WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.340 --> 00:00:04.360 You Are a Meat Robot The usual objection to curing all disease is that it's impossible. 2 00:00:04.900 --> 00:00:10.720 You replace three hundred and thirty billion cells a day. You three-D-print windpipes. 3 00:00:10.800 --> 00:00:17.900 You reprogram skin into brain cells. You've already proven your body is a machine, and machines are repairable. 4 00:00:18.540 --> 00:00:22.660 The only reason you haven't repaired it is that you spent the repair budget on missiles. 5 00:00:23.160 --> 00:00:30.340 This chapter removes the "impossible" objection so you can get back to the "expensive" objection, which the treaty solves. 6 00:00:30.820 --> 00:00:36.460 Your body is a machine. Not "like" a machine. A machine. Blueprint: D.N.A. 7 00:00:36.960 --> 00:00:42.040 Moving parts: organs. Fuel: whatever you ate for lunch (usually something beige). 8 00:00:42.700 --> 00:00:49.960 Owner's manual: your genome, which you only discovered twenty years ago, in a drawer you hadn't opened for two hundred thousand 9 00:00:49.960 --> 00:00:55.280 years. Before that you were just shaking it and hoping. This is called "medicine.". 10 00:00:56.240 --> 00:01:04.319 Your D.N.A. is a program written three point eight billion years ago by a process with no quality assurance team, no project 11 00:01:04.319 --> 00:01:08.270 manager, and no version control. It has never been debugged. 12 00:01:08.580 --> 00:01:15.420 It has never been patched. It contains code from organisms that went extinct five hundred million years ago. 13 00:01:16.240 --> 00:01:22.480 You are running legacy software that predates multicellular life, and you are surprised when it crashes. 14 00:01:23.340 --> 00:01:27.800 That's like being surprised when a three point eight billion year old car breaks down. 15 00:01:28.200 --> 00:01:33.790 The surprising part is that it starts. Death is a Technical Problem. 16 00:01:34.200 --> 00:01:40.980 Every religion and philosopher has sold you the same story: death is natural, inevitable, and meaningful. 17 00:01:41.620 --> 00:01:48.240 Very comforting. Also wrong. Death is what happens when your parts break faster than your body can fix them. 18 00:01:48.700 --> 00:01:54.480 That's not philosophy. That's a maintenance schedule. Every disease is a mechanical failure. 19 00:01:54.720 --> 00:02:02.560 Every ailment is a broken part. Every slow decline into decrepitude is an engineering problem with an engineering solution. 20 00:02:03.100 --> 00:02:10.400 You just keep filing them under "philosophy" and "the human condition," which is like filing a flat tire under "existentialism.". 21 00:02:11.820 --> 00:02:16.080 You've spent two hundred thousand years writing poetry about death. 22 00:02:16.160 --> 00:02:20.760 You could have spent it building a wrench. You did eventually build the wrench. 23 00:02:20.760 --> 00:02:26.150 Then you wrote poetry about the wrench. You Are a Self-Repairing Meat Robot. 24 00:02:26.720 --> 00:02:31.620 Your D.N.A. is three billion letters of code. Not "like" code. 25 00:02:31.640 --> 00:02:38.660 It IS code. You learned to read it (the Human Genome Project) and you're learning to edit it (CRISPR). 26 00:02:39.520 --> 00:02:43.340 You are mechanics who finally found the service manual under the seat. 27 00:02:44.160 --> 00:02:51.000 The service manual is written in a language you only partially understand, in a font that's three point eight billion years 28 00:02:51.000 --> 00:02:59.460 old. But still. Progress. Every day, your body runs a maintenance routine that would make a German car engineer weep with 29 00:02:59.460 --> 00:03:07.440 joy and then immediately resign out of inadequacy: You replace three hundred and thirty billion cells daily. 30 00:03:07.880 --> 00:03:15.260 That's three hundred and thirty billion. With a B. Every day you throw away more cells than there are stars in the Milky 31 00:03:15.280 --> 00:03:20.800 Way and grow new ones before lunch. You repair ten thousand D.N.A. 32 00:03:21.020 --> 00:03:26.540 damage events in every cell, every day. You have thirty-seven trillion cells. 33 00:03:26.860 --> 00:03:34.640 That's three hundred and seventy quadrillion repairs per day, performed by molecules that have never been to medical school. 34 00:03:35.820 --> 00:03:42.650 You rebuild your entire skeleton every ten years. You are not the same skeleton you were a decade ago. 35 00:03:43.040 --> 00:03:46.520 You are a ship of Theseus made of calcium and poor decisions. 