Reversing Aging: Visionen, Wissenschaft und ethische Fragen der Langlebigkeitsforschung

Aubrey de Grey ist ein visionärer britischer Biogerontologe, der zu den bekanntesten Persönlichkeiten in der modernen Altersforschung zählt. Geboren 1963 in London, hat er sich das ehrgeizige Ziel gesetzt, den Alterungsprozess des Menschen grundlegend zu verstehen und zu verlangsamen. Mit seiner Forschung verfolgt er die Idee, dass Altern kein unvermeidliches Schicksal, sondern eine behandelbare biologische Herausforderung ist.

Als Mitbegründer der SENS Research Foundation (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) hat de Grey einen innovativen Ansatz entwickelt, der darauf abzielt, altersbedingte Zell- und Gewebeschäden gezielt zu reparieren. Durch seine inspirierende Arbeit und sein unermüdliches Engagement hat er weltweit das Interesse an der Lebensverlängerung und regenerativen Medizin neu belebt. Viele sehen in ihm einen Pionier, der den Mut hat, groß zu denken und die Grenzen des Möglichen in der Biologie neu zu definieren. Aubrey de Grey steht damit für Hoffnung, Fortschritt und die Vision einer gesünderen, längeren Zukunft für die Menschheit.

027 Reversing Aging and the Future of Longevity. With Aubrey de Grey

[Aubrey de Grey] (0:00 - 0:22)
Nobody wants to get sick, and so they kind of pretend that aging is somehow special, that it's somehow distinct from the so-called diseases of aging, which it isn't. There's no biological difference between the so-called diseases of aging and aging itself. There's no such thing as aging itself.

[Nils Behrens] (0:22 - 1:14)
Welcome to HEALTHWISE, the health and longevity podcast brought to you by Sunday Natural. I'm Nils Behrens, and in this podcast, we explore what it truly means to be healthy. Together, we will dive into topics such as medicine, exercise, nutrition, and emotional well-being, always with a wise perspective on what generally benefits us.

My guest today is Aubrey de Grey, a well-renowned biogeontologist and a visionary in the field of longevity research. He is best known for his groundbreaking approach as to reversing aging and his belief that aging could soon be treatable. As the co-founder of the SENS Research Foundation, he dedicates his life to exploring how we can significantly extend human life and overcome age-related diseases.

And so I say a warm welcome to Aubrey de Grey. 

[Aubrey de Grey] (1:14 – 1:15)
Hi there, thank you for having me. 

[Nils Behrens] (1:15 – 1:19)
Dear Aubrey, how does a perfect Sunday look like for you?

[Aubrey de Grey] (1:19 - 1:30)
Perfect Sunday? A perfect Sunday is a day when I am not traveling and I am just able to stare at the sky from my hot tub at home.

[Nils Behrens] (1:30 - 1:35)
Okay, sounds very good. So when did you first realize that aging isn't necessarily inevitable?

[Aubrey de Grey] (1:37 - 2:43)
Well, the thing is, I didn't really have a time when I realized that, because nobody ever told me that it was inevitable. It had always been obvious to me that the human body is a machine, which accumulates damage like any other machine, and that this damage can be repaired. And if you do so, then you extend the functioning lifespan of the machine, just like getting the rust off a car every so often before the doors fall off.

And the thing I didn't realize was that other people didn't think that way. I only found out in my 30s, well, around the age of 30, that most people viewed aging as this kind of mystery that was kind of woven into the fabric of the universe, and there was nothing we could do about it. And that was a huge surprise to me, because it was obviously not true.

And yet, perfectly intelligent, knowledgeable people seem to think it.

[Nils Behrens] (2:44 - 2:50)
That's really interesting. So how would you explain your concept of reversing aging to someone who never heard of your work?

[Aubrey de Grey] (2:51 - 5:41)
So the best, the simplest way to explain the way that I think we're going to bring aging under medical control is to actually continue with this analogy that I just gave about remembering that the human body is a machine. So if we look at cars or airplanes or whatever, then they have a warranty period, there's an amount of time that they are guaranteed to last for. But we know that some cars are working just as well as when they were built, even though they are 10 times older than their warranty period, like more than 100 years old.

And that's because if you use a machine, it accumulates damage as a consequence of its normal operation. But the machine is set up to tolerate a certain amount of that damage without any decline in function. It's only when there's more damage than that certain amount that you have a problem that things start to not work so well.

So if you do preventative maintenance, if you just repair that damage and maintain and restore the structure and composition of the machine to how it was when it was first constructed, then it will carry on working. The definition of a machine really is that its function is determined by its structure. So if we come to the human body, you know, it's a really, really, really complicated machine, but it's still a machine.

