4 (29:31):
Pretty much the same, But I feel like I'm doing something.
Chapter four, A warm welcome.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
You have a thousand identical worms, You give them the
same environment, everything's the same. You feed them the same food.
One and die in ten days.
Speaker 6 (30:00):
Of old age.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
One dies in twenty days in old age. That's not luck,
that's not random. There's something and we can understand that.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
That's doctor William Maher, the director of Harvard's Healthy Aging Initiative.
When I meet him in his office, I can't get
over how young he looks. He's tall, lean, dress smartly
and skinny jeans and cool kicks. But he's a tenured
professor running his own research lab at the most prestigious
public health school in the country, so he has a
(30:29):
lot going on. But the thing he really wants to
talk to me about is worms, specifically a minuscule worm
about the size of a comma called sea elegance. Mayor
is studying the way the body and brain sense and
react to nutrients, like how we're affected by intermittent fasting.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
The first studies where we've already taken nematoid worms that
always live two weeks and changed one gene and now
they lived sort of like five weeks. It's just revolutionary.
At the time, this kind of went against all theory
of evolutionary biology. You could do one thing and change
the whole way an animal interacted with time.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
But the reason worms like these are such special test subjects,
he tells me, is that they only have about three
hundred neurons, and that makes them, like tiny computers, really
easy to genetically reprogram.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
There's a bit of a debate in the field where
it's three hundred or three hundred and two. This is
how nerdy we are, we're reaching it. But we can
take the energy sensor, which senses low energy and is
turned on when you don't eat, and make that constituably on.
And now even if it eats a lot of food,
it doesn't realize it's having a lot of food, and
it lives a long time. It has the life span
of a diet restricted animal. And we could even show
(31:37):
we can map that down to two neurons in the
brain and we could flip it on and off and
get back this longevity. So this is huge interaction.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
But Mayer has room in his heart for more than
one kind of worm. He also loves to work with
the Lowa loa. The lower loa is basically the same
round worm as the cele again, but they have very
different lifespans. And when I ask him why so.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Right, the elegants live in the soil corny around. They
have a really dangerous life. They probably live two days
in the wild, So there's no evolutionary reason. There's no
adaptive reason for those animals to evolve the capacity to
maintain their bodies for eighteen years because they're only going
to see three days. So natural selection is just a
math problem. Everything is governed to make the animal live fast,
(32:19):
die young. Lower low is a parasite, so it lives
inside bodies of us. Actually a super protected environment.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
These lower loas are extremely canceted. Think gated living for worms.
Just in this case, the human body is the worm's
McMansion because lower loas live under our skin.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
Now, suddenly mutations of natural selection which make the animal
live longer have an advantage.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Right.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
That's why you tend to see long live animals on
islands where there's low predation, in places where it's low stressed.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
I love that round worms have found the blue zones, right,
bodies and then doctor Mara goes somewhere I wasn't expecting.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
In the wild. We have good examples of population of
animals that split and one stays on that say, the mainland,
and one goes onto an island. So somedly you separate
them into a hazardous environment and a safe one. When
that happens, the one in the safe environment, they become
longer lived because it's now worth it. And so will
this happen to us? No idea, but you know, intellectually, maybe.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
Will it happen to us? Will we turn into two species?
It is a thing I can't stop thinking about.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
According to the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University,
which state has the highest proportion of one hundred plus
year olds?
Speaker 4 (33:36):
Answer? Hawaii. It's got to be in beaches.
Speaker 5 (33:40):
Right of the following countries which rates lowest for life
expectancy Cypress, Slovenia, Lebanon, Nicaragua, or the United States.
Speaker 4 (33:51):
It's the United States. According to the World Health Organization,
Cypress ranks sixteenth worldwide, Slovenia twenty six fifth, Nicaragua fortieth,
and the USA forty first. Experts say key factors in
America's ranking are income, inequality, social isolation, and lack of
access to healthcare. While Mayor is working on what helps
(34:16):
humans live longer, he also knows that's only one piece
of the longevity puzzle.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
The other piece of my job is that, you know,
why is it that if you're born in Dorchester your
body age is faster potentially than it would if you're
born in Cambridge.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
Recent studies show that there's roughly two decades separating the
life expectancy in Cambridge and the nearby Boston neighborhood of Dorchester.
The median family income in Cambridge is one hundred and
seventy five thousand dollars, and average life expectancy is ninety two.
In Dorchester, a community that has some of the highest
poverty rates in the state, average lifespan is much much lower,
(34:52):
around seventy two. Joe Coughlin told me, we humans have
twenty plus years of life that we can't joy yet,
but people in communities like Dorchester don't even have those
twenty years. And it's not a mystery why.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
And I think that you know, healthy aging is a
human right. If wealth is the biggest driver of how
well you live and how long you live, it's not
just luck. It's not just the genetics of the wealthy.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
Look. Will Mahor is in the longevity space. He knows
that general excitement in the field is good for business.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Twenty years ago, no one was talking about this, and
now everybody's talking about it, and that is super exciting.
Speaker 4 (35:36):
Maybe dangerous, too dangerous, perhaps because as the government has
continued to slash NIH funding and grants for institutions, Mayor
worries that we have taken public health for granted. I'm
worried about that too. It's like we as a people
don't realize that public health is the reason that we
have those twenty extra years, or why infant mortality rates
(35:59):
have changed so drastically in the US. In nineteen hundred,
one in ten babies used to die before hitting age one.
Now that's one in two hundred. Mayor started his Center
for Healthy Aging specifically to do the type of interdisciplinary
research that will bring aid to the most possible people.
But in the excitement over extreme longevity by the rich
(36:23):
and for the rich, He's worried we're hastening the division
of our species.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
We have such differences across different populations. Even if you
look at the gains we had in the twentieth century
in America. It was like we added thirty years of
life expectancy if you look at the lowest earners, and
they didn't get those gains at all.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
Hearing Mayor talk about these two worms reminds me of
the story that my family in India told me about
Brian Johnson, and it's kind of the story of one
set of worms visiting another. So Johnson flies on this
private jet to Bombay for the sole purpose of being
interviewed by this superstar podcaster, Nick hil Kamat one minute,
(37:01):
he's talking about turning his home into a blue zone,
and then he asks, is it okay to put a
mask on? Yeah? Yeah, okay?
Speaker 13 (37:08):
Is that okay?
Speaker 12 (37:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (37:10):
Yeah, A little awkward, right, and comments team is really confused.
They're indoors. Do you feel better? I mean, when you're
feeling something, this is more precautionary. I mean I feel it.
It burns my lungs, it burns my throat, and then
I also just know, like these level of glutens, it
(37:31):
really does wreak havoc on the body. He stays around
for a while with the mask on, but then he
abruptly ends the interview and hops. On a flight home,
Ryan had to leave. Air quality in Bombay is not
up to I'm actually surprised that the air quality affected.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Him that much.
Speaker 4 (37:52):
That laugh. That's kind of what my family felt. They
saw it as performative and silly, like, sure, he might
to one hundred and fifty, but what's the point if
you can only live like some hothouse flower in a tiny,
perfect terrarium. Chapter five Brains and Dishes. When we were downstairs,
(38:42):
there's a video of a mouse. It felt like he
was at a dance party or something.
Speaker 13 (38:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is you know, amazing.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
MIT's Pick, our Institute for Learning Memory. It's impressive the
way most buildings are impressive. It's got a giant white
stair case and our portraits on the wall. But the
thing I couldn't stop staring at was a video on
loop of white mice running around a little cubicle looking
like they're three hours in to the world's tiniest rave.
