WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:19.520 I just want to point out that Ray has a PhD in biology and biochemistry with a specialization 00:00:19.520 --> 00:00:23.040 in physiology from the University of Oregon. 00:00:23.040 --> 00:00:28.720 From '59 to the early '80s he taught courses in anthropology, biology, physics, nutrition, 00:00:28.720 --> 00:00:35.360 immunology, metabolism, and psychology at colleges in Oregon and Mexico. 00:00:35.360 --> 00:00:38.520 And he also conducts private nutritional counseling. 00:00:38.520 --> 00:00:43.600 He started his work with progesterone-related hormones in 1968. 00:00:43.600 --> 00:00:49.760 And I don't know if most people know that John Lee got his material from Ray Peat. 00:00:49.760 --> 00:01:00.800 His pot, not Crystal and Dr. Crystal's pot, but the work that John Lee proposed and that 00:01:00.800 --> 00:01:03.840 most people have read has come from Ray. 00:01:03.840 --> 00:01:07.800 And as you probably know, Linus Pauling said, "If you're 10 years ahead of your time, you 00:01:07.800 --> 00:01:11.840 get a Nobel Prize, but if you're 15 years ahead of your time, you get called a quack." 00:01:11.840 --> 00:01:19.760 And unfortunately, Ray is 15 years ahead of his time, as is also shown with coconut oil, 00:01:19.760 --> 00:01:24.160 which 15 years ago he was promoting and everybody thought it was poison. 00:01:24.160 --> 00:01:29.200 And now every health food store has about six varieties of coconut oil and everybody's 00:01:29.200 --> 00:01:30.200 using it. 00:01:30.200 --> 00:01:32.920 But they didn't believe him 15 years ago. 00:01:32.920 --> 00:01:40.240 So he's been working on both practical and theoretical aspects of the energy in the body's 00:01:40.240 --> 00:01:43.320 structure or independent at every level. 00:01:43.320 --> 00:01:47.640 Anyway, he says, "Marketing of products without understanding just what they do and why they 00:01:47.640 --> 00:01:52.560 do it seems to be adding confusion rather than understanding as hundreds of people sell 00:01:52.560 --> 00:01:54.280 their misconceptions with products. 00:01:54.280 --> 00:01:59.640 The very concept of marketing is at odds with the real nature of these materials, which 00:01:59.640 --> 00:02:04.080 has to do with protection and expansion of our nature and potential. 00:02:04.080 --> 00:02:08.000 The distorted idea of human nature is sold when people are treated as the market." 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:30.160 Anyway, I give you Ray Deaton. 00:02:30.160 --> 00:02:39.400 The reason I was late getting into biology, starting graduate school in 1968, even though 00:02:39.400 --> 00:02:50.400 I graduated from college in 1956, it was my first experience of biology classes in 1950 00:02:50.400 --> 00:02:59.920 and '53 that made me think that biologists were sort of demanding or doing something 00:02:59.920 --> 00:03:00.920 completely anti-scientific. 00:03:00.920 --> 00:03:14.000 Because in the 1940s I had read people, for example Russian psychologists, in about 1948 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:23.640 I read an article that explained the distribution of chromosomes in the population. 00:03:23.640 --> 00:03:30.040 Forty-six chromosomes was the modal number, but there were perfectly healthy people who 00:03:30.040 --> 00:03:37.200 had 47 or 45 and even some with two more or less. 00:03:37.200 --> 00:03:47.280 But usually the farther you were from 46 chromosomes the more likely you were to have some kind 00:03:47.280 --> 00:03:48.280 of a syndrome. 00:03:48.280 --> 00:03:58.960 But anyway, they looked at it statistically and 46 was very clearly the modal, most common 00:03:58.960 --> 00:04:02.680 number in the population and they looked at lots of people. 00:04:02.680 --> 00:04:08.080 But then two years later when I got into high school biology the textbook said humans simply 00:04:08.080 --> 00:04:12.360 have 48 chromosomes, period. 00:04:12.360 --> 00:04:20.760 And then in college biology, same thing, humans have 48 chromosomes, nothing but statistical 00:04:20.760 --> 00:04:23.760 variability. 00:04:23.760 --> 00:04:33.640 It was 1956 before American biologists discovered that we have 46 chromosomes. 00:04:33.640 --> 00:04:41.760 And the textbooks never made a big thing about why they were eight years behind other relatively 00:04:41.760 --> 00:04:49.680 backward countries, backward economies in something that seems as simple as counting 00:04:49.680 --> 00:04:50.680 chromosomes. 00:04:50.680 --> 00:04:58.880 Anyway, when I graduated from college I had a very bright literature teacher, literature 00:04:58.880 --> 00:05:10.320 and humanities, so I decided that maybe the real understanding of the world could be by 00:05:10.320 --> 00:05:12.560 studying literature and philosophies. 00:05:12.560 --> 00:05:20.040 But when I got to university, this was in the peak of McCarthyism, the English department 00:05:20.040 --> 00:05:28.720 was one of the basically most cowardly, closed off parts of the university. 00:05:28.720 --> 00:05:35.080 And I tried several different departments, the psychologists were the best people I could 00:05:35.080 --> 00:05:39.280 find at the university at that time. 00:05:39.280 --> 00:05:48.160 And so I almost majored in psychology but then I found that you had to believe in Watsonian 00:05:48.160 --> 00:05:57.240 behaviorism or at least Skinnerian behaviorism to get through the biology department. 00:05:57.240 --> 00:06:05.800 Consciousness was not a reality at that time and my professors actually explained why you 00:06:05.800 --> 00:06:13.160 don't need to use an anesthetic for circumcising babies because they're not conscious. 00:06:13.160 --> 00:06:18.760 And the fact that they rise around and scream and turn red when they're being cut, that's 00:06:18.760 --> 00:06:20.760 just a reflex. 00:06:20.760 --> 00:06:30.360 Consciousness develops at the age of one and a half years when the myelin is completely 00:06:30.360 --> 00:06:31.360 deposited. 00:06:31.360 --> 00:06:36.680 And that's the time at which the brain stops growing. 00:06:36.680 --> 00:06:37.680 Brain cells multiply. 