And it accumulates damage as a consequence of its normal operation. And if we can figure out a panel of treatments of medicines that can repair that damage and restore the body at the molecular level and the cellular level to something like how it was as a young adult, then that will stop us from going downhill, from getting sick as a result of having been born a long time ago. That's the entire idea really.

And of course, the only reason it's a sensible idea is because one can actually describe what it means in practice, one can describe what changes occur to the structure and composition of the human body during adult life, and therefore what one has to repair. And I was able to do that 25 years ago, almost, pretty thoroughly, because people have been studying aging for a long time. So we already knew what changes occurred.

The place where some innovation was needed was to develop ideas for how we might repair some of that damage. There were some types of damage, like for example, cells dying and not being replaced by the division of other cells that people already understood, you know, you can use stem cell therapy to repair that kind of damage. But there are other ones where I had to come up with whole new ways to repair the damage.

[Nils Behrens] (5:42 - 5:49)
Okay, excellent, excellent. There are many skeptics when it comes to longevity research. How do you respond to the biggest critics of your work?

[Aubrey de Grey] (5:50 - 6:57)
Well, there are not so many skeptics as they used to be. When I started talking about all of this, first of all, I had to convince my colleagues in the academic community. And this whole idea of damage repair was a big paradigm shift.

Before then, people were focused only on the possibility of slowing aging down, not of reversing it. And so I had to work quite hard to persuade my colleagues that this was a sensible way to think. That took maybe 10 years.

But in the mid 2000s, I guess, I started to come to the attention of the wider world and started, you know, getting a lot of media attention and so on. And then absolutely, there was a lot of criticism from non-scientists, non-biologists, people who didn't really understand what I was saying at all, but that didn't stop them from criticizing it. And of course, I was ready for that.

You know, it wasn't in any way surprising. But, you know, it's just part of the job. If people don't know what they're criticizing, but they criticize anyway, then you just have to be patient and explain to them why they're wrong.

[Nils Behrens] (6:59 - 7:05)
You talk often about the seven deadly signs of aging. Could you briefly explain what these are and why they are so crucial?

[Aubrey de Grey] (7:05 - 10:55)
Yeah, right. So, as I was mentioning earlier, the human body is a really, really complicated machine. And so, the changes that happen in the body, the things that are the underlying drivers of aging, these changes, there are lots and lots and lots and lots of them.

But it turned out to be useful to, if you like, classify these changes into a manageable number of categories. And the reason that's useful is because it helps us to organize the process of developing medicines that are going to be required to fix this thing. So, I mentioned loss of cells a minute ago.

So, this is like, obviously, the body is made of a lot of cells, like 30 trillion cells or something like that. And cells come in different types. Some of those cells just sit there and don't divide, like brain cells, neurons.

And that's kind of like, sometimes they die, but not very often. Some cells are very much more short-lived, like the cells in the blood, for example. Most cells in the blood are very short-lived, and they have to be replaced regularly.

So, we have cells in our bone marrow that are stem cells that divide and replenish the cells that the body is losing all the time. The same in the skin, the same in the lining of the gut. But sometimes those stem cells get depleted.

We don't have so many of them in old age as we did earlier. And the cells that are not replaced, the ones like neurons, for example, they also get depleted, because sometimes those cells die and they're not replaced at all. So, of course, there's a problem there, because eventually, after enough cells have died, you're not going to have enough cells for the organ in question to do the job.

So, let's take Parkinson's disease, for example. That's a disease, of course, of neurodegeneration, and it's caused by cell loss. There's a particular type of cell in the brain called a dopaminergic neuron, that we lose them rather rapidly compared to other brain cells, and they're not replaced.

But the thing is, we have an idea for how to fix that, which is stem cell therapy. You can just inject stem cells into the right part of the brain, and they will divide and transform to replace the cells that the body is not replacing on its own. Okay, so we're now pretty good at that, and there are clinical trials going on to do exactly what I just described.

But then the question is, like, are there other cells in the body that are also in need to replace? And, of course, there are, but you can do the same kind of thing. Not exactly the same thing, but nearly the same thing.

You can do stem cell therapy. Different stem cell therapies for different organs have some differences, but they're only differences of detail, which means that once you've got stem cell therapy working reasonably well for one or two tissues, you can get the next one working and the one after that much more quickly and much more easily, because you can reuse the knowledge, the expertise that you gained in all the trial and error that you had to go into to get the first one working. So that's why this classification is useful. So I had these seven deadly things, as you rightly called them.