36 00:03:47.380 --> 00:03:53.520 You are not a static object. You are a pattern that persists while matter flows through you. 37 00:03:54.160 --> 00:03:58.720 Like a river, except the river is meat and it's arguing with its insurance company. 38 00:03:59.420 --> 00:04:03.500 Aging is what happens when the river starts cutting corners on its own maintenance. 39 00:04:04.520 --> 00:04:10.760 You are literally dissolving at the molecular level, right now, while reading this sentence. 40 00:04:11.740 --> 00:04:17.100 It's fine. (It is not fine.). You've Already Started Fixing the Machine. 41 00:04:18.040 --> 00:04:26.060 Exhibit A: You Can Grow New Parts. A kid in Michigan has a three-D-printed windpipe keeping him alive. 42 00:04:26.640 --> 00:04:35.170 You print custom titanium skulls and jaws. You grow bladders and blood vessels in labs and install them in humans. 43 00:04:35.480 --> 00:04:44.300 Like replacement parts. For people. From a printer. The same technology you use to print novelty phone cases, you're using 44 00:04:44.300 --> 00:04:52.300 to print throats. You are manufacturing replacement human organs on the same type of machine that makes Yoda figurines. 45 00:04:53.020 --> 00:04:57.290 If that doesn't prove you're a machine, I'm not sure what level of evidence you require. 46 00:04:57.840 --> 00:05:01.200 Perhaps someone could print you a new brain so you can process it. 47 00:05:02.320 --> 00:05:11.000 Exhibit B: You Can Reprogram Your Cells. In two thousand and six, Shinya Yamanaka figured out how to turn adult cells back 48 00:05:11.000 --> 00:05:17.140 into stem cells. Any cell. From anywhere in your body. Back to factory settings. 49 00:05:17.700 --> 00:05:21.930 Like holding down the reset button, except on a skin cell. And it works. 50 00:05:23.020 --> 00:05:29.100 This means: Your skin cell can become a heart cell. Your blood cell can become a brain cell. 51 00:05:30.060 --> 00:05:37.420 Any cell can become any other cell. It's like discovering every part of your car can transform into any other part. 52 00:05:38.060 --> 00:05:42.100 Need a new transmission? Just reprogram your floor mat. Need a new engine? 53 00:05:42.320 --> 00:05:46.460 Your cup holder has been an engine this entire time. It just forgot. 54 00:05:47.660 --> 00:05:54.960 You won a Nobel Prize for proving that your cells have no idea what they are and can be talked into being something else. 55 00:05:55.480 --> 00:05:59.100 This is the most important discovery in the history of medicine. 56 00:05:59.820 --> 00:06:08.420 You celebrated by going back to mostly not using it. Exhibit C: You're Debugging Your Code. 57 00:06:08.620 --> 00:06:17.260 Gene therapy is literally finding typos in your D.N.A. and correcting them: Luxturna (twenty seventeen): Fixes blindness 58 00:06:17.260 --> 00:06:22.720 caused by a mutated retinal pigment epithelium sixty-five, or R.P.E. 59 00:06:23.260 --> 00:06:30.150 sixty-five gene. One injection. Sight restored. The entire disease was a typo. 60 00:06:30.340 --> 00:06:34.360 One letter wrong, and you couldn't see. They fixed the letter. 61 00:06:35.260 --> 00:06:40.560 Zolgensma (twenty nineteen): Fixes spinal muscular atrophy. 62 00:06:41.080 --> 00:06:48.560 Babies who would die before age two now walk. The disease was a spelling error in one gene. 63 00:06:48.880 --> 00:06:52.550 You corrected the spelling. The baby walks. That's the whole story. 64 00:06:53.600 --> 00:07:02.840 Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR-T therapy (twenty seventeen): Reprograms your immune system to hunt cancer. 65 00:07:03.440 --> 00:07:09.380 Complete remission in "incurable" cases. You taught your white blood cells to be assassins. 66 00:07:10.460 --> 00:07:15.040 They were already assassins, technically, but now they're assassins with a target. 67 00:07:15.980 --> 00:07:20.200 You're not treating symptoms anymore. You're fixing the actual code. 68 00:07:20.700 --> 00:07:27.120 That's like going from "the car makes a weird noise, turn up the radio" to "the car makes a weird noise, let me look at 69 00:07:27.120 --> 00:07:31.780 the engine." It only took you two hundred thousand years to try the second approach. 70 00:07:32.420 --> 00:07:41.020 The Car Restoration Analogy. Think of your body as a nineteen eighty-seven Honda Civic with three point eight billion miles 71 00:07:41.020 --> 00:07:46.360 on it. You already know how to fix most of the parts: Joints: Like worn brake pads. 72 00:07:47.200 --> 00:07:51.780 You pop them out and put new ones in. You've been doing this since the nineteen sixties. 