00:06:37.680 --> 00:06:45.000 At one time they said only up until the sixth month of gestation, then they gradually extended 00:06:45.000 --> 00:06:47.000 to a year and a half. 00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:55.400 But consciousness at that time was said, if there's such a thing as consciousness at all, 00:06:55.400 --> 00:07:01.480 it doesn't begin until a baby is a year and a half old when there's no longer any division 00:07:01.480 --> 00:07:04.040 of brain cells. 00:07:04.040 --> 00:07:11.880 You remember at that time brain cells didn't reproduce, heart cells didn't reproduce. 00:07:11.880 --> 00:07:20.720 It was in 1990 when brain cells and heart cells were discovered to be able to reproduce 00:07:20.720 --> 00:07:22.440 even in adults. 00:07:22.440 --> 00:07:32.440 But one of the other people I read in the 1940s was Gelfi Polizhaev, a developmental 00:07:32.440 --> 00:07:37.040 scientist who had been demonstrating organ regeneration in the 30s and all through the 00:07:37.040 --> 00:07:38.040 40s. 00:07:38.040 --> 00:07:45.440 And the brain cells and heart cells can be stimulated to regenerate. 00:07:45.440 --> 00:07:53.080 The last ten years or so, the advent of cloning and stimulated regeneration in stem cells 00:07:53.080 --> 00:08:02.400 and so on, this is causing a lot of turmoil in the biological world. 00:08:02.400 --> 00:08:10.520 You don't get a sense in the newspapers of what this is doing to professors who have... 00:08:10.520 --> 00:08:18.280 Until Dali, I guess, there were still people who were saying Dali is impossible because 00:08:18.280 --> 00:08:24.600 in principle you can't clone an animal from a somatic cell. 00:08:24.600 --> 00:08:27.240 You can clone vegetables because they're different. 00:08:27.240 --> 00:08:32.640 But people were saying right into the 1990s it's impossible to clone an animal. 00:08:32.640 --> 00:08:42.280 But a guy named Gurdon was cloning frogs and amphibians back in the 60s. 00:08:42.280 --> 00:08:48.400 That was impossible too because frogs are animals and animals can't be cloned from somatic 00:08:48.400 --> 00:08:49.480 cells. 00:08:49.480 --> 00:09:00.440 So there's this sort of underground fact in biology that the superstructure mainstream, 00:09:00.440 --> 00:09:09.960 the people that educate medical students, this reality is something very different from 00:09:09.960 --> 00:09:12.960 science. 00:09:12.960 --> 00:09:20.040 In the 1970s, all of my professors, I think I heard every one of them at some point say 00:09:20.040 --> 00:09:25.680 something like, "Today, 100,000 of my brain cells die." 00:09:25.680 --> 00:09:30.720 At that time it was 100,000 per day. 00:09:30.720 --> 00:09:34.040 Previously it was 10,000 per day. 00:09:34.040 --> 00:09:41.640 In 1970, an article in Science took advantage of this background. 00:09:41.640 --> 00:09:49.960 All biology professors believing that their brains were dying massively every day of their 00:09:49.960 --> 00:09:50.960 life. 00:09:50.960 --> 00:10:00.000 And of the knowledge that people used to program computers by punching holes in cards, introducing 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:04.200 information by punching out pieces of card. 00:10:04.200 --> 00:10:11.680 This article in Science explained memory and learning through the lifespan in terms of 00:10:11.680 --> 00:10:15.520 selective death of brain cells. 00:10:15.520 --> 00:10:22.080 If we're losing 100,000 brain cells every day, just think how this compares to a computer 00:10:22.080 --> 00:10:28.480 where you can punch out hundreds of thousands of bits of information on each card that you 00:10:28.480 --> 00:10:32.720 put into the computer. 00:10:32.720 --> 00:10:43.240 This, I could name probably 20 completely insane ideas that were current in the biological 00:10:43.240 --> 00:10:45.480 community. 00:10:45.480 --> 00:10:55.800 For example, probably half of my biology professors at one time cited a study by August Weismann 00:10:55.800 --> 00:11:07.480 who in 1889 or 1890 cut the tails of 1,500 mice over a period of 22 mouse generations. 00:11:07.480 --> 00:11:18.960 And so this just proves Lamarckian and Darwinian inheritance or evolution of acquired traits. 00:11:18.960 --> 00:11:28.920 Of course Lamarck, even when I was 8 and read this in an encyclopedia, it was obvious that 00:11:28.920 --> 00:11:40.040 Weismann was making propaganda because Lamarck said animals that strive and adapt and acquire 00:11:40.040 --> 00:11:46.560 new traits by this striking adaptation pass some of those traits on to the next generation. 00:11:46.560 --> 00:11:59.120 And Darwin, my parents had some books including Darwin's first editions that had the introductions 00:11:59.120 --> 00:12:07.120 like the Descent of Man had an introduction in which Darwin said people are saying that 00:12:07.120 --> 00:12:17.120 I base evolution on the Malthusian idea of the survival of the fittest and elimination 00:12:17.120 --> 00:12:19.120 of unfit and so on. 00:12:19.120 --> 00:12:24.760 He said no, here are the things that I believe account for evolution. 00:12:24.760 --> 00:12:33.100 And he named the things that Lamarck and Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin was an evolutionist 00:12:33.100 --> 00:12:43.000 in the 18th century at the very end of the 18th century Erasmus Darwin was saying exactly 00:12:43.000 --> 00:12:51.960 the same things that Lamarck said that sexual selection and adaptation and inheritance of 00:12:51.960 --> 00:12:54.240 acquired traits. 00:12:54.240 --> 00:13:03.940 Darwin as slaves of the 1860s said you're distorting me, I agree with Erasmus Darwin 00:13:03.940 --> 00:13:07.260 and Lamarck on these points. 00:13:07.260 --> 00:13:19.020 But by the end of the century Weismann was typical of the social Darwinist said Malthus 00:13:19.020 --> 00:13:30.060 had the right idea that weak people are eliminated and so the human species is improved by misery, 00:13:30.060 --> 00:13:37.260 poverty, disease and war are improving the human species. 00:13:37.260 --> 00:13:47.900 A literary critic wrote that he had seen evidence that the king hired Malthus specifically to 00:13:47.900 --> 00:13:58.700 help put down the revolutionary spirit because the monarchy was realizing that they were 00:13:58.700 --> 00:14:07.580 in danger because people were impoverished, diseased and hating to be killed in pointless 00:14:07.580 --> 00:14:17.020 wars so he had Malthus say it's good to suffer poverty, disease and war are creative, they 00:14:17.020 --> 00:14:20.660 eliminate the bad stuff. 