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--:-- Shamitha Basu: Advancements in science and medicine are allowing humans to live longer than ever. Some illnesses that once carried a terminal diagnosis are now treatable, or even curable.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: For all of our progress, though, the human condition still has an expiration date. Death is inevitable. But there are some people who are trying to challenge that idea. It really depends on who you talk to. Some people are really convinced that they're going to live forever.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: I'm talking with Jacqueline Detweiler-George. She's been reporting on the researchers and scientists who don't see death as an inevitability, but as a problem to be sidestepped and eventually totally overcome.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: I think the thing right now is that we're targeting very specific diseases and very specific things. So, you know, we're trying to cure cancer specifically or we're trying to cure heart disease, but we're not addressing this overall unraveling of the body as you get older.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: Yeah, yeah. I mean, aging is the strongest risk factor for death from all age-related diseases, right? So if you target aging by itself and you figure out what that is, like what that underlying process is that makes people vulnerable to these other diseases, then presumably you can make larger strides that advance human lifespan at least more broadly.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: Detweiler George's article in Popular Mechanics is called Can Science Cure Death? You can read and listen to it on Apple News with an Apple News Plus subscription.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: When I spoke with her, I asked where the science is right now and just how seriously we should consider death a curable condition. There seem to be sort of two camps that you're reporting on. Can you talk about what they're trying to accomplish?
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: As with any science that's in its infancy, right, you have these really powerful early theories and basic research that's going on into how cells work and health span or increasing the amount of livable, happy, healthy life that you get before you die. Or even just increasing lifespan by 20 years or 30 years, something that we haven't really seen yet.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: And there are a lot of theories about what causes aging. And then on the other side, what you have are people who are jumping in and some of them call themselves immortalists or anti-deathists and kind of building on the excitement and trying to either make money or it could just be that they're personally optimistic about some thing that they built or that they want to work and they're trying to sell it to people.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: It can be very hard for people who aren't versed in this stuff to figure out which is which. But that's part of what we did the article for.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: You described this conference that happens annually called RADFest. Yeah. It stands for Revolution Against Aging and Death. Can you just, can you paint the picture, take us there? What's this conference like?
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: The guy who runs the Coalition for Radical Life Extension, which runs RADFest, his name's James Stroll. His real idea is that we need to reconsider how we think about death, right? We need to have like a humanitarian revolution against this deathist paradigm. We need to change movies. We need to change the way we think about it. And so Radfest is a manifestation of that.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: He calls it Woodstock for anti-aging, basically. There's music. There's dance. There are people in conference wear doing exercises in the audience. There are panels. You know there like a show floor where you can try out some of these different treatments some of which are kind of invasive it seems to me for a conference floor.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: Like what I saw somebody getting like an IV basically which I was like I don't think I would get an IV from a booth at a Las Vegas conference I don't know Maybe some people would. Clearly some people would.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: So things like that and vendors and a lot of vendors that I think if you have any science background, you would look at with some skepticism, You know, magnet mats and, you know, pendants and oils and things like that.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: So there's definitely a lot of hope there. And there is a lot of talk of science that is in its infancy but is exciting. But it's kind of interspersed with this wild hippie music festival is the vibe that I get from it.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: Yeah, it gave off some really festively kind of atmosphere. But to your point, it also did sound like there were some seemingly bad actors there to sort of prey on people who are searching for longevity, right?
