"Speaker 1: You are about to hear from Dr. Saul Villeda, principle investigator of the
Villeda Lab, one of the NIH funded biomedical researching laboratories at U.C.
San Fransisco.
He and his team focus on understanding how to reverse aging in the brain.
Speaker 2: Have you always been a science type?
Speaker 3: I'm not sure if I was a science kid, but I was definitely an oddball kid.
I remember my Mom first mentioned the word science to me when she went to her garden.
I had gotten all these chemicals from the bathroom, you know, like Pepto-Bismol, Tylenol,
bleach, soap and I made different concoctions with them.
And then I went to the garden and I put them on all these plants.
And then some of them had holes in the leaves because it burnt through them, obviously.
I didn't know what I was doing.
And she came out, she didn't get angry, but she just said, ""You know, maybe you're gonna
be one of these little mad scientists someday,"" and that sort of stuck with me.
Where I grew up, my parents are from Guatemala and I think my Mom finished high school, my
Dad didn't.
And it was really coming down to go I go to college or do I do something like be a mechanic,
which you know in my neighborhood you made a lot of money.
So I didn't really think much about it.
I took all these classes 'cause my friends were in them, but one of those classes was
an AP psychology class.
And that's where I started thinking, you know, that was the first time where we looked at
the brain and we started thinking about different regions of the brain, doing something with
respect to the rest of our body, thinking, talk,ing, walking.
You know, I never thought about how does everything work?
I mean, the brain controls everything.
Figuring out how it works is fascinating, figuring out how it develops is fascinating,
and for me my interest is figuring out why thing sort of get broken as we get older.
And I'm really interested in challenging things.
Do we have to get old?
Can we reverse aging?
I had never heard the word Ph.D until I was a freshman in college.
I remember I think it was my first math class where they said you know, my name is Doctor
So and So and doctor didn't mean you're gonna take my temperature or give me a shot.
It meant I have this degree, I'm an expert in this field I'm gonna teach you.
And this is the first time that I realized that medicine, not being a physician, but
medicine means much more than just figuring out a disease and curing it.
There's something that happens long before that, which is someone has to figure out how
to cure it.
Having a lab means I got to meet and recruit students from a lot of different backgrounds.
You know, our students come from all sorts of places, both here in the United States
and outside and we had a common desire to understand this idea of preventing or reversing
aging.
Research means so much.
I think most people think of someone with glasses, nerdy, in a corner somewhere and
it's so much more.
It's number one, a community.
It's a family.
Your lab is a family.
And number two then, it's this creative environment.
You're free to explore.
It's up to you to figure out problems that haven't been solved yet, and I think the other
thing you have to remember is I think that there's this idea that in order to do science,
you must be a genius.
Only genius's do it.
But that's not true, because you need different perspectives.
You need people coming from different backgrounds who are gonna think about a question in a
different way.
And it doesn't matter if you're a 75-year old Nobel laureate or if you're an 18-19 year
old freshman, sophomore in college doing research for the first time.
It doesn't matter.
You can be rich, you can be poor, you can be White, you can be Black, you can be Latino,
Asian, there's everything.
Absolutely.
It is one of the most accepting environments I've ever worked in.
For my family, it's sort of the American dream, proof that the American dream can happen,
proof that it doesn't matter if you, you know, I went to public school in Los Angeles, not
in a great place, we were poor, but I still had the education and I still was able to
go to UCLA and then Stanford and now UCSF.
So that's the first thing my lab means.
And the second is absolute freedom and creativity.
A few years ago, if I told you, you know what, I think I can reverse some signs of aging,
people would have thought we were crazy.
And now there's all these labs in places like Harvard and Stanford and now here that are
actually finding evidence for this.
And even if we don't extend life, I don't have to live 200 years, I'm happy living 80
years.
But I would love to live 80 happy years.
I'd love to be 75 and still be able to run and still think really well and maybe not
develop things like Alzheimer's disease and I think that the biology can teach us ways
that maybe we can do that.
That we don't necessarily live longer, but we live better."