Translator: Ivana Korom Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
My father always says: "Time is inexrorable.
And with time comes old age and death".
Actually, no one can deal with death very well. I, myself, don't.
Some people deal with it well, they believe in Heaven.
Those who believe in Heaven have no issues with death,
as heaven comes after it.
But nowadays many more people don't believe in Heaven.
And therefore want to live longer. Want to live better, with quality of life.
For a practicing atheist like me, who has this issue with finitude,
it was odd to start my scientific career studying cellular death.
I used to study cellular corpses, known as apoptotic corpses
which are essential to building our bodies.
Without their natural death, there's no life.
Without natural cellular death, our fingers, let alone our brain,
can't be built.
70% of the cells that grow in the brain die even before this organ starts working.
The mouse on the left has no cellular death in its brain.
The brain keeps growing and growing
and the animal dies before it's even born.
But knowing its importance doesn't mean accepting total death.
Actually, mankind is always bitter about a number of things.
That's why they subvert their own evolution.
Men build machines to fly, to think better, to dream,
and we now live at least twice as long as out great-great-great-grandparents.
And learning from nature, we want more than that.
Who's never thought about being a gecko?
At least to be able to regenerate your own body.
If a gecko loses a paw or its tail,
in a few weeks, that organ will be completely regenerated.
Or who never thought about being a naked mole rat?
This cute little animal who, if human, would live a thousand years.
This animal was able to create a system. It developed a tumor-control system.
It is able to avoid any type of cancer as soon as this cancer appears.
That's why it lives ten times longer than its familiar relatives,
who every now and then crawl around our homes.
And it's very interesting to think that in nature there are examples and
biological prerogatives that make us think about
subverting our own evolution somehow.
Putting together what we learn from nature
with what we learnt in terms of passed-on knowledge in the past 30 years,
we can dream higher. We can create these boards with genetic material
that we do in the lab, and we can create much more extraordinary things,
which started being done five years ago in Japan.
2012 Physiology/Medicine Nobel laureate, a Japanese researcher, did the following:
He took a piece of skin to the lab,
grew some cells known as fibroblasts of that skin,
and in these cells, with the help of a virus, (which worked as a Trojan horse)
he inserted four genes, of the 25,000 that compose the genome.
These four genes, when inserted into these cells,
transformed them into cells currently known
as induced pluripotent stem cells.
These cells behave just like an embrionary cell,
and so they pretty much go back in time.
So from a little piece of skin, we are able to create
in a lab a minibrain, part of a heart,
part of a lung, of a liver, and so we can replay the beginning of human life.
It's like transforming the old into the new.
It's like rebuilding the entire biologic clock of the human development
in a way that hadn't been considered for years.
The idea is simple: it's like giving a cell access
to every library it's entitled to in terms of information.
Imagine that in this case, the library is the genome.
For a cell to become a blood cell
or a neuron, it has access to specific books of this library.
With cellular reprogramming, a cell can go back and have access
to this entire library and decide what it wants.
Actually, to anything that the researcher wants it to be.
So we have possibilities in the lab to create,
to reinvent all the cellular types that create our bodies.
That has great implications because we can create cells,
for instance heart cells, from the cells that came from the skin.
We can create a number of new tissues that, in the future,
will be able to be used as spare parts to precisely
reduce also the dependence to transplants.
We can create neurons. We can create spermatozoon and egg cells.
This will change pretty soon the way we think about getting our offspring.
Because having skin is enough to generate spermatozoon and egg cells.
Two women will be able to have biological children.
Two men will be able to have biological children.
A child will be able to have a child.
That is food for thought.
What can we currently do with reprogrammed cells?
We can actually do a lot of cool things. Here at the lab, at UFRJ,
we are working with a mental disease known as schizophrenia.
It's a mental disease that affects over 2 million people in Brazil.
More people suffer from it in Brazil
than from HIV, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's together.
That's a lot of people, and they have huge trouble socializing,
they cause great emocional harm to their families
and financial losses to the government, of at least 100 million dollars a year.
What we do at the lab is
we create neurons of schezophrenics off the patients' skin.
Those are human neurons created from the skin of schezophrenic people.
What we recently discovered by using this technology is this:
the image on the top is what we call a cell culture,
a human neurons culture of normal people.
The image at the bottom is a culture of a person with schezophrenia.
Each little green spot represents a cell that is producing free radicals.
An active variety of oxygen.
You can see that the image on the top has less spots than the other.
What we have concluded:
the oxidative stress is a characteristic
of the generation of neurons in the brains of schezophrenics.
Based on this information we can conclude many things.
We can use this as a biologic platform
to look for new drugs.
To try and eventually be able to create new medication
that can eventually reduce some schezophrenia symptoms.
Thus the idea is to do some research based on the skin fragments of patients,
of many patients, to create reprogrammed cells and test medication.
And to do that in large scale, by the way,
with help of companies and other labs at UFRJ,
to be able to eventually create drugs that are really individualized,
what some call personalized medicine.
The idea is interesting,
but we need many more people working with this technology in Brazil.
Sure, it's a recent technology, but we need more people working here.
That's why part of my staff's time at UFRJ is dedicated to training people.
We train Brazilians to cultivate cells and in the cellular reprogramming technique.
Those are some students that came to the lab this year, 2012,
to learn about cultivating reprogrammed stem cells.
Besides that, we produce a big part of our reagents.
As you know, the reagents we buy from abroad are more expensive,
and they take a long time to be delivered here.
The same research takes us much longer than it does our colleagues abroad.
So we've decided to create some of those reagents here in Brazil.
Those reagents are currently patented.
They're being commercialized, not only here but also abroad.
That's a way we have to accelerate our research.
The class of 2012. These people are from Manaus, from Rio Grande do Sul,
from different parts of the country, being trained by our UFRJ
Biomedic Sciences's lab
in the cultivation of reprogrammed stem and embrionary cells.
Although I don't believe in heaven, I am very optimistic.
I believe the future really is promissing.
We can really think of many applications
for what we call cellular reprogramming.
And including the simplest ones, which we are doing now,
which is trying to modify,
trying to understand complex human diseases from a piece of skin.
The point is, it's already possible
to reprogram cells from pee.
That's right, you don't even need a skin fragment anymore.
Because in urine, there are cells detached from the kidney,
so, from urine cells from each of us it's possible
to reprogram and create neurons identical to the ones in your head.
That's curious, to say the least.
The point is, we might never hit the immortality target,
but whatever it is we hit around it, will already be very interesting.
We might not ever be able to create warriors like the ones in "Highlander",
but we can help many people, try and understand human diseases better,
we can create lab organs that will reduce transplant lines,
a big world problem.
We can better understand our own biology.
How do we evolve?
How does a cell decide to be a heart cell, a brain cell or a retina cell?
There's a lot to be done along the way.
I can say this: Time might really be inexorable,
but in the meantime,
I believe it's very worth dreaming the impossible.
Thank you.