(39:15):
I'm here at the lab to visit with doctor Leeway's
PSI The director of the PSI Lab, which is at
the absolute cutting edge of neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's research, Doctor
Sie is soft spoken, elegant. Instead of wearing a lab coat,
she's got a shawl around her shoulders. But also she
is intimidating. Still, I kind of got to ask her,
(39:40):
why is she throwing dance parties for mice.
Speaker 13 (39:43):
We showed that initially in Alzheimer's, even in a very
young age, the power of the gamma wave is a
compromised Already.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
Gamma waves are brain frequencies that show up in higher
order work, like when your brain is concentrating intensely or
solving problem or retrieving informing memories. But as they looked
at patients with Alzheimer's, they noticed that those gamma waves
were dysregulated.
Speaker 13 (40:09):
So we did a very simple experiment, what if we
can boost this gamma waves?
Speaker 4 (40:14):
In twenty sixteen, sized team thought, what if we blast
led lights at mice, cue the strobe lights, you.
Speaker 13 (40:22):
Know anywhere between thirty to sixty herds of frequency that
usually is the most active when you know we are
actively engaging in higher order quantity functions. So we saw
that some of the pathological features of Alzheimer's disease reduced
quite drastically.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
And then sign noticed that as blood circulation in the
brain increased, it let spinal fluid in to help clear
metabolic waste, and it increased the efficiency of those higher
order brain processes. It was a huge step forward. Then
they added a few more invasive stimuli to the mix,
things like tactile vibrations and sound pulses, and eventually they
(41:06):
found they could transfer the results to humans. Now there's
a commercial version that sounds like one of those red
light masks they're always hawking on insta. Is it like
a mask?
Speaker 13 (41:17):
So it's more like Goggle's like, and also at earphones.
Speaker 4 (41:21):
They're in stage three trials now with a wider population,
and if all goes well, it'll go to market. I'm
odd that such a simple application of light and sound
can fend off Alzheimer's. It feels too easy, but also
beautifully futuristic. Okay, I need to level with you. I'm
(41:46):
not just here to see the tiny dance party. I'm
really here because I'm worried about my own brain. When
you grow up a scrawny, nerdy kid like I did,
your brain is your superpower. My creativity comes from making
strange connection between little facts and details. I remember the
specifics of conversations even three or four decades later and
(42:07):
a sharp brain. That's what seemed to keep my grandfather
the writer, and my great grandmam the one hundred three
year old going. But I've also seen family and friends
lose their memories and their sense of self. And right
now that's been on my mind because I can feel
my memory slipping a little bit, and I worry it'll
(42:29):
be the way Ernest Hemingway described how people go bankrupt
gradually and then all at once. Doctor cy clarifies that
what's happening to me is pretty typical.
Speaker 13 (42:41):
So about by mid forties, things start to.
Speaker 4 (42:44):
Change for me right now?
Speaker 13 (42:48):
Oh right, I mean, okay, just on average they are extremes,
but on average, Spider may forties, you start to forget
what wor you start to forget names, like you know,
you want to refer to someone you just cannot think
of the right name. And then after age of sixty five,
(43:13):
people start to develop different kinds of dementia. So yeah,
that's a life cycle.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
What's the point of living to one hundred or one
hundred and fifty if you don't have a healthy functioning brain.
Like wearing agnes was hard but manageable, but I worry
about what it means if I'm carrying forward without my
memories or my ability to learn, or even a grasp
of who I am. Luckily, doctor CSI has a solution
(43:42):
hiding in the back, behind the door we're not allowed
to walk through. We spot a team of students in
a wet lab because inside that's where they're growing clones
of human brains in petri dishes. That's right, Doctor Size
(44:06):
figured out how to take skin cells and basically model
your brain in a dish. It's not a full brain,
it's a simplified organoid that reprograms stem cells into six
types of brain cells, and then it helps them form
structures until they're firing neurons, and it's infinitely replicable. She
(44:26):
can do it so many times, it's going to be
a massive game changer for personalized medicine today. The my brains,
as she calls them, are basically focused on people with
apoe four the Alzheimer's gene, but it allows her to
test medicines and interventions that would work specifically for you.
Speaker 13 (44:46):
It really allows us to just create a model in
the petra dish from anybody's somanti cells.
Speaker 4 (45:00):
Do you have a testable brain? Essentially in the future dish.
Speaker 13 (45:02):
Right, And that's just very very convenient because this is
very modular. We can actually mix a match, you know,
cells from different genetypes. We can mix a POI four
nerve cells with APOE two or three grille cells and
(45:25):
then see whether a certain pathology will still develop and
so on. And we can also use this my brain
to test different drugs. And the best thing is, I
think this has the potential for personalized treatment because I
(45:45):
can take your skin cells to make a brain for you,
and then if you develop any disease, we can test
what draw is the best for your brain as opposed
to his brain.
Speaker 4 (46:02):
The whole my brain concept blows me away, and I
want to see one so badly, but we are not allowed.
I try to find out how much of a cost
to make me a my brain. I ask multiple times
for the current price tag. I even tried being a
little cheeky to get a very very rough estimate, but
doctor side does not want to reveal the cost.
Speaker 13 (46:26):
It's yeah, it's expensive right now, everything's very boutique.
Speaker 4 (46:32):
I can only imagine how many zero she's talking about.
But that's how moonshot science works. And if everything goes right,
maybe worms like us will be able to use it
someday too. Before I go, I decided to ask doctor
say about Ted Williams. If she can recreate my brain
in a Petri dish and run tests on it, can
(46:52):
she possibly recreate Ted's and figure out how to reanimate it?
I have to ask, you have Ted Williams here? The
baseball star's brain is frozen at all core? Like, what
do you make of all of that space?
Speaker 13 (47:10):
I don't want to give myself into trouble that may just.
Speaker 10 (47:14):
Say aloud, okay, I do believe in healthy aging because
I think our society cannot sustain with so many people
having givensia.
Speaker 13 (47:31):
It's a huge loss for the society. So I think
if we can really promote healthy aging of the brain,
I think that would do a very good thing to
the society. But all this other stuff I think, I
just don't want to give myself in trouble.
Speaker 4 (47:52):
It's comforting to think that doctor CSI has unlocked something magical,
the very real hope that our brains could stay healthy
as long as our bodies too.
Speaker 5 (48:05):
What animal lives on a geriatric island near Boston Harbor.
Speaker 4 (48:10):
The answers aillennial rock hopper penguins. The New England Aquarium
noticed that they had a bunch of penguins who were
in the early thirties and had several conditions that required
closer and monitoring, just like human seniors required. God, who
cares about penguins? Why are you so obsessed with Ted
Williams's head?
Speaker 5 (48:30):
Huh?
Speaker 4 (48:31):
I know, I know, I know. I mean part of
it is that, in a ten minute cab ride in
this tiny metropolis, I have pinballed from a statue of
a man who had his head cut off and stuffed
into a freezer, his long shot chance at immortality to
a scientist who, in the decades since, has figured out
(48:53):
how to grow a working copy of your brain in
a petri dish. That has blows my mind. But also
I think it's the mystery of it. Like for people
skeptical about cryonics, Ted Williams has been the punchline. But
I'm still tripped up on whether Ted even wanted to
(49:16):
be frozen. He didn't leave a diary, his kids have
all passed, and frankly, so much of his story is murky.
Like consider what was written in his will. Ted wanted
to be cremated and scattered in the Florida Keys in
his favorite fishing hole. I mean a simple cremation, and
(49:36):
being scattered in warm waters feels like the opposite of
being frozen. Then there's what his kids said. His two
youngest claimed they'd all signed a pack to go into
biostasis together, though the evidence was more than a little dubious.