00:14:20.660 --> 00:14:30.340 And this is Weismann's mouse tail experiment was just one wildly propagandistic thing that 00:14:30.340 --> 00:14:35.020 he did to knock down Darwin and Lamarck. 00:14:35.020 --> 00:14:43.940 His main work was counting chromosomes even though he had such bad vision that he couldn't 00:14:43.940 --> 00:14:45.500 use a microscope. 00:14:45.500 --> 00:14:54.700 In 1890 he determined that the development of an individual from an ovum is possible 00:14:54.700 --> 00:15:05.780 because the genetic material such as Mendel identified, the genetic material is all there 00:15:05.780 --> 00:15:16.660 in the ovum and when that fertilized egg divides each of the subsequent divisions loses some 00:15:16.660 --> 00:15:23.700 genetic information and obviously you couldn't clone from a somatic cell because not all 00:15:23.700 --> 00:15:30.620 of the genetic information is there so he said the germline is immortal, the body, the 00:15:30.620 --> 00:15:39.780 soma is mortal and he said each time you differentiate to a new tissue or organ that's because you've 00:15:39.780 --> 00:15:50.700 lost some of the genetic information that was in the ovum and remember this was 60 years 00:15:50.700 --> 00:15:57.740 before Americans learned to even count the average number of chromosomes in people. 00:15:57.740 --> 00:16:05.740 A guy who couldn't use the microscope because of bad eyes created the doctrine of the deletion 00:16:05.740 --> 00:16:15.300 of information to explain the expansion of complexity from a fertilized egg to an adult 00:16:15.300 --> 00:16:16.300 organism. 00:16:16.300 --> 00:16:28.540 Weissman said that since the body is mortal it doesn't have everything it needs to create 00:16:28.540 --> 00:16:36.260 itself if you take only one part so it's going to wear out, the wear and tear theory started 00:16:36.260 --> 00:16:44.900 there at the same time, that the mortal tissues of the body aren't all there and they're eventually 00:16:44.900 --> 00:16:47.460 just going to wear out. 00:16:47.460 --> 00:16:58.260 Programmed aging essentially derives from this idea of the deletion of information. 00:16:58.260 --> 00:17:08.060 The whole trend of 20th century biology was building on this idea of increasing complexity 00:17:08.060 --> 00:17:17.780 by deleting information and so the guy that said learning is because our brain is dying 00:17:17.780 --> 00:17:26.540 it was exactly analogous to Weissman's, the organism develops because it loses information 00:17:26.540 --> 00:17:34.220 and in the 50s there were people who said that you can x-ray bacteria and cause them 00:17:34.220 --> 00:17:44.740 to mutate into new forms by destroying their genes with x-rays. 00:17:44.740 --> 00:17:54.300 This was as weird as it seems, bacteria that had lost their genetic information were said 00:17:54.300 --> 00:18:05.620 to have given rise to the next higher complexity in evolution and all of the phyla of complex 00:18:05.620 --> 00:18:13.460 organisms were believed by the Weissman principle to have derived from bacteria that had lost 00:18:13.460 --> 00:18:22.020 information. 00:18:22.020 --> 00:18:33.700 That picture of progress through loss I think traces back to the time that Erasmus Darwin 00:18:33.700 --> 00:18:42.220 he had a slogan painted on the side of his carriage, from seashells everything comes, 00:18:42.220 --> 00:18:50.060 the Latin phrase, but that got him in trouble so he had it painted out fairly quickly because 00:18:50.060 --> 00:18:59.980 people realised that evolution was contrary to the creationist doctrine and for example 00:18:59.980 --> 00:19:07.100 well into the 19th century to graduate or even to study at British universities you 00:19:07.100 --> 00:19:12.740 had to essentially sign a loyalty oath that you believed all of the tenants of the Church 00:19:12.740 --> 00:19:25.780 of England, people like Shelley were not welcome at the English universities and earlier censorship 00:19:25.780 --> 00:19:34.820 was tightening up all through the 18th century and people like Darwin instead of writing 00:19:34.820 --> 00:19:44.660 scientific treatises about evolution as Lamarck did in France which was relatively loose, 00:19:44.660 --> 00:19:55.380 Darwin wrote a poem about the nature of life and put his ideas of acquired adaptive and 00:19:55.380 --> 00:20:02.540 sexual selection creating evolutionary progress. 00:20:02.540 --> 00:20:12.380 The deists remember didn't want to deal with church officials entering for example the 00:20:12.380 --> 00:20:22.700 investment market and saying that God can intervene at any time to have anything secure, 00:20:22.700 --> 00:20:29.220 the deists wanted a sort of mechanical clockwork universe that was predictable so that they 00:20:29.220 --> 00:20:37.220 could start projects and have confidence that they could finish them without God intervening 00:20:37.220 --> 00:20:44.540 and so they said God was like a clockmaker who started the world running and he was such 00:20:44.540 --> 00:20:52.860 a perfect creator that he made it so that it would run all by itself forever but it 00:20:52.860 --> 00:20:57.100 was like a clock that he was winding up and setting in motion and then staying out of 00:20:57.100 --> 00:21:06.300 it so that physicists and engineers and anyone could count on certain reliability in the 00:21:06.300 --> 00:21:13.100 world but as people started working on steam engines and understanding what happens to 00:21:13.100 --> 00:21:23.220 the energy and the fuel, the laws of thermodynamics were eventually extracted from understanding 00:21:23.220 --> 00:21:31.660 how steam engines work and they said well the nature of reality is that everything is 00:21:31.660 --> 00:21:40.860 running down in a closed system, it can't do anything but run down and so physics was 00:21:40.860 --> 00:21:48.900 set on the same kind of path that nothing can be added to the world because that's God's 00:21:48.900 --> 00:21:57.820 province, the only thing that can be done to the world is