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Aubrey de Grey

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33
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2015-11-19
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2015-11-19
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  1. “What it does instead is it makes things easier and faster. Having the genome, even the original one genome, Craig Venter's genome has definitely facilitated a lot of research. But on its own, it doesn't cure things”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “But we're certainly seeing that already. I mean, of course, a lot of this involves enabling technology at the level of informatics and also at the level of simple hardware. So we've got better techniques for sequencing now. We've got better techniques for modification of the genome with things like CRISPR, for example. And, of course, we've also constantly got new advances in computational interpretation of what we know about the genome and the epigenome and the microbiome and so on, what these things are doing. So yes, I think that there's definitely a very heartening and accelerating increase in our ability to maintain health and indeed restore health as a result of all of this. But I think we've always got to remember that things like the ability to sequence things really fast and really cheaply or the ability to process things usually”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “clear that the increase in the carrying capacity of the planet over the next century will way outrun the increase in the actual population of the planet.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “was actually much more modest, much less frightening than people would normally think. Plus also, of course, we're interested in the solutions. So we've got an overpopulation problem today. But the problem is not that we have 7 billion people. The problem is that we have 7 billion people who are all creating a lot of pollution because of fossil fuels and such like. So, of course, the solution to that could be have fewer children or don't cure aging, but it could also be invent new technologies that increase the carrying capacity of the planet. And that's of course exactly what we're doing. We're having a burgeoning of renewable energy. Quite soon we'll have nuclear fusion one way or another in terms of agriculture as well. We obviously need a lot of land right now to create enough food for everybody, but that's changing with the development of artificial meat and so on. So it seems to me pretty damn...”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, so the concept that if we defeated aging, we would have a terrible problem of overpopulation is probably the number one knee-jerk concern that people raise. And it's so insidious and so persistent that we eventually resorted to the option of actually funding a forecasting group in Denver that over the past 30 years developed a very well regarded system called International Futures. We actually funded them to extend the versatility of their system so that it could explore the concept of sense, the concept of actual rejuvenation biotechnologies that would restore the health of people who are already in middle age and keep it there. And of course, we knew what the answer was going to be, more or less, namely that the consequences of that for the trajectory of world population or indeed of populations of”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So I wouldn't call it competition. It's more of a race. Ray and I are, we know each other well, of course, and Ray is very much interested in... In regular biomedical approaches as well. So when he talks about how to live long enough to live forever is the phrase that he likes, he talks about these bridges. There's things that you can do today that will postpone the ill health of old age somewhat. And he is actually a lot more optimistic than me with regard to how much we can postpone aging with stuff that already exists today. But then bridge two, as he calls it, is almost identically fence. It's basically using high-tech biotechnology to repair damage. And bridge three is the one that you're really referring to. The increasing use of what we might just in general call non-biological solutions to medical problems, especially focusing on the more miniaturized stuff like nanotechnology, and then eventually perhaps even on transferring consciousness to a different substrate, the concept of uploading. So the reason I call it erase rather than a”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Along the road and get them to a sufficient level of proof of concept that other people would get interested. And we've been very successful in doing that.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Partly advanced, so for example the elimination of amyloid, which is a kind of molecular waste product that accumulates outside in the species between cells. In some cases, in one case, Alzheimer's disease, that's very much in clinical trials, and we basically solve the problem. That can now be eliminated. It doesn't have much effect on Alzheimer's disease on its own, but it's fair bet that in combination with other therapies that will be developed in the future that fix the other aspects of Alzheimer's, that it's going to be very useful. There are other amyloids, though, in other tissues that accumulate and cause other problems in aging, and we haven't made much progress in those areas, so that's actually one area that we're funding precisely for that reason. You know, since research foundation exists, and indeed was constituted as a charity, specifically because not a lot is happening in a lot of these areas. They're being neglected far too much, and somebody needs to step in and actually kick them along.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So how far along we are in developing these things, of course the different types of damage, the different answers to that question. So in the case of stem cell therapy, of course, there are quite a number of stem cell therapies already in clinical trials. I mentioned the case of Parkinson's disease. There are plenty of other, of course, aspects of ill health that don't have to do with aging that are also amenable to clinical trials using stem cells. Most of the other things are a good deal less far advanced. Some of them are”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, I mean, the. Probably the biggest thing, the biggest component of the sense concept that allowed the whole thing to fly originally was my realization that we have this window of opportunity afforded by the fact that the body is set up to tolerate a certain amount of these various types of damage, which means that we can We can infer that these various types of damage are inert until such time as they've accumulated to a certain threshold of abundance. Now inert means they're not participating in metabolism. So if we just target those initially inert phenomena, then we have a good chance of not having unwanted side effects, not disrupting the labyrinthine network of processes that keep us alive.