A piece of scrappaper stained with motor oil founded the
trunk of his son's car. Also, the paper wasn't signed
(49:58):
the way he signed official document with his full name.
It was signed the way he signed his autographs. Plus
Ted never actually signed Alcore's consent forms. Ted's son John
Henry had signed them all after his dad had died.
So I guess the question becomes, why do this to
your dad? It turned into a messy family drama and
(50:18):
we'll never really know the answer. But then there's this.
In twenty fourteen, Ted's younger daughter, Claudia, agreed to a
rare on camera interview with a local Boston news station.
She insisted that after a lifetime of being a distant,
disengaged father in his later years, Ted Williams made a
real effort to connect with his kids, that this was
(50:42):
the reason he was interested in cryonics.
Speaker 11 (50:45):
Outside Fenway, Claudia looks up at that statue of her
dad differently. Now she understands her father better, and she
wants all of us to understand the decision behind having
her dad's body frozen, ridiculed by so many the punchline
of joke after joke.
Speaker 5 (50:58):
It was a promise, It was a pact, but it
also was a hope that maybe, just maybe.
Speaker 13 (51:05):
What if?
Speaker 4 (51:07):
What if? It's kind of sad and human, but also
I find myself struck by the optimism, because sure, cryonics
is not viable now or maybe ever, but science is
and always has been a story of what if. What
(51:28):
if we could harness Zeus's most potent weapon and deliver
it as electricity through outlets in every home. What if
we could dream like Icarus and transport ourselves by sailing
the skies? What if there's truth in the myths, the
stories that we passed down generation after generation, the ones
about living better and longer. It's an idea that had
(51:51):
me pulled over on the side of the road on
my way to O'Hare in the middle of winter, trying
to fill a jug with magic water. That's next time
on how to Live.
Speaker 12 (52:04):
Forever O.
Speaker 14 (52:29):
Shao singing Holygallyso say.
Speaker 4 (52:45):
That was fun. Thank you so much for listening and
for sticking around for the credits. How to Live Forever
is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast. This show
is hosted and written badly by me Mungash. Together, then
all of these talented humans and sweep in and make
it so much better, starting with Mary Philip Sandy, our
supervising producer who can do absolutely everything except drink milk.
(53:09):
Please don't offer her milk, give it to a cat instead.
The show is eped by my superstar wife, Lizzy Jacobs,
who is well known podcasting, but better known in my
house for her famous elementary school story The Sun Also Sets.
Skyline is story edited by Mark Lotto, a story savon
and also a closet basketball fan who knew our science
(53:29):
producer is Mark Steven Allen. Mark, thank you for taking
me to Boston and to see the world's Tiniest mouse Rave.
I want to thank Anna from Computer City Productions for
mixing this episode and for working overtime to make it
so beautiful. Thank you Anna. Thank you to Botany as
z Atti Records and Bliss sampsa for the stunning music.
(53:50):
If you want to hear more, we made you a mixtape.
Just check out the show notes. Research support from Lucas
Riley and Matt Riddle, both of who told me lots
and lots the secrets about living forever. I will share
them with you next episode. This show is executive produced
from iHeart but my good friends Ali Perry and Katrina Norvel.
It would not have happened without my pals at Kaleidoscope,
(54:12):
including Oswa Alishan and Costislinas. Thank you both. Thank you
so much to Julia Nutter, David Weisboard and Shino Zaki
for lending us your ears and for bearing with early
versions of the show. The very best lawyer and person
Rachel Strom. I cannot recommend her enough. Thank you for
your counsel and also for taking my kid to Pride
night at a Liberty game. That was the cherry on top. Also,
(54:37):
Christy L. Viney, thank you for the beautiful marketing work
you've done for the show. I'm really bad at this,
so if I missed you, please text me. Special thanks
to all the kiddos, Henry Ruby, Julian Branda, lou Rima,
Enzo Pearl Baby Leyon, how could I forget you?
Speaker 14 (54:52):
Baby?
Speaker 1 (54:52):
Layon?
Speaker 4 (54:53):
All my friends at iHeart, including Bob Connell, Kerry, Nikki, Anna, Jason,
Jerry and Moore wear A Crew, my New York Crew,
and my Atlanta Crewe. There are too many to name.
Also Shata and Sah, my family in India, my family
and the States. That voice at the top was my
good friend and basically family. Will Pearson, who you may
(55:15):
recognize from the cover of Sport magazine, Thank you for
quitting baseball and starting a trivia magazine with me instead. Will,
And as always, this show is for my dad and
for my mom, both of whom I thank my lucky
stars for
This is Will Pearson, Mango's co host on Part Time Genius.
Here with a quick warning before you listen to the episode.
Despite Mango's grandmother's greatest wish, he is one hundred percent
not a doctor and nothing in this episode should count
as medical advice. Also, as I mentioned being the co
host of Part Time Genius, I'm a little insult that
I wasn't asked to be this episode's quiz master, but
(00:31):
I'm sure with time I'll get over that. With that said, enjoy,
the people are good.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
I could I could have been the lawyer.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
The choice.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Is the scene tell the phone, stalk, cut and.
Speaker 5 (01:16):
Something.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
Oh you wonderful animals, thank you so much for coming back.
We are just about to start our Live Forever trivia show,
So everyone get out your puzzles and papers and let's begin.
Mary go ahead and kick us off.
Speaker 5 (01:38):
Question one. The topic is jellyfish. If you know about jellyfish,
this will be easy. What type of jellyfish can revert
to a baby polyp stage and live its life over
again into infinity.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
It's the immortal jellyfish, and the truth is nobody knows
why it has that superpower. It is just a sack
of goog less than a quarter engine diameter, and it
may hold the secret to eternal life. Next question, please.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
What legendary American comedy troupe saying, if you're too old
for dancing, get yourself a monkey land?
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Answer the Marx Brothers. Back in the nineteen twenties, a
French surgeon named Serge Bornoff began implanting slices of monkey
testicles onto human testicles, which he called rejuvenating by grafting
pipes spread fast. B. Cummings wrote Versus about it, and
so did Irving Berlin.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
Question three, This one's tricky. What sports hero turned mongesh
off of longevity? Possibly forever?
Speaker 4 (02:37):
I don't know why anyone would know this, but bonus
points if you answered Ted Williams. Because it is Red
Sox legend. Ted Williams sell me something good, and Fenway Park,
(02:57):
the home of the Red Sox, is actually where I'm
headed right now. I'm in a cab because I want
to visit the giant bronze statue of Ted Williams aka
the Splendid Splinter Boston legend. Though I guess my Cabby
could use a reminder. Is a baseball player?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
We have done enough?
Speaker 4 (03:20):
There are only two things most people know about Ted Williams. First,
he had a season high batting average of four O six,
a Red Sox record that still hasn't been broken. I'm
not a baseball guy, and even I know that's bananas.
(03:41):
The second thing people know about Ted Williams, he's a punchline.
Speaker 6 (03:45):
You might want to be cremated or be frozen like
Ted Williams.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Head because Ted Williams had his body frozen after he
died by a company who holds dead bodies and stasis
in case they can someday be reanimated. It's the ultimate
plan B for longevity. Heads. The company Alcore, actually launched
(04:11):
in the nineteen seventies with the idea of freezing people
after death as this insurance policy for the future in
the off chance science could get to a place where
being dead and frozen was a reversible condition. And to me,
cryonics has always seen like a bet made by science
fiction fans who didn't get science. But also it would
(04:32):
be one thing if they had just frozen Ted's body.