for it to get poorer, losing 00:21:57.820 --> 00:22:12.420 information or losing organization, losing energy, difference, gaining entropy. I think 00:22:12.420 --> 00:22:23.060 this historical picture accounts for why biologists at the time I was first taking biology courses, 00:22:23.060 --> 00:22:33.380 why they could believe such impossible to believe things. In studying literature the 00:22:33.380 --> 00:22:45.020 only person that really appealed to me in English literature was William Blake who in 00:22:45.020 --> 00:22:51.220 many different places he had physiological descriptions, for example the number of nerves 00:22:51.220 --> 00:23:00.500 in the optic nerve, his count was closer than any count until the electron microscope was 00:23:00.500 --> 00:23:11.940 developed about 180 years later or so. Blake described evolution which obviously he was 00:23:11.940 --> 00:23:19.660 getting these ideas from the culture. Erasmus Darwin was contemporary with Blake and was 00:23:19.660 --> 00:23:27.180 a very famous intellectual and so there was this oral culture in London and other big 00:23:27.180 --> 00:23:40.700 cities in which advanced 200 year advanced ideas in physiology, biology, evolution, development. 00:23:40.700 --> 00:23:49.340 For example at the same time I think it was from Swedenborg, the religious leader who 00:23:49.340 --> 00:23:55.900 was also an engineer and biological experimenter, Swedenborg I think is where Blake got the 00:23:55.900 --> 00:24:08.220 idea that showed up in his books that the nerves develop and invade the other tissues. 00:24:08.220 --> 00:24:17.260 This wasn't demonstrated until I think 1911 how the embryo innervates the tissues, the 00:24:17.260 --> 00:24:23.340 nerves come from the top and go down into the various tissues and at a late stage of 00:24:23.340 --> 00:24:34.300 development innervate the muscles and skin and so on. Remember Malthus was not censored 00:24:34.300 --> 00:24:42.740 but everyone who had an alternative idea of what's going on in society and evolution was 00:24:42.740 --> 00:24:49.980 likely to get hanged if they were too blatant in their description of things the king didn't 00:24:49.980 --> 00:24:59.580 like and Blake was tried for treason for sedition in 1804 and after that he was much more circumspect 00:24:59.580 --> 00:25:06.220 in the way he described his evolutionary and physiological ideas. They became very hard 00:25:06.220 --> 00:25:14.540 to interpret but that was the general situation. There was this amazingly rich scientific culture 00:25:14.540 --> 00:25:23.860 that was like a piece of the 20th century set there in 18th century London and people 00:25:23.860 --> 00:25:33.700 that did get published like Malthus were the people who were put up to the task for a political 00:25:33.700 --> 00:25:41.220 reason. When contemporary textbooks write the history of their science they look at 00:25:41.220 --> 00:25:49.780 who got published and physicists and engineers and biologists who held the right ideas were 00:25:49.780 --> 00:25:55.700 the ones that got published but the really good ideas were things that people talked 00:25:55.700 --> 00:26:06.100 about in secret. So the idea of being ahead of your time is really more like being under 00:26:06.100 --> 00:26:16.060 your time because there's this 200 years of more or less contemporary thinking. Other 00:26:16.060 --> 00:26:26.300 people that I read in the 1940s in the time that I was 8 to 12 years old or so, J.C. Bowes 00:26:26.300 --> 00:26:38.460 was one of the interesting people who around 1900 had been very popular and exciting as 00:26:38.460 --> 00:26:48.660 a physics researcher and a biological researcher and a radio researcher in England. But after 00:26:48.660 --> 00:26:56.820 two or three of his lectures people started thinking about the meaning that he was showing 00:26:56.820 --> 00:27:09.260 crystals and metals and vegetables and animals all had sensitivity and reactivity and you 00:27:09.260 --> 00:27:15.740 could fatigue a piece of metal for example and let it rest and it would recover just 00:27:15.740 --> 00:27:25.260 the same way a fatigued muscle recovers. And when the British biologists started realizing 00:27:25.260 --> 00:27:34.820 the implications of what Bowes was saying they went back to a more abstract kind of 00:27:34.820 --> 00:27:44.740 biology and he didn't give any more seminars. He went back to India and Marconi sent his 00:27:44.740 --> 00:27:52.580 man to try to get Bowes to be involved in the Marconi radio company because Bowes had 00:27:52.580 --> 00:28:05.940 invented the sensor for radio detection. Ordinary sensors at that time had a, the sensor would 00:28:05.940 --> 00:28:15.260 pass a current which would turn a current into a bell that would ring the bell and activate 00:28:15.260 --> 00:28:24.420 a hammer that would knock the sensor back into a starting position. So they were sort 00:28:24.420 --> 00:28:30.340 of like a Rube Goldberg apparatus. You could only detect a signal as fast as your hammer 00:28:30.340 --> 00:28:38.660 could resensitize the thing. Bowes by understanding the fatigue ability and recoverability of 00:28:38.660 --> 00:28:46.900 material used metal particles and mercury coatings and pressure and such so that he 00:28:46.900 --> 00:28:56.740 could tune up his radio sensor and it would spontaneously recover its sensitivity so you 00:28:56.740 --> 00:29:03.940 could keep sending a signal and do practical radio communication. And that was one of the 00:29:03.940 --> 00:29:13.100 devices. If you used it too much, too fast, too long, it lost sensitivity just the way 00:29:13.100 --> 00:29:19.860 an overworked muscle or brain loses sensitivity. So you would let it rest and then it would 00:29:19.860 --> 00:29:26.540 come back and work like a fresh one just like resting your brain and muscle. And one of 00:29:26.540 --> 00:29:33.660 my next newsletters is going to be on this idea of fatigue and what it has to do with 00:29:33.660 --> 00:29:50.620 inflammation, excitation and eventually damage to the tissue and atrophy of the tissue. And 00:29:50.620 --> 00:29:58.340 as far as I know the people at Polar Giaf, they didn't make any special reference or 00:29:58.340 --> 00:30:10.380 connection