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well right, so I mean, I think the big thing that technologist, an engineer of any kind has as a starting point is the understanding that any machine and of course the human body is just a machine any machine has moving parts it does damage to itself as a side effect of its normal operation so one can use the same principles like top level principles to postpone the ill health of old age as one might use to keep a car going longer than it was designed to go. That's the easy part. Then the hard part is that because the human body is such an astronomically complicated machine and because we understand it so poorly one has to be quite ingenious in identifying approaches to extending its healthy lifespan that are likely to work despite our ignorance in other words to essentially leave well alone as much as possible”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, it's kinda. I mean, basically peer review is an us covering process, right? It's both the people who actually are providing the money and the people who are selecting who to get the money out of the far too many applications, they need to protect their reputation somehow. And it's just too easy to be cautious and to favor incremental stuff that is within the remit of What the applicant had already done, very close to it. So it's an enormous stifling influence on research. And it's a particularly bad these days when funding is so short, when the pay line, the portion of graphs that are actually funded is so low”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Interesting question. I would say yes and no. I mean, certainly the availability of information online is an enormous opportunity for people to come out of left field and have new ideas. But then, you know, in most sciences and in fact in most fields of technology, one has to be pretty knowledgeable already in order to actually have new ideas that are not completely broken. I would not have been able to come up with sense if it hadn't been for spending those initial five years in the field just learning, just going around and listening a lot and thinking. And The silo question comes later, really. The silo question arises really when we look at the ways in which ideas are taken forward. Because, of course, getting something to actually work once you've decided what you're trying to get working involves the...”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Working on it in about 2005 and it was only 2012 that we were able to demonstrate a really powerful proof of concept showing that we could actually protect cells in cell culture from otherwise lethal amounts of this particular toxin So that's why it was hard battle credibility wise but things are getting better all the time in a large number of these areas just because we are getting to proofs of concept.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And stem cell therapy for Parkinson's disease is a very viable concept. It's actually, there are a couple of clinical trials going on right now that people are very optimistic about. So yeah, and that's the kind of idea. But a lot of the other things I suggested were much further afield from what gerontologists had even heard about in the news, let alone in conferences, things like, for example, well, as I mentioned, finding bacteria that can break down substances like oxidized cholesterol that drives atherosclerosis. The idea would be then you'd find the bacteria, you'd then identify the genes and enzymes that they had that allowed them to break this stuff down, and then you'd modify those genes so that you could put them into human cells and protect the human cells by giving them this augmented garbage disposal capacity. It took us a long time to get it to work. I put the idea forward for the first time back in 1999.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, of course, the different categories have very different approaches. So one example that's very familiar to everybody is the way of repairing the type of damage that I call simply cell loss. So cell loss is just cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells. And various aspects of aging are predominantly driven by that. Parkinson's disease is a fine example where there's a particular part of the brain in which neurons of a particular type tend to diet in unusually rapid rate and that eventually stops that part of the brain from working right. The fix is of course stem cell therapy. You put cells in that can know how to divide and differentiate to replace the cells that the body is not replacing on its own.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Basically, all of it, yeah. I mean, the idea is you don't need to repair all of it, but you do need to repair most of it. The damage comes in a variety of different types, different categories, and within each of the categories there may be a lot of examples. Some of these things may add up, but basically any of the categories can kill you on its own.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I was able to kind of smoke out the opposition, so to speak, which had previously been happening at the level of kind of off-the-record ridicule. And there were a couple of major running battles that I pretty comprehensively won in terms of demonstrating that the ideas that I was putting forward were indeed very plausible and that the conclusion that they were not plausible, that other people had been expressing, was essentially a result of ignorance.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, it stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, but you really don't need to know that. Now you do. But yeah, I mean, so one example, it's not even from anything biomedical, it's from environmental decontamination. The idea of using bacteria as a source of genes and enzymes that can break down material in the body that we don't have any enzymes to break down, thereby, of course, eliminating this stuff and stopping it from accumulating to an eventually toxic level. You know, nobody heard of that. People were pretty intrigued by it, but they didn't really think it was something that made much sense in medical terms, or at least some of them didn't. Of course, in any field, there's a range of degrees of dogmatism. And some of my more vocal detractors certainly just poo-pooed pretty much everything they hadn't already thought of. But in about 2005,”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, so, I mean, there was one example, one big example as a component of sense is not even from anything medical at all.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Options for really implementing this, for doing the damage repair and these other areas were areas that gerontologists didn't know anything about. They'd never come across them when I started talking about them they thought that I was talking about stuff they didn't need to know about, you know, so it was all very difficult.