What Alcore did was way worse. According to a Sports
Illustrated investigation, Ted was supposed to be preserved in full
but when his corpse arrived, an eager beaver at Alcore
started severing his head, but by the time the error
(04:52):
was discovered, a technician was already mid slice. They debated
what to do, leave him like a human pets dispenser,
or finish the job. So they finished the job in
Froze's head and body in separate tanks. Not a great start. Then,
in two thousand and three, a Cryo whistleblower came forward
(05:13):
accusing the company of various atrocities, including mishandling Ted's remains,
and Larry Johnson wasn't just some employee blabbing to CBS.
He was a former paramedic who had actually been Alcore COO.
Johnson said it all started when they wanted to move
Ted's frozen head to another container.
Speaker 7 (05:31):
Obviously, the head round is not going to set upright,
so they got a tuna fish can. They set the
head on top of the can and then filled the
vessel with liquid nitrogen. Well, obviously, after two or three
days of being in that state, when they pull you out,
that can is stuck to the top of the head.
Speaker 4 (05:47):
Obviously, but even if you're a cryonics buff, what happened
to Ted Williams was particularly off putting.
Speaker 7 (05:56):
A technician grabbed a ranch a monkey ranch, took a
swing at can, missed it missed the can, hit the head,
draw back again. A second swing hit the can, send
a fine across the room.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
The company denied the allegations immediately, but the damage was done.
Ted Williams became a laughing stock. And my excuse to
keep disbelieving. And I'm not alone.
Speaker 8 (06:25):
Just bury it.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
Who wants to come back to this mess with the
fucking mess Just die already. Ted's not the only reason
I'm in Boston, though. This place is the heart of
some of the most cutting edge longevity science. That sexy
supplement NAD first got its start here. It's home to
huge leafs and gene editing, and human trials are going
(06:49):
on here that could reversely coma. There are over a
thousand biotech startups between Boston and Cambridge. And if there's
one thing a life in trivia has taught me, it's
that you gotta check the facts. So I'm here to
see for myself. From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts, I am
(07:10):
Monga's Tatiicular. This is Skyline Drive How to Live Forever,
(07:41):
Chapter one, Suiting.
Speaker 5 (07:43):
Up Before biotech, what were people in Cambridge busy making candy?
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Cambridge used to be the center of American candy manufacturer.
Main Street was dubbed Confectioner's Row and just a few
of the products invented here include Necho Wafers, Charleston Chew's,
Sugar Daddy's and Junior Min's. I wish I was here
on a candy taste test mission, but I'm almost as
(08:17):
excited about what I am here to do to get
turned into an eighty year old.
Speaker 9 (08:26):
So bungee is going from the waist to behind your
hamstring to your ankle, and this is again like reducing
that range of motion.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
And the next thing we get at is some stiffness
in the joints.
Speaker 9 (08:37):
So we have braces that go on your elbows that
will do first, we'll do your knees, and then also
a neck brace.
Speaker 10 (08:43):
So you'll feel a little bit restricted without this.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
I've come to the mit Age Lab because I'd heard
that doctor Joe Coughlin and his team have invented a
so called aging suit. In my head, I was picturing
some futuristic spacesuit where you dial up the gear on
the age you want to be. But it turns out
it's more like a bag full of vans and weights
that you wear under a bulky jumpsuit. The weights weren't enough.
Speaker 11 (09:10):
Next we have these weighted gloves, so again we're thinking
about joint stiffness, maybe some arthritis in the hands.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
Joe and his team call it AGNES, an acronym for
age gain now empathy system, and the idea started from
this is a thing play. Joe and his team. We're
trying to get a better understanding of how the aging
body works. So after some pizza and discussion, they all
put on myriad restrictive vans and stood around a mat.
Speaker 8 (09:40):
To play twister. And so we had my students, my
staff with engineers.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
Falling over one another on red, yellow, green, and blue dots.
Was transformative. The team understood on a bizarre first and basis,
how the elderly move. And since then they've helped create
better design for seniors, including how to get in and
out of a new car. And those few bands got
upgraded to become the bag of empathy that is AGNES.
(10:10):
And now it's my turn to play. In ten minutes
of putting on hand weights and ankle weights and arm
weights and standing in modified crocs on uneven foam blocks
and having bungies and belts tied from my limbs to
a helmet. I went from forty seven to well, Agnes.
Speaker 9 (10:29):
You're almost there.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
So what I age am? I right now?
Speaker 5 (10:37):
This is not necessarily the healthiest older adult. Like we're
getting at a couple of unmanaged chronic conditions.
Speaker 9 (10:43):
You might think late seventies, early eighties.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
But again, yeah, really varies from person to person.
Speaker 12 (10:49):
Drop it.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
I put on some glasses that blur my sight considerably.
I have no peripheral vision, and my body feels bound up.
But I set forth to conquer the world, or at
least this floor. I'm not consciously like trying to walk slower.
Speaker 6 (11:08):
Just trying to, you know, kind of balance.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
If the process of growing older and feeling your body
deteriorate is like boiling a frog, a gradual change that
slips past awareness, then putting on Agnes is the feeling
of diving into that sculding pot and understanding instantly what
hot is. That's actually the purpose of the Age Lab.
They're warmly decorated rooms set up as test living rooms
(11:34):
and kitchens. There's even a cherry red Volkswagon bug name
Miss Daisy, which feels like a less fun version of
Mario Kart, where you're trying to drive on ice and
snow with the reflexes of an old person. It's all
a built to help us understand how the elderly navigate
this world and improving quality of life for everyone. Joe
(11:55):
tells me.
Speaker 8 (11:56):
You know, whether or not we can get mice to
live two hundred years and there where we get to
live one hundred and fifty, that's great. That's folks down
the street here that are doing that.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Joe's saying, he isn't one of the scientists and wet
labs at MIT and Harvard. He's on a different mission.
Speaker 8 (12:11):
I want to be able to make sure that you're
happy with those hundred years that you have already.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
Honestly, that's what I want too, not necessarily living longer,
but living better in the years I do have. As
Joe puts it, we already have thirty to forty years
of longevity, greater than we did in nineteen hundred.
Speaker 8 (12:29):
The fastest growing part of the population is eighty five plus.
Older age is the greatest achievement of humankind, and yet
we still look at it as a problem. I'm hoping
that increasingly people are starting to see this as an
opportunity rather than a problem to be solved.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
I wander around in the suit. It is a strange feeling,
not just the weight of it and slowing down to
this degree, but also I have such little awareness. As
I move around the floor, I realize I'm treating it
like a workout class. My minders are giving me simple
challenges and I am panting along, just trying to keep form.
(13:11):
That idea of wearing this for a day is just crazy.
Speaker 9 (13:15):
I wouldn't recommend that. Yeah, it's a little bit different
than the body you're used to.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
Yeah, I feel like Batman, not the superhero part of Batman,
just the fact that he can't turn his head without
turning his whole body. Everything about this suit is labored.
Speaker 9 (13:32):
Yeah, I noticed you're like looking at the ground, maybe
taking shorter strides.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
That this isn't how I normally walk. My minder send
me to the coffee machine. What are those fancy machines
with lots of pictures of options on a screen. I mean,
I guess that the top left one was just a
regular coffee, but I really couldn't read it. Yeah, everything
is a series of educated guesses. Here, I assume black
(13:59):
coffee is up the top left, but I can barely
see anything, so I'll drink whatever it serves me. But honestly,
choosing the coffee isn't even the hard part. It's all
the mechanics pulling the cup out of the sleeve, trying
to balance while sitting on a stool that you reached
back to kind of ease your way into the chair. Yeah,
(14:20):
I both want to take the coffee, and I'm afraid
at some point I'm gonna split. I have never thought
about how hard it is to sit on a stool before.