These were categories of types of damage that accumulate in the body. And for each one, there was this generic approach to doing the fixing. So for cell loss, it was stem cell therapy.

For waste products that accumulate inside the cell, I had this idea of using genes found in bacteria to break them down, things like that.

[Nils Behrens] (10:56 - 11:07)
Okay. Excellent. Excellent.

So when you look at the current technologies, which are, from your point of view, the most promising? You said already stem cells. Is this the most promising for you at the moment?

[Aubrey de Grey] (11:08 - 12:04)
There's definitely no one thing that's the most promising. You can't really have that, because we've got all these different types of damage. They need different approaches to fixing them.

So all of these things need to be developed and given to the same people at the same time. There's no one that's the most important. However, what I will say is it's very important when we look at biomedical technologies to remember that aging is not something that we work on in isolation.

The most useful, well, many of the most useful technologies that are going to be involved in treating aging in this way and repairing the damage of aging are ones that are equally useful across the whole of medicine, not just aging. So for example, CRISPR, which is this way to modify the genome, that's useful for diseases of childhood, just as it's useful for aging.

[Nils Behrens] (12:05 - 12:27)
Excellent. Excellent. So we are at the moment here now on a conference, and we also have seen a lot of many new researches here.

And when you look at some of these technologies which are presented in terms of drug discovery and things like that, are there anything which you might see also extremely promising for the future?

[Aubrey de Grey] (12:28 - 13:39)
Oh, definitely. I mean, one of the big things that I always emphasize when I give interviews is, well, 20 years ago, when I first started talking about the seven deadly things and the way to fix them. I only had one approach for each of the seven types of categories of damage, one possible way of going about fixing it.

And now for each of the seven, there are multiple approaches that are out there. So for example, cell loss that we're talking about earlier. We have stem cell therapy, but that's all we had.

Now we've got this thing called partial reprogramming, which is a system for getting cells that are already in the body to behave more like stem cells than they normally would, and to therefore be able to regenerate and replace lost cells more effectively than they normally would in an old person. This is a very new idea. It was only first started to be developed just a few years ago as a result of work that was published first in like 2006, which was after I had come up with the original scheme.

[Nils Behrens] (13:40 - 13:54)
I find it very interesting. Yesterday, there was a presentation about the 12 hallmarks of aging and that at the end, most of the 11 hallmarks are caused because of one hallmark, the dysbiosis. Do you have an opinion about that?

[Aubrey de Grey] (13:55 - 14:57)
Yeah. So all of the so-called hallmarks of aging are linked to each other in one way or another. So I mean, you could think of my seven deadly things as hallmarks before hallmarks were cool, right? That was the original list of hallmarks.

The more recent attempts to classify aspects of aging into these hallmarks are actually, I don't think they're quite as good as my one was, largely because they are not built on the need to have corresponding repair approaches. They're more of just kind of a classification for the sake of classifying. But the thing is, everything talks to everything else.

So there are other people who would say that cross-linking is actually the hallmark that matters the most and it causes everything else. But that's also a bit of an exaggeration. Essentially, you can't have a hierarchy of these things.

Each of them has influences on the others, but that goes in both directions.

[Nils Behrens] (14:58 - 15:04)
Okay, excellent. So what would you say, how realistic is it that we will see a complete reversal of aging in the near future?

[Aubrey de Grey] (15:05 - 15:49)
Well, so of course, I've been thinking about timeframes since I started in this field. At this point, I think we have a 50-50 chance of getting to a pretty effective level of comprehensiveness in developing these damage repair approaches within the next 12 to 15 years, the second half of next decade. And so that's a threshold that I call longevity escape velocity, which is the point where we haven't necessarily completely fixed aging, but we've fixed enough of it to be able to buy us maybe 20 years of additional life, which will be enough time to figure out how to make it even better and so on.

[Nils Behrens] (15:49 - 15:54)
What would you say are the biggest obstacles when we need to overcome this achievement?

[Aubrey de Grey] (15:56 - 16:35)
The main obstacle is that still society is terrified of getting its hopes up. Almost everybody in humanity is absolutely terrified of aging, so much so that their only way of coping with it is to pretend that they're not terrified at all and to make these stupid arguments that aging is some kind of blessing in disguise or whatever. And so aging is not taken seriously as a medical condition the way it should be.

And that means that there's not nearly enough money being spent trying to develop these things. At the moment, I still have to spend most of my time just raising a small amount of money to get work done.