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And I came along and basically my new idea in very simple terms was just that rather than trying to clean up metabolism and thereby slow down the rate at which the body creates damage to itself as a result of its normal operation. Rather than doing that, the idea was to actually repair damage, so to go in one step down the road, so to speak, to do periodic repair, not necessarily completely 100% comprehensive, but fairly comprehensive, so as to maintain a level of damage in the body that was within the tolerance of the body, because the body set up to tolerate a certain amount, right? And that's why nothing really goes wrong until late middle age. So this idea only flew, it only made sense because I was able to identify other areas of biology that gave rise to practical”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Work with the variability and rate of aging that we see in nature, the fact that some species age a lot more slowly than others, even within a species some individuals age a fair bit more slowly than others. If we could understand that phenomenon really well, then maybe we could translate that into understanding into something therapeutic. And it hadn't worked, of course. Nobody was really getting anywhere. And indeed, until the 1990s, pretty much everyone had even given up on trying to admit that that was the ultimate goal of gerontology.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “That's right, to keep us healthy. Keep us healthy, yeah. All right, so Well, right, yes, it was very controversial at first. And of course, this was kind of no surprise to me because when I had this big kind of Eureka moment in 2000 of how to go about this, the realization was a radical departure from what people had been thinking before. Essentially, gerontology for decades had been built on the concept of trying to”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So, first of all, let me point out that you are backsliding a little bit by talking about my efforts to extend life. You've got to remember it's a side effect of extending.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “It was only after the year 2000 when I started putting forward my particular ideas for how we might do something about aging that people started to think of me as more of a troublemaker and in some cases use my lack of experimental training against me as a way of trying to imply that because I didn't know how to work a pipette therefore everything I said was nonsense.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I actually was accepted pretty well pretty quickly. In the first five or so years that I was working as a gerontologist, so basically the second half of the 90s, I was publishing stuff that was relatively harmless. It was like new explanations for other people's data that interpreted them better. And this was actually very well received. I was able to gain quite a reputation for myself. And in fact, the fact that I didn't have the regular traditional experimental training in how to work a pet and so on worked somewhat in my favour. People thought, well, this guy, you know, he's come from nowhere and he's having these ideas that we ought to have had really. And he must be very smart. So I rose to a level of general acceptance and recognition pretty quickly, especially since I was taking the trouble to integrate myself a lot, going to conferences on my own hook and so on.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “There was a lot of overlap there. It was actually one of the big reasons why I decided to switch fields, why I decided that I had a respectable chance of making a significant contribution in biology. I realized that a lot of the reason why people were not making progress in postponing the ill health of old age was because they were going about it more as lifelong basic scientists and not so much as technologists with a more goal-directed kind of way of thinking. I felt that there was a good chance that I would be able to bring in new ways of addressing these issues and thinking about them and maybe come up with ideas that would actually be promising. And sure enough, that's how it turned out.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And that project was very undermanding. It left me a lot of spare time and of course access to all the university facilities and libraries and so on and paid the bills. So I was able essentially to Do research in my spare time. In fact, the reason I originally took the job was so as to resume my artificial intelligence research, which I had had to put on hold for a year or two on account of lack of funding. But when I decided to switch fields, of course, it was just switching what I did in my spare time, so it wasn't something risky.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Making machines smart enough to relieve us of the tedium of having to spend our lives doing things that we wouldn't do if we weren't being paid in order to make the world go round. Yeah, so I wanted that to end, but I always knew that that was only the world's second most important problem. And so after I kind of got over the shock of finding that most people didn't think that way, which I'd never dawned on me until the age of 30 or whatever, yeah, I switched fields, and I was in a very fortunate position there. I was working in the University of Cambridge on a bioinformatics project that was a nice way of combining my formal training in computer science with my newfound informal training in biology.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Which was really quite bizarre, I thought, because I'd always gone through my whole life assuming that everybody understood that aging was the world's most important problem, the source of the world's greatest amount of suffering and so on. But it turned out that my wife and indeed all the other biologists I was meeting were actually of a very different persuasion. They thought that aging was not very interesting and not very important. And I was absolutely appalled and it actually took me another year or two before I really came to terms with it. But eventually I decided that even though I was already working in artificial intelligence research, which I viewed as a humanitarian exercise,”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So, and of course, journalists tend often to sensationalize that. They think it sells more papers if they talk about immortality and other stuff like that. But how did I make the transition? Well, it was quite interesting, actually, and a lot of luck was involved. Essentially, in 2000, when I was in the middle of my work in software verification, I met, and shortly afterwards married, a biologist from the US who was on sabbatical in the UK. She was a full professor at UC San Diego. She's quite a lot older than me. And through her, I first of all learned a lot of biology over the dinner table as one does. But also after a couple of years, it began very gradually to dawn on me that we were never talking about aging.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Well, first of all, thank you for putting in that clarification because it's normally something that I need to put in in interviews, that yes, I'm just a real medical researcher. I work on health and any longevity benefits that may arise from this work are a side effect of health because, of course, being sick is what kills people.”

    2015-11-19 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Defeating Aging with Aubrey de Grey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source