But you have to have some awareness of where the
stool is behind you. You have to know how to
lower yourself at the right speed. It is hard to
do with a cup of coffee in your hand. So
(14:41):
in the end, I placed the coffee on the table
and then use my hands as reference points, one on
the table, one on the stool to lower myself gently,
and I stick the landing. But there is no standing
ovation for what feels like a very gymnastic feet.
Speaker 12 (15:02):
Wow, shouldn't be winded from taking a lot at an office.
Speaker 4 (15:09):
And finally, the Peace Day Resistance take the stairs down
and take Agnes to the streets. My God, the stairs.
(15:30):
That first step is a leap of faith. I'm so
conscious of where that first stairs, hoping that I can
land it square on these foam padded shoes, and gripping
the banister poorly with both my arthritis induced hands until
my foot touches down. It feels like forever. I slowly
(15:54):
get more confident, but never really enough to not be
clutching the handrail for dear life. When we finally get
downstairs and out the door, I am so grateful for
the cold December air because I'm drenched in sweat. I'm
trying to regain balance as we slowly do a loop
around the building, But it turns out balance isn't the
(16:16):
only thing I lost, my sense of It is funny
that my first I don't know how long have I
been wearing this, Like like ten minutes?
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Much longer?
Speaker 5 (16:27):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Really a little past eleven?
Speaker 4 (16:30):
Oh wow, I've been wearing the suit for nearly an hour,
and I'd lost track of time.
Speaker 9 (16:36):
Sometimes we have folks put the suit on and they're
thinking about someone in particular in their life, like a
family member or someone they work with, and feeling like, wow,
I can kind of understand a little bit of what
they might be experiencing. So I'm wondering, like, if this
is making you think of anybody?
Speaker 5 (16:54):
You know?
Speaker 4 (16:58):
I feel like a jerk when I think about it,
about how impatient I can be with people moving slowly
on New York sidewalks, or even sometimes with my mom
not understanding why she's anxious about little things, when I
can see now that even just sitting or tackling things
around the house is so much harder than I ever imagined.
(17:21):
Wearing agnes, immediately you understand just how inadequate this world is,
how it's not designed for people to age or have
different abilities. Joe tells me that the crosswalk sign and
countdowns and cities are based on the time that a
college sophomore should be able to cross the street. Think
about how many people that leaves out.
Speaker 8 (17:46):
We need to think about how do we make environments,
whether it's our homes, our cars or streets, our stores,
our hospitals, age ready. So I'm trying to think about
how to make our kitchen age ready. If we remodel
the bathroom. I have to tell you, the doorjam that
we have is too narrow. And God forbid that either
I or my wife have to use a walk or
a wheelchair. We're not going to be able to get
in there, can't use the bathroom. Congratulations, welcome to senior housing.
(18:10):
So it's kind of given me a wake up call.
That's perhaps driving my spouse nuddy, but it's also I
like where I live. I want to be able to
build it to stay where I live.
Speaker 4 (18:49):
Chapter two, The Hallmarks of Agent. We keep talking about it,
but what even is it? We know what it looks like.
Your hair grows gray, your skin SAgs, and you add
candles to the cake, But what is actually happening? I
(19:11):
asked our Signs producer Mark Allen, and he said, simply,
everything wears out for me. The best way to understand
that is to do my dad's favorite activity, lie back,
preferably in a recliner, and listen to music. My dad
(19:38):
didn't care about fancy clothes or name brands, but he
was a total audiophile. When he passed, he left me
his vintage Macintosh receiver and his Altech Lancing Valencia speakers,
the first things he saved money to buy in America,
(20:00):
and as an album peaks out from its packaging, it's vulnerable.
Purists cleaned the albums like a ritual before and after
playing them. They know how dust and dirt and the
oil seeping from our fingertips slowly affect our record's play.
They keep their collections out of sunlight and away from radiators,
and also too much moisture and too little moisture. And
(20:22):
even with all that care, the integrity of a record
will eventually warp or scratch or break down, lasting just
a human lifetime for rarely more. In twenty thirteen, four
longevity scientists published a landmark paper that gave us an
answer to that question, what is aging that we're still
(20:43):
using and refining today. They identified what drives aging, both
at the cellular and molecular levels, and they call these
drivers the hallmarks of aging. At first they named nine hallmarks.
Today scientists say there are twelve. By the time this
comes out, there may be more. What's stunning is that
(21:03):
we start the aging process in the womb, and over time,
no matter how healthy you try to be, more and
more goes wrong. That's what the hallmarks are trying to track.
There's telemere attrition, where the tiny caps at the ends
of your chromosomes begin to phrase so much that your
cells stop dividing, and suddenly heart disease and blood clotting
and liver disease enter the picture. Then there's loss of proteostasis,
(21:28):
the quality control. When you're young, every misfolded protein gets
cut like bad takes in the studio. But over time
the system looted at fear, glicklitches and warp notes stack
up until the whole mix gets muddy and boom, you've
got Alzheimer's. And that's just too.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
There's ten more gnomic instability, epigenetic alteration, chronic inflammation, contis function,
the able work out a faiety in cell exhaustion, all
get interested work, mutation, can cellular it's the essence. Can
you hear this? What's happening? It's happening in your body too.
There are so many ways your body starts to go wrong,
and the hope is the more scientists understand, the more
(22:07):
they'll be able to counter the deterioration.
Speaker 12 (22:10):
But until then we'll just have to deal with the
natural wear and tear of living, accepting the quiet ways
our bodies break down until the music stops.
Speaker 5 (22:28):
What longevity influencer is sixty feet long and weighs one
hundred tons.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
Answer the bowhead whale. In two thousand and seven, a
group of Native Alaskan whalers found a harpoon tip in
the neck of a bowhead whale dated back to the
Victorian era, which means that whale lived over two hundred
years two hundred eleven actually Chapter three Men in Black.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Yes, yes, shee dope.
Speaker 9 (23:03):
Maybe he's fit a skin.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
He had a boy west Night hid away?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yes, yes, she dope. Maybe he's been of skin.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
He hit a boy to west Knight getaway.
Speaker 9 (23:18):
Yes, yes, she dope.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
So when you get tenure, you no longer have to
worry about not getting tenure. Okay, So it's a real
liberating situation. So I thought, wow, what would be good
to work on?
Speaker 12 (23:31):
Now?
Speaker 4 (23:34):
That's doctor Lenny Guarantee, a professor at MIT and a
pioneer of longevity science. He laid the foundation for several
hallmarks of aging, and also he sells longevity supplements. Lenny
is in his seventies. He's fit, bald. He tells people
he's biologically six years younger than he should be. Also,
(23:54):
he's kind of a character. He thinks white T shirts
are dorky. So he only wears black. He'll tell you
all the reasons. Beethoven's seventh Symphony is superior to the fifth.
So he's got takes. And just like everyone who got
into studying aging before it was fashionable, he was considered fringe.
Speaker 6 (24:17):
I was walking down the hallway one day and my
department chairman walked by and he said, what's new? And
I said, I think I'm going to shift my lamp
to working on aging, and he doesn't double take.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
What But after playing with yeast, yes, yeast, he discovered
what seemed like a real breakthrough. They found a protein
called sir tou that played a key role in yeast longevity.
But don't get too excited about sir too because that's
not what the story is about. Instead, we're focusing on
an ingredient sur too uses to affect longevity, a little
(24:56):
molecule called NAD. That's the real star here.
Speaker 6 (25:02):
And NAD been known for over one hundred years. It's
involved in metabolism and cells. It's involved in mitochondrial function.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
Eventually, Lenny shows that by boosting the NAD levels, he
can lengthen the lifespan of not just yeast.