to J.C. Bowes but these ideas of material substance being sensitive and responsive 00:30:10.380 --> 00:30:18.980 the same way living substance is, these were in the culture and A.I. Oprin who is considered 00:30:18.980 --> 00:30:32.140 one of the founders of the study of the origin of life, 1924 I think Oprin's book was, which 00:30:32.140 --> 00:30:42.820 explained a jelly conception of the origin of life, that organic materials would coalesce 00:30:42.820 --> 00:30:54.940 spontaneously and Oprin got his ideas from this Belgian, Bungenberg de Jong who wrote 00:30:54.940 --> 00:31:06.260 in 1922 a book on, he called it complex coacervation which is like a colloid that reestablishes 00:31:06.260 --> 00:31:12.700 new equilibria until you get several phases that are all stable with one another. Some 00:31:12.700 --> 00:31:22.340 of them love oily materials, some that are more water loving. But Oprin and Bungenberg 00:31:22.340 --> 00:31:33.060 de Jong were the pioneers of the gel conception of cytoplasm even though there were people 00:31:33.060 --> 00:31:41.620 who realized that the cytoplasm is a gel and that the membrane isn't a necessary component, 00:31:41.620 --> 00:31:53.140 these people did the thinking and the experimenting that showed how a gel can establish itself, 00:31:53.140 --> 00:32:00.540 remain in equilibrium, have preference for certain types of material that will dissolve 00:32:00.540 --> 00:32:06.340 oily materials preferentially over watery materials and that certain salts will be concentrated 00:32:06.340 --> 00:32:16.300 just passively, just in the physical arrangement of materials without any pumps or energy being 00:32:16.300 --> 00:32:38.860 involved at that stage. Le Chatelier was another contemporary, Vernadsky the Russian went around 00:32:38.860 --> 00:32:46.820 the world, he hoped to get an appointment in the United States but no one wanted to 00:32:46.820 --> 00:32:55.940 have a geobiologist or a biogeologist on their faculty so he was mostly working in France 00:32:55.940 --> 00:33:06.260 and Russia and he recognized in Le Chatelier's principle which chemists all know about but 00:33:06.260 --> 00:33:16.580 don't really apply it very far, Le Chatelier's principle is that when you disturb a system 00:33:16.580 --> 00:33:29.740 of substance, the substance responds so as to reduce the stress. Vernadsky showed that 00:33:29.740 --> 00:33:38.260 any energy impinging on any substance creates order of a certain kind depending on the nature 00:33:38.260 --> 00:33:46.700 of the energy impinging on the substance so sunlight running through air or sea water 00:33:46.700 --> 00:33:55.380 whatever organizes that in a certain way and the energy by Le Chatelier's principle minimizes 00:33:55.380 --> 00:34:06.260 the disturbance. So a continuous flow of energy is going to continuously restructure and reorganize 00:34:06.260 --> 00:34:14.740 adding information to the system when you flow energy through any substance that has 00:34:14.740 --> 00:34:22.780 any capacity for memory it's going to remember that now this is the second passage of energy 00:34:22.780 --> 00:34:34.140 so it's never the same as the first passage the substance remembers by changing its structure. 00:34:34.140 --> 00:34:42.820 Water in the 1930s and 40s water was already being realized to have its intrinsic memory 00:34:42.820 --> 00:34:52.500 and have long range ordering processes that made water near a surface different from the 00:34:52.500 --> 00:35:01.540 water at a great distance from a surface and the water that had been near a surface will 00:35:01.540 --> 00:35:08.940 remember some of that structuring effect that it had. For example, where a body of water 00:35:08.940 --> 00:35:15.900 or a drop meets the air it forms a film that's tough enough for a bug to walk on. That's 00:35:15.900 --> 00:35:21.020 the sort of structuring that happens anytime something different is introduced into the 00:35:21.020 --> 00:35:36.820 water. Bernadsky by applying this principle showed that all substance is especially wet 00:35:36.820 --> 00:35:44.980 gelatinous substances are able to store experience or store the record of energy that's passed 00:35:44.980 --> 00:35:55.780 through them. A lot of people were thinking about the origin of life in terms of a warm 00:35:55.780 --> 00:36:05.380 soup is how a lot of American biologists described it. Sidney Fox who was a student of Oprins 00:36:05.380 --> 00:36:20.380 and understood De Jong's work, he suggested that maybe life didn't start in the soup. 00:36:20.380 --> 00:36:32.620 He thought possibly condensing amino acids formed in clouds or wherever might have condensed 00:36:32.620 --> 00:36:41.180 on the hot volcanic rocks. So he just threw some powdered amino acids on hot volcanic 00:36:41.180 --> 00:36:48.980 rocks and sprinkled a little bit of water just enough to make a very viscous gel. Then 00:36:48.980 --> 00:36:56.900 he scraped the stuff up an hour or two hours later and put it in water and looked at it 00:36:56.900 --> 00:37:06.580 under the microscope and it had formed something much more specific than the complex coacervates 00:37:06.580 --> 00:37:18.540 that Bungenberg, De Jong had studied. Sidney Fox's mixture of amino acids had spontaneously 00:37:18.540 --> 00:37:29.900 and almost immediately formed little bacteria-like particles of very uniform size and shape. 00:37:29.900 --> 00:37:36.620 When he added amino acids to the watery solution that these were floating in, the things would 00:37:36.620 --> 00:37:47.220 grow incorporating amino acids into their structure and even produce offspring. They 00:37:47.220 --> 00:37:56.460 would reach a certain size and a bud would form. In the absence of water, slightly moist 00:37:56.460 --> 00:38:04.820 hot amino acids polymerize spontaneously into proteins and those proteins spontaneously 00:38:04.820 --> 00:38:13.820 form little bacteria-like particles that break up. Following the coacervation principle, 00:38:13.820 --> 00:38:21.860 they are more stable at a certain small size and those then, the proteins that make up 00:38:21.860 --> 00:38:31.220 those particles can catalyze reactions incorporating new amino acids in the new proteins allowing 00:38:31.220 --> 00:38:41.260 them to grow. So in an hour or two, Sidney Fox demonstrated something very much like 00:38:41.260 --> 00:38:51.780 the origin of life that Oprin and Bungenberg, De Jong had just postulated as possible. Sidney 00:38:51.780 --> 00:39:03.180 Fox demonstrated real growing organism-like things with real proteins spontaneously synthesized. 