- [Dr. Patrick]: But just kind of to go back what you were saying about the epigenetic
clock, and the aging, and I had always wondered about with the Yamanaka, you know, these transcription
factors that are able to sort of take a already differentiated cell, like a skin cell, or
a neuron, or a liver cell and turn it back into a stem cell, a pluripotent stem cell.
You know, I always wondered, "What about the epigenome?"
Right?
Is it like, do you have an older epigenome but you're like somehow, you know, like...
- [Dr. Sinclair]: You actually reset the epigenome, and that's how it works.
Yeah.
So, think of the genome as the digital information.
So this is zeros and ones, or in this case, A, T, G, C. But the epigenome is the reader
of that, and it's analog, and it's very hard to maintain over 80 years.
- [Dr. Patrick]: That has to be the key.
- [Dr. Sinclair]: It's a loss of information.
- [Dr. Patrick]: It has to be.
- [Dr. Sinclair]: Yeah.
But how do you get back that information?
So I'm going to geek out a little bit because your audience is a smart one.
So back in 1938, there was a man, a brilliant person called Claude Shannon who was at MIT
and he wrote a theory, mathematical theory on communication.
And his goal was to correct the loss of noise during a transmission of a radio signal during
World War II and beyond.
And he came up with a mathematical theorem of how do you make sure that the signal that
starts here is pristine when it gets to the actual receiver?
And what he decided was you can either make it digital or you can have somebody who's
observing the signal and then if it gets messed up, you then send a replacement signal.
We now call that TCP/IP.
It runs the internet.
That's how it all works.
That's why it works.
And we wouldn't have an internet if it wasn't for Claude Shannon's work back in the '30s
and '40s.
I think that's a good recipe for understanding why we age, loss of noise over time, analog
systems, very prone to noise.
But that system of resetting aging, how do you get the original information back that
it was when the signal was first sent, that's what we're working on.
That's what we think the Yamanaka factors are able to do.
They're the group that sits above and says, "Oh, that signal is degraded, use that signal."
- [Dr. Patrick]: Yeah.
That's cool.
- [Dr. Sinclair]: Well, so that's all part of...
- [Dr. Patrick]: High-five.
- [Dr. Sinclair]: Thanks, Rhonda.
- [Dr. Patrick]: I'm excited.
- [Dr. Sinclair]: That, I've been writing up in a book, which is coming out later this
year in September.
And so I've been so busy writing a book, I haven't even put this out in scientific publications.
So maybe one of the first times that a scientist puts his whole ideas and theories in a book
before it comes out in peer review.
So, we'll see.
But, you know, I think it's there for people to judge.
Maybe by September, I'll have some scientific papers written up as well.
- [Dr. Patrick]: What an exciting field.
Do you think other scientists in the aging field will start working on this?
I feel like this needs to be...there needs to be a big push, like there need...
- [Dr. Sinclair]: Yeah.
It's going fast.
So right now, I mentioned Juan Carlos Belmonte in the Salk, he's the pioneer.
Steve Horvath is part of our dream team.
There's another guy...unfortunately, they're all guys currently, but hopefully not forever,
is Manuel Serrano.
He's been working on...
He's in Spain, in Barcelona.
He's been putting these factors into mice, but there aren't just men working on the epigenome
of aging.
So a couple of really top leaders.
So Anne Brunet is at Stanford.
She's been working on the epigenomic causes of aging.
And we have Shelley Berger at UPenn who's been studying, among other things, what makes
the difference between a short-lived ant and a long-lived ant, they have the same genome,
just different epigenomes.
And Jessica Tyler works on the epigenetics of yeast cells and trying to work out exactly
what I was describing earlier about the distribution of proteins between DNA breaks and controlling
a cell's age.
But that's it.
That's basically the world's elite teams of epigenetics of aging, but it's exploding.
Two, three years from now, we'll have hundreds of labs.
- [Dr. Patrick]: Yeah.
It sounds...
I mean, this is cool.
It's something I've definitely...
This whole idea, like, is definitely, in some way, come to my mind with the Yamanaka factor
and using that to, like, reset, you know, for aging, not just about making...
I mean, there's always the, okay, well, you can keep, you know, replenishing your cell
types in different organs and kind of keep it going, but like, to like turn it back,
to like think it's a young cell.
Like, there's got to be a way, there's got to be a way.
- [Dr. Sinclair]: Right.
Yamanaka did us a big, a big favor.
Actually, John Gurdon who won the Nobel Prize with Yamanaka, he really told us years ago,
back in the 1980s, that reversal of aging is possible.
And we didn't really get it.
What he did was he took an adult cell nucleus from a tadpole, put it into a frog's egg,
and made a new tadpole.
What that actually tells you is that your genome can be reset to go way back, and aging
is not a one-way street.
- [Dr. Patrick]: Yeah.
The fact that you can take your adult cell and reset it to a stem cell is proof, right?
I mean...
- [Dr. Sinclair]: Right.
But now we know the machinery, at least the beginnings of it, and it's a very exciting
time.
- [Dr. Patrick]: Yeah.
And I'm so excited right now.
I'm like, there's all this other stuff we were going to talk about, you know?