--:-- Shamitha Basu: Right. I mean, that's the thing is there are lots of different reasons that you get into this, you know, and for some people, it's really a serious fear of death or they, you know, they have some disease or there's some reason that they feel an urgency about it. And those people can be preyed upon because, you know, the science is in its infancy.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: There aren't a lot of concrete recommendations you can give. So if somebody goes to an event like that and there is all this hard science talk that is really inspiring and then they go on the show floor and someone's like, you know what you need is this, you know, these copper socks or whatever. And, you know, some of these things are very expensive.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: In the article, I talked about a $8,500 air filtration system. I mean, you don't need that, you know, and somebody is going to spend $8,500 on that. And it's probably not going to make them live longer.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: And, you know, that's a pretty sad and scary situation that that is going on. But it's not all bad actors out there. You do introduce us to some people who have been studying this, who are established names in this.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: You introduce us to Dr. David Sinclair. You call him the guy in longevity research. So tell us about him and his research.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: Yeah, I'm sure there's other people in longevity research who are like, what? He's one of the guys. Let's not play favorites. No, but he is. He really is. He has been in just really so many incredible publications. His research is very compelling.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: So I think what's interesting about what David Sinclair is doing is his lab has focused on one particular process that he thinks underlies a lot of how our bodies break down as we age and that he thinks can explain a lot of the things that happen to us.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: And the way he has done that, he's actually doing experiments on mice where he has reversed this process to some degree.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: I think we should all be excited about what's possible. Clearly, it is possible to some degree.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: I like how you described Sinclair as having the same sort of mad optimism that seems to strike everyone who works in longevity research.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: If this is something you do, no matter how logical and scientific you are about it, you're going to want to use it on yourself, right? Like death is the great equalizer. We all don't really want to die or at the very least don't want to get diseases of aging before we die.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: So in his case, I mean, he talks a lot. He's been on podcasts. He has a book. And he's very clear about the things that he does himself. A lot of the things are perfectly normal.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: He avoids smoking. He tries not to eat too much. He exercises, he uses saunas, things like that. And, you know, there are some supplements. All things a doctor might tell you to do.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: One of the things he mentioned is he likes to eat stressed plants because his belief is that the plants being grown under these stressful conditions increases certain protective factors in the plants. And so then when you eat them, you get the benefits of those protective factors.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: Right. Yeah, to some people that sounds a little kooky, but like it might work. Why not?
--:-- Shamitha Basu: I like how you described it as saying you sort of wondered what his garden might look like A bunch of really stressed out plants that have been grown under the worst conditions They toughen up That what I said I was like it sounds like my garden actually but I didn't do it on purpose Unintentionally I just not good at it Yeah
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: So what are some of the concrete as you put it the sort of practical mostly widely agreed upon things that people can do to possibly live longer and healthier?
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: The big ones are associated with this concept called hormesis, which is gently stressing your body in such a way that it encourages your body to protect itself with these particular biological factors.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: So a lot of the ones that are supported are things like getting into saunas or letting yourself get cold. So kind of allowing your body to experience temperature fluctuations.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: The main one, honestly, the intervention with the biggest support is to eat less. Eat less. Eat less, yes. So there's been a lot of studies in mice, in monkeys, in humans.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: And when you restrict calories, whether you do it, I think a lot of people do recommend something like intermittent fasting now, but it can also just be like a general calorie restriction.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: So that's one of the most supported ones. Both Dr. Sinclair and Dr. Nir Barzilai, who is another expert I talked to for this, do intermittent fasting.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: And so just explain briefly, what is intermittent fasting for anyone who's not familiar with how it works?
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: Yeah, so there are different ways of doing it. The main two that I've heard about are the 5-2 diet, which is you eat normally five days a week, and then two days a week you do just 500 calories for the day, which is hard.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: I've done it. I did a biohacking article a few years ago and tried that out, and by the end of the day you get kind of cranky. But you do feel pretty good.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: I felt fine. So it's 500 calories over the course of the day. Yeah. And it's not restricting your time when you're eating. It's just restricting your calories.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: Well, that's one way to do it. And then the one that's more popular is 16-8. But again, like you can change these. These are just kind of like popular ones. You know, some people just don't eat for 12 hours every night and that's how they do it.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: 16-8 is you restrict your eating window to eight hours. So you only eat within eight hours. And there's a fair amount of research in rats, I believe, that when they're allowed to eat whenever they want this high-fat diet, they develop all these diseases that we associate with aging, cardiovascular disease, all that kind of stuff.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: And then when you restrict them to eight hours, they can still eat whatever they want. They just eat it within this eight hours, then that goes away.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: So there's some fairly compelling evidence for that as well. But again, you don't have to be really strict about this. You can just eat less. You can skip lunch. You can do a lot of things to try to make it less miserable because I know people joke about, you know, you might live for an extra 10 years, but it'll feel like 30 if you can't eat whenever you want, you know.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: So you do want to have an enjoyable life, you know, just a long one.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: You know, one thing I appreciated, Jackie, in this article is that you did sort of touch on the issue of what would happen if humans started living longer lives and the sort of ripple effect, the problems that it might create that I'm thinking about overpopulation and environmental damage.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: What do some of the people that you speak to say about that?