00:39:03.180 --> 00:39:23.500 The inflammatory process that causes atrophy and inflammation, tumor formation, aging, 00:39:23.500 --> 00:39:40.340 tissue loss and so on, this is structurally just like fatigue. If you start thinking of 00:39:40.340 --> 00:39:50.220 the living stuff as substance rather than information, then you imagine you're a chemist 00:39:50.220 --> 00:39:57.020 or an engineer with a gob of stuff to analyze. You look at it under different conditions 00:39:57.020 --> 00:40:10.100 of temperature and pressure and saltiness and wetness, the amount of water versus salt. 00:40:10.100 --> 00:40:18.820 When you look at the living organism or at its cells in this way as substance, everything 00:40:18.820 --> 00:40:30.540 gets infinitely simpler. When you look at it from the Weissman influenced kind of biology, 00:40:30.540 --> 00:40:42.260 you have the God created infinitely complex genome which is being torn down to create 00:40:42.260 --> 00:40:54.100 the various structures. But it's essentially an infinitely complex process that it's so 00:40:54.100 --> 00:41:01.100 complicated that you can't calculate it. But when you look at it from Vernadsky's, LeChantelier's 00:41:01.100 --> 00:41:12.820 and Sidney Fox's perspective, you see that physical processes influence the behavior. 00:41:12.820 --> 00:41:30.140 When you look at any condition such as dementia, cancer, arthritis, epilepsy, paralysis, migraines, 00:41:30.140 --> 00:41:40.180 emphysema, all of these are physical processes as well as biological processes. A common 00:41:40.180 --> 00:41:53.620 feature that they have is that the cells get too wet. The gel that's put into a watery 00:41:53.620 --> 00:42:03.700 solution without enough salt or sugar or things dissolved in water swells up and can eventually 00:42:03.700 --> 00:42:15.820 decompose just from getting too wet. All of the fatiguing, inflaming, tumor forming, atrophy 00:42:15.820 --> 00:42:25.540 producing biological processes involve this accumulation of water out of control. The 00:42:25.540 --> 00:42:34.340 gel is no longer in control and excluding watery stuff. The gel is forced to take up 00:42:34.340 --> 00:42:42.100 too much water and along with the water it tends to take up random amounts of protein 00:42:42.100 --> 00:42:50.260 and fat and salts that shouldn't be there. For example, the healthy cell excludes calcium 00:42:50.260 --> 00:42:58.860 and takes up magnesium. If you immerse it in too much water without enough sodium, that 00:42:58.860 --> 00:43:07.220 alone will cause the cell to take up calcium and the calcium and the water excite the cell. 00:43:07.220 --> 00:43:13.940 So for example, to apply this to epilepsy, if you make a person drink too much plain 00:43:13.940 --> 00:43:22.780 water it can bring on a seizure. Another way that neurologists can test for epilepsy, they 00:43:22.780 --> 00:43:28.420 used to do this, actually have a person drink a pint of water and if they had a seizure 00:43:28.420 --> 00:43:35.460 that proved they had epilepsy. Or they would have them hyperventilate and if they had a 00:43:35.460 --> 00:43:42.940 seizure from hyperventilating that proved they had epilepsy. When you hyperventilate 00:43:42.940 --> 00:43:53.220 you reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood. That allows water from the blood 00:43:53.220 --> 00:44:04.380 to move out into the cells such as the brain cells causing them to swell, get excited and 00:44:04.380 --> 00:44:10.300 in the case of epilepsy it can cause a seizure or in other situations it can cause cramping 00:44:10.300 --> 00:44:24.740 pain. Are there any questions or comments up to this point? 00:44:24.740 --> 00:44:45.060 I wanted to back up way in the beginning when you were talking about William Blake. A lot 00:44:45.060 --> 00:44:46.060 of what William Blake wrote was poetry and what I got from his readings back in medical 00:44:46.060 --> 00:44:47.060 school, he was profoundly religious. Was that a cover or was that him? 00:44:47.060 --> 00:44:48.060 Yeah, he referred to God as Old Novadanny Aloft. 00:44:48.060 --> 00:44:49.060 But all his illustrations are profoundly religious. 00:44:49.060 --> 00:44:50.060 Yeah, he was... 00:44:50.060 --> 00:44:57.060 Like I've been doing this for ages. 00:44:57.060 --> 00:45:08.980 Yeah, he came from a sect that used language in a particular way and when you look at the 00:45:08.980 --> 00:45:15.260 conflicts between two different poems, one where he's sounding like an atheist, ridiculing 00:45:15.260 --> 00:45:30.500 a beastly cruel God, he basically says that doesn't exist, that only God is man-like. 00:45:30.500 --> 00:45:35.500 So he was a humanist speaking a very old-fashioned religious language. 00:45:35.500 --> 00:45:58.740 Could you make some analogies as to what could be happening today? I mean, I go for instance 00:45:58.740 --> 00:46:05.740 the drug companies, the FDA, and they really suppress knowledge. 00:46:05.740 --> 00:46:14.140 Yeah, I'm trying to avoid taking any genetics courses. I think I did take one, but I read 00:46:14.140 --> 00:46:19.660 the textbooks they were using in other genetics courses and one of them was called Classical 00:46:19.660 --> 00:46:27.340 Papers in Genetics. And I read that just to see what they considered their history to 00:46:27.340 --> 00:46:36.500 be. Were there some really good genetics ideas that were apart from this Weizmann mental 00:46:36.500 --> 00:46:45.700 organ religion? And all of the papers in that book of classical papers that supposedly are 00:46:45.700 --> 00:46:53.900 the foundation of modern genetics, all of them said these data are consistent with the 00:46:53.900 --> 00:47:03.780 idea that there was no confirmation of an idea, it was simply it could happen. And that's 00:47:03.780 --> 00:47:11.620 surprisingly how science has been working in the 20th century, consistent with not disprove 00:47:11.620 --> 00:47:21.260 all of the alternatives and leave something that is very convincing. But basically just 00:47:21.260 --> 00:47:31.100 saying it could happen in line with this evidence. And often the conclusion in magazine science, 00:47:31.100 --> 00:47:37.700 the conclusions often have nothing to do with the data except the editor didn't read the 00:47:37.700 --> 00:47:38.700 paper. 