Speaker 6 (25:18):
I said, jeez, we just did a simple intervention in
worms and made them live longer. And this chap he says,
just what the world needs, long lived worms.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
But over the next ten years he starts moving up
the food.
Speaker 6 (25:32):
Chain, first in worms and then in mice. And at
that point I was really interested in turning attention to humans.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Yeast definitely, worms, sure, mice maybe, but humans. That's a
kind of expensive that takes a higher level of backing.
Speaker 6 (25:52):
And I got a cold call from someone from the
business world. That's a company all Sequoia.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
And this is where we get into the supplements. The
Sequoia he's talking about is Sequoia Capital, the famed VC
firm that backed such little known companies as Apple and Google.
Now they're backing Lenny's use for NAD which he's figured
out how to harness effectively for anti aging.
Speaker 6 (26:20):
So that was a product that was launched and the
company which is called Elysium Health.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
But money really changes what you can do and what
you have to do. Now Lenny could finally run tests
on humans and he figured out a way to restore
NAD levels in the sixty plus set. But Lenny also
had to make money for Sequoia. It's not like walking
around Mit telling your department chair you're going to make
worms live longer. So Elysium goes to market and it
(26:52):
feels lux like the eight hundred dollars a year baby
Apple and Goop never had.
Speaker 6 (26:58):
From the beginning, we've hadustomer feedback, and the most common
feedback is that their fingernails grow faster. And people report
a lot of things that are not so verifiable, like
they feel better, they have more energy, But the fingernails,
when you see it, you have to believe it. It's
(27:20):
right there in front of you.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
That's the frustrating thing about longevity science. You won't actually
be able to tell if you've lengthened the users' lifesvens
until you wait out their expected lifetimes. And also, people
are really interested in anything that might do something which
can lead to a certain kind of flooded market.
Speaker 6 (27:40):
Part of the reason when I got into aging that
my department had was less than enthused is because the
field had been riven with snake oil salesmen up to
that point. That's the history of the aging field. I
guess I'm responsible for the craze that we're now seeing,
(28:03):
which still seems to be an exponential phase of growth.
Speaker 4 (28:07):
So here we are in the supplement's gold rush. Where
As Lenny says, sometimes people don't get it quite right.
It can mean taking something that has no real effect,
but it dashes your hopes and waste your money. It
could be a small inconvenience like a tummy ache, or
could give you salmonella through a green powder that was
eventually recalled where it could kill you, which is what
(28:31):
happened with a cholesterol supplement that led to eighty debts.
Those both happened in the last two years. And I
don't have the energy or intel to read up on
what advisory board each little bottle on the shelf has,
so I guess I'm back to judging by the label.
Speaker 10 (28:58):
Hey quiz guy, you take an huh skeptic.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
Uh not nad. Doctor Primus actually didn't mention it in
his Mountain of advice. But since you asked per cuban
C three complex MEGAD three and MK seven fullic acid
B twelve, MEGAZOQ ten ubiquinol immune devents bills which have
zinc and elderberry fish oil Omega three.
Speaker 5 (29:21):
Stop geez.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
Oh, And there's a green powder I mix into a
glass of water and drink most mornings.
Speaker 12 (29:30):
And how do you feel?
Speaker 4 (29:31):
Pretty much the same, But I feel like I'm doing something.
Chapter four, A warm welcome.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
You have a thousand identical worms, You give them the
same environment, everything's the same. You feed them the same food.
One and die in ten days.
Speaker 6 (30:00):
Of old age.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
One dies in twenty days in old age. That's not luck,
that's not random. There's something and we can understand that.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
That's doctor William Maher, the director of Harvard's Healthy Aging Initiative.
When I meet him in his office, I can't get
over how young he looks. He's tall, lean, dress smartly
and skinny jeans and cool kicks. But he's a tenured
professor running his own research lab at the most prestigious
public health school in the country, so he has a
(30:29):
lot going on. But the thing he really wants to
talk to me about is worms, specifically a minuscule worm
about the size of a comma called sea elegance. Mayor
is studying the way the body and brain sense and
react to nutrients, like how we're affected by intermittent fasting.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
The first studies where we've already taken nematoid worms that
always live two weeks and changed one gene and now
they lived sort of like five weeks. It's just revolutionary.
At the time, this kind of went against all theory
of evolutionary biology. You could do one thing and change
the whole way an animal interacted with time.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
But the reason worms like these are such special test subjects,
he tells me, is that they only have about three
hundred neurons, and that makes them, like tiny computers, really
easy to genetically reprogram.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
There's a bit of a debate in the field where
it's three hundred or three hundred and two. This is
how nerdy we are, we're reaching it. But we can
take the energy sensor, which senses low energy and is
turned on when you don't eat, and make that constituably on.
And now even if it eats a lot of food,
it doesn't realize it's having a lot of food, and
it lives a long time. It has the life span
of a diet restricted animal. And we could even show
(31:37):
we can map that down to two neurons in the
brain and we could flip it on and off and
get back this longevity. So this is huge interaction.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
But Mayer has room in his heart for more than
one kind of worm. He also loves to work with
the Lowa loa. The lower loa is basically the same
round worm as the cele again, but they have very
different lifespans. And when I ask him why so.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Right, the elegants live in the soil corny around. They
have a really dangerous life. They probably live two days
in the wild, So there's no evolutionary reason. There's no
adaptive reason for those animals to evolve the capacity to
maintain their bodies for eighteen years because they're only going
to see three days. So natural selection is just a
math problem. Everything is governed to make the animal live fast,
(32:19):
die young. Lower low is a parasite, so it lives
inside bodies of us. Actually a super protected environment.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
These lower loas are extremely canceted. Think gated living for worms.
Just in this case, the human body is the worm's
McMansion because lower loas live under our skin.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
Now, suddenly mutations of natural selection which make the animal
live longer have an advantage.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Right.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
That's why you tend to see long live animals on
islands where there's low predation, in places where it's low stressed.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
I love that round worms have found the blue zones, right,
bodies and then doctor Mara goes somewhere I wasn't expecting.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
In the wild. We have good examples of population of
animals that split and one stays on that say, the mainland,
and one goes onto an island. So somedly you separate
them into a hazardous environment and a safe one. When
that happens, the one in the safe environment, they become
longer lived because it's now worth it. And so will
this happen to us? No idea, but you know, intellectually, maybe.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
Will it happen to us? Will we turn into two species?
It is a thing I can't stop thinking about.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
According to the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University,
which state has the highest proportion of one hundred plus
year olds?
Speaker 4 (33:36):
Answer? Hawaii. It's got to be in beaches.
Speaker 5 (33:40):
Right of the following countries which rates lowest for life
expectancy Cypress, Slovenia, Lebanon, Nicaragua, or the United States.
Speaker 4 (33:51):
It's the United States. According to the World Health Organization,
Cypress ranks sixteenth worldwide, Slovenia twenty six fifth, Nicaragua fortieth,
and the USA forty first. Experts say key factors in
America's ranking are income, inequality, social isolation, and lack of
access to healthcare. While Mayor is working on what helps
(34:16):
humans live longer, he also knows that's only one piece
of the longevity puzzle.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
The other piece of my job is that, you know,
why is it that if you're born in Dorchester your
body age is faster potentially than it would if you're
born in Cambridge.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
Recent studies show that there's roughly two decades separating the
life expectancy in Cambridge and the nearby Boston neighborhood of Dorchester.
The median family income in Cambridge is one hundred and
seventy five thousand dollars, and average life expectancy is ninety two.