[Nils Behrens] (16:36 - 16:51)
Okay, so in terms of the society, what would you say is the view on stop aging? Because I think a lot of people are thinking that this is ethically not justifiable.

[Aubrey de Grey] (16:51 - 17:45)
So a lot of people say that it's ethically not justifiable or words to that effect. But of course, do they really think that? I don't think so.

Because, you know, nobody wants to get sick. Right? And that's all we're talking about.

We're just talking about stopping people from getting sick. It's as if like, it's like saying that it's terribly good to be trying as hard as you can to do something just so long as one doesn't succeed. It's ridiculous.

It's absurd. Nobody wants to get sick. And so they kind of pretend that aging is somehow special, that it's somehow distinct from the so called diseases of aging, which it isn't.

There's no biological difference between the so called diseases of aging and aging itself. There's no such thing as aging itself.

[Nils Behrens] (17:46 - 17:57)
Yeah. What would you say? How likely it is that this could become just a privilege of the, let's say, rich people, there's no way in the world that that would ever happen.

[Aubrey de Grey] (17:57 - 18:47)
And that's, it's very easy to explain why it couldn't happen. The simple answer is, aging is extremely expensive for society, extraordinarily expensive, like the vast majority 80%, 90% of the medical budget of the Western world goes on the health problems of late life. If you can stop those health problems from happening, you save a lot of money, right?

Now, of course, even if you have to spend some of that money on the therapies, the preventative therapies that stop people from getting sick when they get old, fine, but you still, the therapies will pay for themselves many, many times over really quickly, which means that it would be economically suicidal for any government not to make sure that these treatments are available, independent of the ability to pay.

[Nils Behrens] (18:47 - 18:52)
Longevity could have a significant impact to the global population. What is your view on that? 

[Aubrey de Grey] (18:52 - 21:04)
This is probably the single most common criticism of, of this kind of work. They say, oh, well, we put all the people. And of course, you could argue that today, we already have a problem of overpopulation.

And that's why we have like climate change, because there are so many people. But this is not because of the number of people. This is because of the amount of pollution that people make.

So everything that we're doing now to develop other technologies, like, you know, carbon capture, or bacteria that eat plastics, or artificial meat, things like that, these are going to reduce the amount of pollution that people make. So we will actually have less of an overpopulation problem as we go forward, even if we have more people. We must also remember that we will only have more people very slowly, you know, even though we, if even if nobody dies, oh, then we've still only got like, people are only getting older at one year per year, right.

And so, you know, there's no way that you could possibly have, like, 20 billion people on the planet for 100 years, at least. And, you know, it's generally a bad idea to make decisions today of what to do today, on the basis of what you think the world is going to be like 100 years from now, we have no idea what the world's going to be like 100 years from now. I wish I could be more, you know, useful than that.

But I don't have any magical secrets. The main thing that one can do is, first of all, don't die in stupid ways when you're young, like don't get into a car accident. And secondly, do whatever you can to speed up the research, right, so that you have a better chance of benefiting from that research of things that don't yet exist.

So you know, write me a check if you can, if you don't have if you don't have a large bank balance, you could interview me, for example, or you could just be and get involved in advocacy. Or if you're a scientist, get into an impactful area of research that's relevant to this kind of work.

[Nils Behrens] (21:05 - 21:10)
So what would you say? How does your work and your knowledge of longevity influence your own lifestyle?

[Aubrey de Grey] (21:12 - 21:36)
Well, I, my lifestyle is, like, is, is really defined by my work, you know, I spend a lot more time than I would like traveling, and traveling around the world, giving lectures, going to conferences, and so on. Because I have to get the word out, I have to get people to understand what's going on and why it's important.

[Nils Behrens] (21:37 - 21:46)
And finally, what is your biggest dream for the future of humanity? If your visions of reverse aging become a reality? What's my vision of humanity?

[Aubrey de Grey] (21:47 - 22:04)
Well, honestly, you know, it's a world in which there are lots of people who were born a long time ago, but there's no one biologically old, right? And so basically, everyone's healthy, right? And that's a very nice world to be thinking about, no one gets sick.

That would be nice.

[Nils Behrens] (22:05 - 22:15)
Excellent. Thank you very much. May I ask, do you take any supplements on a regular basis?

[Aubrey de Grey] (22:15 - 22:37)
No. I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's decidedly unclear whether supplements do you good or not. I mean, but the point is, they do, they have different benefits for different people. Everyone's different.

Everyone's got different needs. And I just seem to be well built, you know, I can eat and drink what I like and nothing happens. And I don't even need to exercise.

[Nils Behrens] (22:38 - 23:03)
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