00:47:38.700 --> 00:47:50.140 Could you talk a little bit about hydration effects that are involved with let's say blood 00:47:50.140 --> 00:47:55.860 hydration versus extracellular hydration, intracellular hydration also and how hydration 00:47:55.860 --> 00:48:02.740 may relate to developmental cycles in terms of gestation and the evolution of organs? 00:48:02.740 --> 00:48:09.620 At an early stage when the cells are growing fast like the fertilized ovum and early cell 00:48:09.620 --> 00:48:19.940 divisions, they're about 92% water. And in an old organism the water content gets way 00:48:19.940 --> 00:48:31.380 down to 70% or something like that. In 1920 someone found that just putting cells in a 00:48:31.380 --> 00:48:40.260 hypotonic solution forced mitosis to start. So when the cell is rapidly dividing and forming 00:48:40.260 --> 00:48:48.740 a new organism, the high content of water stimulates a certain kind of activity that 00:48:48.740 --> 00:48:57.780 in the context creates increased mass and complexity. And when the organism is mature 00:48:57.780 --> 00:49:07.220 and doesn't want tumors popping up everywhere, the body fluids, cells, intracellular and 00:49:07.220 --> 00:49:15.540 extracellular are relatively dehydrated. But you can stimulate regeneration just by increasing 00:49:15.540 --> 00:49:24.540 the moistness. In the 1950s some magazine described someone who had the end of their 00:49:24.540 --> 00:49:33.820 finger cut off at the base of the fingernail and they kept it sealed and moist and found 00:49:33.820 --> 00:49:43.580 the finger regenerated. Remembering that 20 or 30 years later, I knew two people, a little 00:49:43.580 --> 00:49:48.980 kid who cut off the end of his finger the same way, right at the base of the nail and 00:49:48.980 --> 00:49:56.420 a carpenter who sawed off the end of his finger. And both the kid's mother put his finger in 00:49:56.420 --> 00:50:05.220 a ballpoint pen case so it was not touching anything but the atmosphere was sealed around 00:50:05.220 --> 00:50:14.220 it and the carpenter used a cigar, an aluminum cigar tube to put over his finger. And they 00:50:14.220 --> 00:50:21.220 now both have perfect normal length fingers. The fingernail looks perfect even though there 00:50:21.220 --> 00:50:32.380 was no fingernail visible after they cut it off. So adults can regenerate nicely formed 00:50:32.380 --> 00:50:41.900 tissue in a very visible way, bone and skin, everything takes on a normal shape. When the 00:50:41.900 --> 00:50:50.340 conditions are right, I think besides the humidity, the carbon dioxide that's kept present 00:50:50.340 --> 00:50:56.540 in equilibrium with the metabolizing tissue, I think the carbon dioxide is a factor that 00:50:56.540 --> 00:51:06.220 prevents it going wild in the mirror scar formation or tumor formation. And I think 00:51:06.220 --> 00:51:17.660 that's the main function of carbon dioxide is when sugar is fully metabolized it all 00:51:17.660 --> 00:51:28.580 turns into carbon dioxide and the carbon dioxide can, but doesn't necessarily, can be turned 00:51:28.580 --> 00:51:35.820 into carbonic acid by combining with water. And so sugar constantly streaming into the 00:51:35.820 --> 00:51:42.580 cell means that water and carbon dioxide are going to be constantly streaming out of the 00:51:42.580 --> 00:51:49.900 cell. And just in terms of binding with water and leaving the cell, that's one way that 00:51:49.900 --> 00:51:59.780 carbon dioxide as it's formed tends to remove water from a certain compartment. But carbon 00:51:59.780 --> 00:52:09.940 dioxide in itself is acidic before it forms carbonic acid. And this is another thing where 00:52:09.940 --> 00:52:21.700 the mainstream culture talks about hydrogen ions as how you conceive acidity. The whole 00:52:21.700 --> 00:52:27.460 way of talking about it is typically in terms of the concentration of hydrogen ions, that's 00:52:27.460 --> 00:52:38.340 what pH means. But the real theory of acidity is just the opposite. It's the binding of 00:52:38.340 --> 00:52:46.100 electrons rather than the releasing of protons or hydrogen ions. And Lewis was the person 00:52:46.100 --> 00:52:54.220 who explained the correct general theory of acidity and so these are called Lewis acids. 00:52:54.220 --> 00:53:01.020 And a Lewis acid doesn't necessarily contain any hydrogen or protons so there's no pH involved 00:53:01.020 --> 00:53:10.140 but it still has all the properties of acidity because it is binding electrons and when you 00:53:10.140 --> 00:53:20.220 bind electrons you tend to liberate protons anyway. And carbon dioxide then in itself 00:53:20.220 --> 00:53:28.380 when it binds to a protein is acidifying the protein just by pulling electrons away from 00:53:28.380 --> 00:53:42.060 the protein. And when you acidify a gel, the gel being acidic proteins, most all biological 00:53:42.060 --> 00:53:55.780 gels and most gels in general are made with acid polymers. If you acidify a gel it tends 00:53:55.780 --> 00:54:07.460 to contract and if you add alkali to it, it expands and swells. And so the acidifying 00:54:07.460 --> 00:54:13.140 function of carbon dioxide tends to squeeze water out of the cells just like what the 00:54:13.140 --> 00:54:19.100 carbon dioxide is doing to the proteins. And so carbon dioxide is a stabilizing and shaping 00:54:19.100 --> 00:54:26.220 factor. Is there any difference in this effect between sugar as a fuel and fat as a fuel? 00:54:26.220 --> 00:54:38.220 Yeah, sugar makes more carbon dioxide per unit of energy and at high altitude or in 00:54:38.220 --> 00:54:52.780 the presence of an atmosphere enriched with carbon dioxide, the cells ability to resist 00:54:52.780 --> 00:54:59.500 fatigue, fatigue being seen as the same as inflammation, swelling, uptake of too much 00:54:59.500 --> 00:55:07.540 water. In the presence of extra carbon dioxide or at high altitude where there is less oxygen 00:55:07.540 --> 00:55:14.780 pressure so you retain the carbon dioxide that your tissues produce because it isn't 00:55:14.780 --> 00:55:24.940 being competed against by the excess of atmospheric oxygen. At high altitude you retain your own 00:55:24.940 --> 00:55:31.460 carbon dioxide as if you had an enriched atmosphere of carbon dioxide. At high altitude or in 00:55:31.460 --> 00:55:42.460 the presence of carbon dioxide you can work harder and longer without getting fatigued. 