Watch the video response here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tsI_28O3Ws
This was posted here on lesswrong a while ago, but they recently uploaded a new version of the video and I took the liberty of typing up a transcript.
The video is fairly long, about 25 minutes. But it's incredibly engaging and I highly recommend watching it. For those who prefer text (because it's faster or because you are a computer), you can read the transcript in this google doc, or below in the comments. Enjoy!
Part 1
Aubrey De Grey AMA
SENS Foundation
(0:27) What specific progress have you made over the past five years? How have your research priorities changed over that time? Are there any ideas that you held close to your heart that subsequent research has overturned? Have you uncovered anything that particularly surprised you in light of your previous research?
SENS foundation has made really encouraging, really dramatic progress over the past five years. We of course work on the very most difficult parts of the SENS panel of applying regenerative medicine to aging, the parts that are at the earliest stage and therefore at the greatest risk of being neglected by other people. And a great example is our work on the elimination of the molecular garbage that accumulates inside cells as byproducts of metabolism. This is something that causes cardiovascular disease. And just recently we published a paper in which we were the first people to show that introducing a bacterial enzyme into human cells in culture can protect them very powerfully against the accumulation and toxicity of the number one toxin in atherosclerosis. Of course, other areas of the SENS panel that other people are pursuing independently of us have also made great progress. So all in all, I’m enormously encouraged. And in terms of changes in what I think is going to happen and what I think could happen, really the only things that have occurred have been good news changes. Cases where people have discovered new shortcuts that make something even easier than we previously thought it was. The rate of progress that we’re seeing is really pretty much what I would have expected overall given the level of funding that’s available, though I know that it could have gone faster and could go faster in the future if that funding is elevated.
(2:08) What about stem cell research? When can we expect to have fully developed artificially made organs such as the heart, lung, or liver? Is there going to be any advancement in brain regeneration in the near future?
Stem cell research and the whole idea of tissue engineering, which is of course one application of stem cell research in a way, is an area that’s probably moving faster than any other in regenerative medicine. Essentially, what we’re seeing at the moment is really dramatic progress in a couple of particular techniques that were only really introduced a few years ago and which are already moving so fast that within a decade I would expect them to overtake traditional organ replacement by transplantation. Those techniques are firstly decellularizing an organ, taking the cells away and just leaving its vasculature and then repopulating that vasculature with new cells. This is a way of avoiding the problems of immune rejection that have of course been the major difficulty of normal organ transplantation since it was first developed. And the second technique being organ printing. The creation using just inkjet printers, using material – biological material laid down one layer at a time. Just in the same way we are seeing 3D printers for non-biological things. These things have been moving so fast that I’m really optimistic about how dramatically they’re going to revolutionize regenerative medicine over the next decade. With regard to the brain of course we can’t look at wholesale replacement of the brain all in one go – that would rather defeat the object. But we can certainly look at stem cell therapies to replace cells that have died and that have of course not been automatically been replaced by the division of other cells. And that’s also moving forward really rapidly with new ways to introduce cells in a way that they’ll migrate around the brain starting from the point where we inject them, and also with ways to remove molecular garbage that accumulates in the brain in diseases like Alzheimer’s.
(4:21) Restoring the pluripotency of somatic cells is very problematic, and pluripotency reversion is a very recent discovery, but it is necessary for your “WILT” approach to defeating cancer. Do you really think it would be possible to develop a cost-efficient industrial process for stem-cell production, in the time-span that you have estimated necessary for the completion of your project?
I’m extremely optimistic about how soon we’re going to see pluripotent stem cells produced from differentiated cell by this de-differentiation concept reaching the clinic. And I’m not the only person who’s optimistic about this. That’s why there are companies like BioTime out there in the private sector pursuing this. Of course in the private sector we normally only see things pursued on a relative short time frame compared to academia. So that’s another testament to that optimism. Really what we’re seeing is not only improvements to the simplicity of the technologies with which we can create embryonic-like stem cells starting from differentiated cells, but also we’re seeing improvements in the quality of those cells, in the extent to which their epigenetic memory, as it’s called, can be really thoroughly erased. So this is moving extremely fast.
(5:18) Has there been progress in verifying your theory of mitochondrial DNA damage?
There’s been some progress in confirming this theory. One of the most heretical – or unorthodox – components of my proposal back in 1997, was that mitochondrial destruction, that happens automatically, ongoingly in cells, is actually a selective process where certain mitochondria are destroyed and other ones are not. Whereas, most people used to think that is was a random process where mitochondria are chosen completely without any, any particular criteria. And, it’s now known that I was right, that this process is selective. Furthermore, the mechanism of that selectivity is now looking as though probably it’s due to changes, chemical changes to the membranes of mitochondria, which again is what I proposed back in 1997. So things are looking good for this theory. However there have been some interesting surprises, for example we now know that mutations in mitochondrial DNA accumulate in stem cells, which is certainly not something that I would have expected back then. However, I do want to emphasize one final point, which is that just like the rest of SENS, the approach that we’re looking at to actually combat the accumulation of mitochondrial mutations does not depend on any particular mechanistic model of how those mutations accumulate in the first place. In this case it involves making those mutations harmless by putting suitably modified copies of the mitochondrial DNA into the nuclear DNA. This is an ambitious project, but the point is that once it works, it doesn’t matter how the mitochondrial mutations got there in the first place.
Part 2
Part 2
(7:01) Around what principles have you organized your current diet?
I believe that there’s only really one general principle that one can use when it comes to diet or indeed supplements or anything that we can do today to postpone age-related ill health. And that principle is simply to pay attention to your body. The reason I say that is just because people differ from each other so much. So any specific generalization that one might make, like you can have more of this particular vitamin or whatever, is bound to have a variable effect on different p... (read more)