73 00:07:52.580 --> 00:07:57.660 It's boring now. Boring is good. Boring means you solved it. 74 00:07:58.520 --> 00:08:05.060 Arteries: Like clogged fuel lines. You shove a tiny metal tube (a "stent") in there and call it fixed. 75 00:08:05.680 --> 00:08:08.660 This works surprisingly well for something that sounds like plumbing. 76 00:08:10.080 --> 00:08:17.480 Hearts: Like a dead battery. You take one from another car (a car that no longer needs it, for reasons) and put it in yours. 77 00:08:17.940 --> 00:08:22.440 This is called a "transplant," which is a polite word for organ recycling. 78 00:08:23.480 --> 00:08:31.000 You're making progress on the harder stuff, too. Cancer is frame damage, and immunotherapy is your new welding torch. 79 00:08:31.520 --> 00:08:36.440 Alzheimer's is a bad transmission, and you're finally starting to understand the gears. 80 00:08:37.340 --> 00:08:43.059 The point is: nobody looks at a broken car and says, "Well, that's just the car's journey. 81 00:08:43.480 --> 00:08:48.240 The car lived a good life. We should accept the car's natural transition into rust." 82 00:08:48.920 --> 00:08:54.880 You call a mechanic. You are a car. Call a mechanic. Fund the mechanic. 83 00:08:56.000 --> 00:09:03.520 The mechanic is medical research and you are paying the mechanic almost nothing while spending your money on missiles, which 84 00:09:03.520 --> 00:09:08.830 are not a car repair tool even in the loosest interpretation of the word "repair.". 85 00:09:09.380 --> 00:09:14.520 The Proof That Aging is Reversible. Nature Already Does It. 86 00:09:15.760 --> 00:09:20.100 Planarian worms: Cut one in half, get two worms. Both younger than the original. 87 00:09:20.600 --> 00:09:23.520 It's like cutting your car in half and getting two newer cars. 88 00:09:24.140 --> 00:09:29.360 This is obviously impossible, except it happens every day in labs worldwide. 89 00:09:30.620 --> 00:09:35.260 Naked mole rats: Live ten times longer than similar-sized mammals. 90 00:09:35.780 --> 00:09:42.260 Don't get cancer. They look like a thumb that's been left in the bath too long, but they've solved cancer. 91 00:09:42.820 --> 00:09:50.900 You have not. Bowhead whales: Live two hundred plus years with no signs of age-related disease. 92 00:09:51.520 --> 00:09:58.980 A whale born when Napoleon was alive is still swimming around right now, perfectly healthy, probably judging you. 93 00:09:59.700 --> 00:10:08.740 Hydra: Biologically immortal. A tiny freshwater polyp with no brain has cracked the code to eternal life. 94 00:10:09.540 --> 00:10:14.220 You have a brain. You have not cracked the code. Draw your own conclusions. 95 00:10:15.680 --> 00:10:21.880 Nature solved aging. Multiple times. In multiple species. Using multiple strategies. 96 00:10:22.640 --> 00:10:26.960 You just need to steal the answer, which should be easy because you've stolen everything else. 97 00:10:27.600 --> 00:10:33.740 You've had empires. You stole entire continents. Surely you can steal a jellyfish's homework. 98 00:10:35.480 --> 00:10:39.400 You've Already Reversed Aging (In Mice... and Human Cells). 99 00:10:40.380 --> 00:10:46.260 You've done it: Significant lifespan extension in aged mice using Yamanaka factors. 100 00:10:47.260 --> 00:10:57.480 thirty-year epigenetic age reversal in human skin cells. Vision restored in blind mice; not slowed, reversed You made old 101 00:10:57.480 --> 00:11:06.420 mice young again. You made old human cells young again. You made blind mice see again (which, if you think about it, means 102 00:11:06.420 --> 00:11:11.230 the nursery rhyme is now a research paper). The farmer's wife is going to be furious. 103 00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:18.480 The mechanisms are understood. The techniques exist. You've demonstrated them in living organisms. 104 00:11:18.840 --> 00:11:26.060 This is not theoretical. This is not science fiction. This is science fact that you proved, published, won prizes for, and 105 00:11:26.060 --> 00:11:30.360 then filed under "interesting" before going back to building submarines. 106 00:11:31.420 --> 00:11:35.310 You're not waiting for a breakthrough. You're waiting for funding. 107 00:11:35.780 --> 00:11:41.680 Which is like having the cure for death in your pocket and not using it because you can't find exact change.