In Dorchester, a community that has some of the highest
poverty rates in the state, average lifespan is much much lower,
(34:52):
around seventy two. Joe Coughlin told me, we humans have
twenty plus years of life that we can't joy yet,
but people in communities like Dorchester don't even have those
twenty years. And it's not a mystery why.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
And I think that you know, healthy aging is a
human right. If wealth is the biggest driver of how
well you live and how long you live, it's not
just luck. It's not just the genetics of the wealthy.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
Look. Will Mahor is in the longevity space. He knows
that general excitement in the field is good for business.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Twenty years ago, no one was talking about this, and
now everybody's talking about it, and that is super exciting.
Speaker 4 (35:36):
Maybe dangerous, too dangerous, perhaps because as the government has
continued to slash NIH funding and grants for institutions, Mayor
worries that we have taken public health for granted. I'm
worried about that too. It's like we as a people
don't realize that public health is the reason that we
have those twenty extra years, or why infant mortality rates
(35:59):
have changed so drastically in the US. In nineteen hundred,
one in ten babies used to die before hitting age one.
Now that's one in two hundred. Mayor started his Center
for Healthy Aging specifically to do the type of interdisciplinary
research that will bring aid to the most possible people.
But in the excitement over extreme longevity by the rich
(36:23):
and for the rich, He's worried we're hastening the division
of our species.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
We have such differences across different populations. Even if you
look at the gains we had in the twentieth century
in America. It was like we added thirty years of
life expectancy if you look at the lowest earners, and
they didn't get those gains at all.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
Hearing Mayor talk about these two worms reminds me of
the story that my family in India told me about
Brian Johnson, and it's kind of the story of one
set of worms visiting another. So Johnson flies on this
private jet to Bombay for the sole purpose of being
interviewed by this superstar podcaster, Nick hil Kamat one minute,
(37:01):
he's talking about turning his home into a blue zone,
and then he asks, is it okay to put a
mask on? Yeah? Yeah, okay?
Speaker 13 (37:08):
Is that okay?
Speaker 12 (37:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (37:10):
Yeah, A little awkward, right, and comments team is really confused.
They're indoors. Do you feel better? I mean, when you're
feeling something, this is more precautionary. I mean I feel it.
It burns my lungs, it burns my throat, and then
I also just know, like these level of glutens, it
(37:31):
really does wreak havoc on the body. He stays around
for a while with the mask on, but then he
abruptly ends the interview and hops. On a flight home,
Ryan had to leave. Air quality in Bombay is not
up to I'm actually surprised that the air quality affected.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Him that much.
Speaker 4 (37:52):
That laugh. That's kind of what my family felt. They
saw it as performative and silly, like, sure, he might
to one hundred and fifty, but what's the point if
you can only live like some hothouse flower in a tiny,
perfect terrarium. Chapter five Brains and Dishes. When we were downstairs,
(38:42):
there's a video of a mouse. It felt like he
was at a dance party or something.
Speaker 13 (38:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is you know, amazing.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
MIT's Pick, our Institute for Learning Memory. It's impressive the
way most buildings are impressive. It's got a giant white
stair case and our portraits on the wall. But the
thing I couldn't stop staring at was a video on
loop of white mice running around a little cubicle looking
like they're three hours in to the world's tiniest rave.
(39:15):
I'm here at the lab to visit with doctor Leeway's
PSI The director of the PSI Lab, which is at
the absolute cutting edge of neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's research, Doctor
Sie is soft spoken, elegant. Instead of wearing a lab coat,
she's got a shawl around her shoulders. But also she
is intimidating. Still, I kind of got to ask her,
(39:40):
why is she throwing dance parties for mice.
Speaker 13 (39:43):
We showed that initially in Alzheimer's, even in a very
young age, the power of the gamma wave is a
compromised Already.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
Gamma waves are brain frequencies that show up in higher
order work, like when your brain is concentrating intensely or
solving problem or retrieving informing memories. But as they looked
at patients with Alzheimer's, they noticed that those gamma waves
were dysregulated.
Speaker 13 (40:09):
So we did a very simple experiment, what if we
can boost this gamma waves?
Speaker 4 (40:14):
In twenty sixteen, sized team thought, what if we blast
led lights at mice, cue the strobe lights, you.
Speaker 13 (40:22):
Know anywhere between thirty to sixty herds of frequency that
usually is the most active when you know we are
actively engaging in higher order quantity functions. So we saw
that some of the pathological features of Alzheimer's disease reduced
quite drastically.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
And then sign noticed that as blood circulation in the
brain increased, it let spinal fluid in to help clear
metabolic waste, and it increased the efficiency of those higher
order brain processes. It was a huge step forward. Then
they added a few more invasive stimuli to the mix,
things like tactile vibrations and sound pulses, and eventually they
(41:06):
found they could transfer the results to humans. Now there's
a commercial version that sounds like one of those red
light masks they're always hawking on insta. Is it like
a mask?
Speaker 13 (41:17):
So it's more like Goggle's like, and also at earphones.
Speaker 4 (41:21):
They're in stage three trials now with a wider population,
and if all goes well, it'll go to market. I'm
odd that such a simple application of light and sound
can fend off Alzheimer's. It feels too easy, but also
beautifully futuristic. Okay, I need to level with you. I'm
(41:46):
not just here to see the tiny dance party. I'm
really here because I'm worried about my own brain. When
you grow up a scrawny, nerdy kid like I did,
your brain is your superpower. My creativity comes from making
strange connection between little facts and details. I remember the
specifics of conversations even three or four decades later and
(42:07):
a sharp brain. That's what seemed to keep my grandfather
the writer, and my great grandmam the one hundred three
year old going. But I've also seen family and friends
lose their memories and their sense of self. And right
now that's been on my mind because I can feel
my memory slipping a little bit, and I worry it'll
(42:29):
be the way Ernest Hemingway described how people go bankrupt
gradually and then all at once. Doctor cy clarifies that
what's happening to me is pretty typical.
Speaker 13 (42:41):
So about by mid forties, things start to.
Speaker 4 (42:44):
Change for me right now?
Speaker 13 (42:48):
Oh right, I mean, okay, just on average they are extremes,
but on average, Spider may forties, you start to forget
what wor you start to forget names, like you know,
you want to refer to someone you just cannot think
of the right name. And then after age of sixty five,
(43:13):
people start to develop different kinds of dementia. So yeah,
that's a life cycle.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
What's the point of living to one hundred or one
hundred and fifty if you don't have a healthy functioning brain.
Like wearing agnes was hard but manageable, but I worry
about what it means if I'm carrying forward without my
memories or my ability to learn, or even a grasp
of who I am. Luckily, doctor CSI has a solution
(43:42):
hiding in the back, behind the door we're not allowed
to walk through. We spot a team of students in
a wet lab because inside that's where they're growing clones
of human brains in petri dishes. That's right, Doctor Size
(44:06):
figured out how to take skin cells and basically model
your brain in a dish. It's not a full brain,
it's a simplified organoid that reprograms stem cells into six
types of brain cells, and then it helps them form
structures until they're firing neurons, and it's infinitely replicable. She
(44:26):
can do it so many times, it's going to be
a massive game changer for personalized medicine today. The my brains,
as she calls them, are basically focused on people with
apoe four the Alzheimer's gene, but it allows her to
test medicines and interventions that would work specifically for you.
Speaker 13 (44:46):
It really allows us to just create a model in
the petra dish from anybody's somanti cells.
Speaker 4 (45:00):
Do you have a testable brain? Essentially in the future dish.
Speaker 13 (45:02):
Right, And that's just very very convenient because this is
very modular. We can actually mix a match, you know,
cells from different genetypes. We can mix a POI four
nerve cells with APOE two or three grille cells and
(45:25):
then see whether a certain pathology will still develop and
so on. And we can also use this my brain
to test different drugs. And the best thing is, I
think this has the potential for personalized treatment because I
(45:45):
can take your skin cells to make a brain for you,
and then if you develop any disease, we can test
what draw is the best for your brain as opposed
to his brain.
