It's a tale as old as time.
Generations upon generations
have obsessed over finding
ways to maintain their youth,
from creams and diets to
surgeries and laser treatments.
Yeah, another solution could be
a lot closer than you think.
Scientists at Harvard have
cracked the code to aging.
Our health expert Doctor Pyle Coley
joins us this morning to talk a
little bit more about exactly what
scientists have discovered here.
Tell us more, doctor.
I could not stop reading this article.
So they first, what they did is they
actually tried to accelerate aging.
So they took mice and they
changed not their DNA,
but the way the DNA was turned on and off.
And what they found is that they aged them
twice as fast as their actual biological age.
So once they understood how
that process works, they said,
OK, let's reverse it and see
if we can slow down aging.
So they took mice that were completely blind,
injected some what's called stem cells,
which are cells that can become,
you know, any type of cell and
kind of engineered or programmed.
Their DNA in a different way.
And the mice regained their vision. Whoa.
And they this worked for brain cells,
that worked for kidney cells,
that worked for muscle cells and it
worked for the entire mouse as well.
So this is just really incredible
breakthrough.
I mean, so this is done in mice.
What is the future look like for humans?
Why is this such a big deal? Basically,
how soon can we get?
Well, we are actually
decades away from it. But really,
I think the reason that this is such
a big deal is because it changed
the way that we think about aging.
So we used to always think
in the scientific community.
That aging is a problem with
the hardware, with our DNA.
And as the DNA replicates,
it accumulates junk or accumulates mutations,
and there's nothing you can do about that.
But what we've now realized based on
these studies is that it's actually a
software issue, not a hardware issue.
So it's the epigenetics,
it's not the DNA itself,
but the way that it's turned on and off,
which can be affected by inflammation,
by stress, by sleep, by smoking,
by a lot of the things that we do.
And if we can reprogram that,
the way that the DNA is expressed,
we can actually reverse the aging.
And so the other piece of this is of course
that they found out that there's actually.
A backup copy, a software reset,
that's inside all of us.
And so if you think about restoring
your computer to its factory condition
when it's starting to kind of act slow
and not do what it's supposed to do,
that's essentially what these
scientists are doing.
They're using that backup copy
to sort of say,
OK,
let's reset your programming so
that your DNA kind of turns on
the way that it was supposed to
when you were younger and gets
rid of all the junk that you've
accumulated based on our bad behavior.
This is awesome because you're right,
and you've been the one to talk to us a lot.
Out make sure we're hydrating enough,
wearing our sunscreen things
that we can tangibly do.
But that's exactly what it's doing.
It's changing our software.
It's kind of giving us that update to make
sure we're not getting those mutations.
I think a lot of people are going to
want to know what challenges lie ahead
with this research for these doctors.
Yeah. So we have to be careful, right,
because when we're starting to change
the biological clock and reverse aging,
could we reverse it so much so
that we can create cancers and
tumors and other types of things.
We want to do it in a way that you're not,
you know, reversing the aging on the body.
Faster than the brain because you don't
want to have a young body and an old brain.
So we have to figure out how to
do it in a way that delivers it
evenly to the entire body.
That reset occurs everywhere in all
the tissues, not in one specific one.
And the other thing this lab is doing that
I thought was really interesting is hitting
that reset button over and over again.
How many times can we do that?
Can we reverse aging?
Could we every five years go for
our reverse aging reprogramming?
And now they're starting to look at primates,
which are monkeys,
so that it's sort of a prehuman.
Trials.
So it's still a little ways away from us.
But Jordan,
I really love the point that you made,
which is that we can reverse aging today.
Yeah.
Without waiting for this discovery
by cleaning up our life.
But also sounds like we're gonna have to
do without waiting for this discovery.
Gonna be awhile. Well,
we might be 100 when it comes out,
and then we would be 50.
Then it just reverses us.
Yeah. Benjamin Buttons,
you know, so it sounds
like even though so they did it in mice,
the next thing is in primates.
And that could be a while.
So this could be a little. Far off.
Yeah. So for us as humans,
probably decades. Yeah.
And, and and as you can imagine,
we would want to be rigorous about
it before this is something we
launched on a widespread fashion.
But I think the idea that we've discovered
literally the secret to what causes us
to age and the fact that it's reversible,
these are incredible breakthroughs
that for decades we have thought
we couldn't do anything about it.
And we can, you know,
we talk about cosmetic treatments
and all of that kind of stuff.
We could obviously start to launch
some of this with our skin cells,
with some of the other things that are
easier than necessarily our brain.
Our organs,
which will take a little bit more
kind of scientific breakthrough,
we're getting to the point that eventually
you're gonna show up to the doctor
and the doctor is gonna say, well,
did you try turning them off and on them?
That's right. That's right.
But our behaviors can do
that every day. Yeah.
So we clean up our act,
we hydrate, we exercise,
we eat whole grains.
All of that changes the software.
It hits little mini resets every single day.
I love that. So really,
let's take, you know,
healthy living seriously,
because that's how we stay young. Hard
reset is way down the road,
but we can do many resets now.
I love how you sent us a bunch of
topics and we're like reverse aging.
That's the one.
That's the one I wanna know about.
Yes. Very interesting. Thank you.