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: I did talk to some people who thought that maybe it wouldn't be a problem. I think the optimism is contagious kind of throughout longevity research. So if you're somebody who already thinks like, we're going to live forever, like we're going to have this amazing future, like you can kind of convince yourself that we're going to solve all these other problems too, right?
--:-- Shamitha Basu: Like, it's just a kind of a way of thinking. But, you know, I think there are real potential problems. The big one is with how egalitarian we can implement it. So obviously, it's not going to be everybody at first, especially when this is really expensive to monitor your body or to get these treatments that may come in the future.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: It's not going to be everybody that's going to be able to afford them. The rich people are going to be able to afford them first. And so you know you really have to make sure that we're not creating this oligarchy or some kind of society where like some people get to live forever and other people don't.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: That a Black Mirror episode I think I mean like that what it sounds like to me Yeah yeah It becomes deeply philosophical really and ethical Yeah It really becomes an ethical question Yeah it does
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: I wonder if did Dr Sinclair or any of the other researchers really because you spoke to several of them talk about how they consider these ethical questions
--:-- Shamitha Basu: So, if you're a scientist and you're working on this, one of the ways people are thinking about it is an increase in health span versus an increase in lifespan. And that is something that is more of an equalizer.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: That is something that I think we should all be hopeful for, right? Because, for example, people who have HIV live on average 10 years less than people who don't. There are people who don't have access to healthy food or exercise opportunities. There are, you know, people who have whatever genes lead them to have early onset Alzheimer's.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: All of these sorts of things, like we're not living equal lifespans now. And so if you can create interventions that can lift up the bottom of that, kind of like lift this lower level, you know, the thing that I say personally is my great grandma, she lived to be 96 and wasn't sick and died while she still had tickets for a riverboat gambling cruise out of Biloxi.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: So like, you know, I mean, she really went for it till the very end. What scientists are kind of thinking about is like creating the situation where everybody can have that kind of like full life straight up to the end.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: And then I think that that's something that you can get on board with the philosophy pretty easy.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: Do you have any advice for people on how to separate the junkie science around anti-aging from the good science?
--:-- Shamitha Basu: In every area of science where it's popular, that's always the hard question, right? Sure. How does a person who hasn't studied this or doesn't have the ability to call up David Sinclair, which is most of us, figure out whether this is real or not?
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: I think in general, supplements – I mean, you have to understand supplements are very unregulated in this country. You can put claims on the bottle that have absolutely nothing behind them.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: Um, so generally speaking, I think the most interesting thing I heard from somebody is, if it really worked, it wouldn't have to advertise itself to you as something that was an anti-aging because you would know, you would have heard, you know what I mean?
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: That's funny, yeah. Yeah, you would have heard about it. And that's not to say that there aren't supplements that might work, but what you have to understand is until it has been thoroughly studied and FDA approved, you are kind of guessing.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: But, you know, in general, use common sense. You know, magnets probably, if they led to people living 150 years, we would know that by now and you would have heard about it. So maybe don't invest in the magnet map that you're saying.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: If you were able to put a number on it after having spoken to all these researchers, does anyone put a number on it? You know, when might we be able to extend lifespans? And if so, how long can lifespans get?
--:-- Shamitha Basu: That question is tough. I did actually put that to David Sinclair. And what I asked him was, do you think we'll live forever? I mean, forever is a huge question.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: And he said, I don't think anytime in the next 500 years that humans will live forever. So what that means is that if you're listening to this, you're going to die, you know, probably.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: Right. But how quickly can we extend life? And which is going to happen first? Are we going to lift, kind of lift all boats to the end point we've established now? Or are we going to extend the extreme living people farther into their 150s or whatever?
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: Which is going to happen first? I would say that first scenario is going to happen first, where it's going to be more of us are going to last closer to the limit versus that the limit is going to change.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: Oh, so fascinating. Jackie Detweiler-George, thank you so much for taking some time to talk with us about this.
--:-- Jacqueline Detweiler-George: Yeah, it was great to talk to you. Jacqueline Detweiler-George's article is available for Apple News Plus subscribers. iPhone users can subscribe in the Apple News app. Thank you.
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