Speaker 4 (46:02):
The whole my brain concept blows me away, and I
want to see one so badly, but we are not allowed.
I try to find out how much of a cost
to make me a my brain. I ask multiple times
for the current price tag. I even tried being a
little cheeky to get a very very rough estimate, but
doctor side does not want to reveal the cost.
Speaker 13 (46:26):
It's yeah, it's expensive right now, everything's very boutique.
Speaker 4 (46:32):
I can only imagine how many zero she's talking about.
But that's how moonshot science works. And if everything goes right,
maybe worms like us will be able to use it
someday too. Before I go, I decided to ask doctor
say about Ted Williams. If she can recreate my brain
in a Petri dish and run tests on it, can
(46:52):
she possibly recreate Ted's and figure out how to reanimate it?
I have to ask, you have Ted Williams here? The
baseball star's brain is frozen at all core? Like, what
do you make of all of that space?
Speaker 13 (47:10):
I don't want to give myself into trouble that may just.
Speaker 10 (47:14):
Say aloud, okay, I do believe in healthy aging because
I think our society cannot sustain with so many people
having givensia.
Speaker 13 (47:31):
It's a huge loss for the society. So I think
if we can really promote healthy aging of the brain,
I think that would do a very good thing to
the society. But all this other stuff I think, I
just don't want to give myself in trouble.
Speaker 4 (47:52):
It's comforting to think that doctor CSI has unlocked something magical,
the very real hope that our brains could stay healthy
as long as our bodies too.
Speaker 5 (48:05):
What animal lives on a geriatric island near Boston Harbor.
Speaker 4 (48:10):
The answers aillennial rock hopper penguins. The New England Aquarium
noticed that they had a bunch of penguins who were
in the early thirties and had several conditions that required
closer and monitoring, just like human seniors required. God, who
cares about penguins? Why are you so obsessed with Ted
Williams's head?
Speaker 5 (48:30):
Huh?
Speaker 4 (48:31):
I know, I know, I know. I mean part of
it is that, in a ten minute cab ride in
this tiny metropolis, I have pinballed from a statue of
a man who had his head cut off and stuffed
into a freezer, his long shot chance at immortality to
a scientist who, in the decades since, has figured out
(48:53):
how to grow a working copy of your brain in
a petri dish. That has blows my mind. But also
I think it's the mystery of it. Like for people
skeptical about cryonics, Ted Williams has been the punchline. But
I'm still tripped up on whether Ted even wanted to
(49:16):
be frozen. He didn't leave a diary, his kids have
all passed, and frankly, so much of his story is murky.
Like consider what was written in his will. Ted wanted
to be cremated and scattered in the Florida Keys in
his favorite fishing hole. I mean a simple cremation, and
(49:36):
being scattered in warm waters feels like the opposite of
being frozen. Then there's what his kids said. His two
youngest claimed they'd all signed a pack to go into
biostasis together, though the evidence was more than a little dubious.
A piece of scrappaper stained with motor oil founded the
trunk of his son's car. Also, the paper wasn't signed
(49:58):
the way he signed official document with his full name.
It was signed the way he signed his autographs. Plus
Ted never actually signed Alcore's consent forms. Ted's son John
Henry had signed them all after his dad had died.
So I guess the question becomes, why do this to
your dad? It turned into a messy family drama and
(50:18):
we'll never really know the answer. But then there's this.
In twenty fourteen, Ted's younger daughter, Claudia, agreed to a
rare on camera interview with a local Boston news station.
She insisted that after a lifetime of being a distant,
disengaged father in his later years, Ted Williams made a
real effort to connect with his kids, that this was
(50:42):
the reason he was interested in cryonics.
Speaker 11 (50:45):
Outside Fenway, Claudia looks up at that statue of her
dad differently. Now she understands her father better, and she
wants all of us to understand the decision behind having
her dad's body frozen, ridiculed by so many the punchline
of joke after joke.
Speaker 5 (50:58):
It was a promise, It was a pact, but it
also was a hope that maybe, just maybe.
Speaker 13 (51:05):
What if?
Speaker 4 (51:07):
What if? It's kind of sad and human, but also
I find myself struck by the optimism, because sure, cryonics
is not viable now or maybe ever, but science is
and always has been a story of what if. What
(51:28):
if we could harness Zeus's most potent weapon and deliver
it as electricity through outlets in every home. What if
we could dream like Icarus and transport ourselves by sailing
the skies? What if there's truth in the myths, the
stories that we passed down generation after generation, the ones
about living better and longer. It's an idea that had
(51:51):
me pulled over on the side of the road on
my way to O'Hare in the middle of winter, trying
to fill a jug with magic water. That's next time
on how to Live.
Speaker 12 (52:04):
Forever O.
Speaker 14 (52:29):
Shao singing Holygallyso say.
Speaker 4 (52:45):
That was fun. Thank you so much for listening and
for sticking around for the credits. How to Live Forever
is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast. This show
is hosted and written badly by me Mungash. Together, then
all of these talented humans and sweep in and make
it so much better, starting with Mary Philip Sandy, our
supervising producer who can do absolutely everything except drink milk.
(53:09):
Please don't offer her milk, give it to a cat instead.
The show is eped by my superstar wife, Lizzy Jacobs,
who is well known podcasting, but better known in my
house for her famous elementary school story The Sun Also Sets.
Skyline is story edited by Mark Lotto, a story savon
and also a closet basketball fan who knew our science
(53:29):
producer is Mark Steven Allen. Mark, thank you for taking
me to Boston and to see the world's Tiniest mouse Rave.
I want to thank Anna from Computer City Productions for
mixing this episode and for working overtime to make it
so beautiful. Thank you Anna. Thank you to Botany as
z Atti Records and Bliss sampsa for the stunning music.
(53:50):
If you want to hear more, we made you a mixtape.
Just check out the show notes. Research support from Lucas
Riley and Matt Riddle, both of who told me lots
and lots the secrets about living forever. I will share
them with you next episode. This show is executive produced
from iHeart but my good friends Ali Perry and Katrina Norvel.
It would not have happened without my pals at Kaleidoscope,
(54:12):
including Oswa Alishan and Costislinas. Thank you both. Thank you
so much to Julia Nutter, David Weisboard and Shino Zaki
for lending us your ears and for bearing with early
versions of the show. The very best lawyer and person
Rachel Strom. I cannot recommend her enough. Thank you for
your counsel and also for taking my kid to Pride
night at a Liberty game. That was the cherry on top. Also,
(54:37):
Christy L. Viney, thank you for the beautiful marketing work
you've done for the show. I'm really bad at this,
so if I missed you, please text me. Special thanks
to all the kiddos, Henry Ruby, Julian Branda, lou Rima,
Enzo Pearl Baby Leyon, how could I forget you?
Speaker 14 (54:52):
Baby?
Speaker 1 (54:52):
Layon?
Speaker 4 (54:53):
All my friends at iHeart, including Bob Connell, Kerry, Nikki, Anna, Jason,
Jerry and Moore wear A Crew, my New York Crew,
and my Atlanta Crewe. There are too many to name.
Also Shata and Sah, my family in India, my family
and the States. That voice at the top was my
good friend and basically family. Will Pearson, who you may
(55:15):
recognize from the cover of Sport magazine, Thank you for
quitting baseball and starting a trivia magazine with me instead. Will,
And as always, this show is for my dad and
for my mom, both of whom I thank my lucky
stars for
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