00:55:42.460 --> 00:55:51.180 And I think that's entirely the effect of carbon dioxide on the water but there are 00:55:51.180 --> 00:56:04.140 effects on the ATP too. The equation for making ATP is to dehydrate the precursors and when 00:56:04.140 --> 00:56:15.140 you destroy ATP by de-energizing it you add water, hydrolyze it. And if you look at the 00:56:15.140 --> 00:56:21.780 equation if you could just pull water molecules out of the environment ATP would spontaneously 00:56:21.780 --> 00:56:28.780 form and it wouldn't take any fancy machinery. Just dehydrating a compartment should cause 00:56:28.780 --> 00:56:42.100 spontaneous phosphorylation. And I think carbon dioxide by its effect on gel and by taking 00:56:42.100 --> 00:56:50.940 water out in the form of carbonic acid, I think that's how the carbon dioxide contributes 00:56:50.940 --> 00:57:04.020 to raising the energy and endurance of cells. At high altitudes in Nepal there was a study 00:57:04.020 --> 00:57:13.460 of I think it was 67,000 households looking for different diseases. They didn't find any 00:57:13.460 --> 00:57:23.020 cases of Alzheimer's or other dementias and they were extremely deficient in brain diseases 00:57:23.020 --> 00:57:32.460 in general. But the absence of aging dementia was remarkable and that's something that's 00:57:32.460 --> 00:57:41.220 been known for over 100 years that high altitude populations are very resistant to the diseases 00:57:41.220 --> 00:57:50.500 of aging, cancer and heart disease for example. In New Mexico alone which is a relatively 00:57:50.500 --> 00:57:58.060 small population but the figures are very clear that for every I think it's 1500 feet 00:57:58.060 --> 00:58:05.980 you get a 5 or 10% reduction in mortality from heart disease. Same with cancer around 00:58:05.980 --> 00:58:13.180 the world. Insurance companies have known that cancer is relatively scarce in Nepal 00:58:13.180 --> 00:58:25.340 and Bolivia and all of the high altitude places. Well carbon dioxide is retained, it has an 00:58:25.340 --> 00:58:34.020 antioxidant function. There's less oxygen but the carbon dioxide is, I think carbon 00:58:34.020 --> 00:58:42.380 dioxide is really what oxygen is being used for. It undergoes chemical reactions but the 00:58:42.380 --> 00:58:49.300 production of carbon dioxide I think is what really creates the structure of the cell, 00:58:49.300 --> 00:59:00.300 maintains the gel in the living state and makes the energy hard to deplete. Just all 00:59:00.300 --> 00:59:07.780 kinds of muscle and nerve tests, grip strength is stronger at high altitude even though the 00:59:07.780 --> 00:59:25.140 oxygen is lower. It's an example of the toxicity of oxygen or the anti-toxicity of carbon dioxide. 00:59:25.140 --> 00:59:32.140 It's tending to damage their lungs and make their emphysema worse. 00:59:32.140 --> 01:00:00.660 I think it's a similar thing to altitude sickness. 01:00:00.660 --> 01:00:09.900 Many places are still treating altitude sickness with oxygen but someone noticed that a device 01:00:09.900 --> 01:00:15.340 they were taking up on Mount Everest, a plastic bag that they would put the sick person in, 01:00:15.340 --> 01:00:21.740 zip it in and blow it up with oxygen. They would get better recover from the mountain 01:00:21.740 --> 01:00:27.980 sickness but someone analyzed the error and they were concentrating their own carbon dioxide 01:00:27.980 --> 01:00:33.220 in this plastic bag and so someone tested just having them breathe carbon dioxide at 01:00:33.220 --> 01:00:50.540 high altitude and it worked. 01:00:50.540 --> 01:01:02.140 I think that's related to the fact that aging involves a plugging up of all kinds of sensitive 01:01:02.140 --> 01:01:13.900 points on macromolecules in the cell. Glycation is something that is identified with diabetes 01:01:13.900 --> 01:01:21.420 and Alzheimer's disease and so on. It means the attachment of sugar like fragments to 01:01:21.420 --> 01:01:29.900 proteins and especially to receptors or sensitive points in the cell, regulatory points. That 01:01:29.900 --> 01:01:38.620 happens, they call it glycation as if it's caused by glucose but actually the oxidized 01:01:38.620 --> 01:01:48.460 products of polyunsaturated fatty acids are many times more active in causing glycation. 01:01:48.460 --> 01:01:59.180 And the glycation happens mainly on lysine amino groups of proteins but you can glycate 01:01:59.180 --> 01:02:09.460 any molecule that has an amino group and that pretty well inactivates it. But the normal 01:02:09.460 --> 01:02:18.380 function of a good concentration of carbon dioxide is to bind to lysine groups in hemoglobin, 01:02:18.380 --> 01:02:24.620 that's how oxygen is released in the tissues where you need it because carbon dioxide comes 01:02:24.620 --> 01:02:31.540 out of the cells, binds to the lysine forming a carb amino group on the hemoglobin, acidifying 01:02:31.540 --> 01:02:38.140 the hemoglobin and making the oxygen available for the cell to get. Then when you get in 01:02:38.140 --> 01:02:46.580 the lungs with a high oxygen concentration, the oxygen displaces the carbon dioxide. But 01:02:46.580 --> 01:02:54.980 the carbon dioxide binds that way to insulin receptors, nerve receptors, anything that 01:02:54.980 --> 01:03:01.940 has a lysine group, carbon dioxide is normally there protecting it and acidifying it and 01:03:01.940 --> 01:03:12.980 stabilizing the structure in the sensitive position or condition. And so just hyperventilating 01:03:12.980 --> 01:03:20.220 I think is contributing to the aging process in which things tend to get glued together 01:03:20.220 --> 01:03:28.340 by glycation. 01:03:28.340 --> 01:03:34.860 So do you know if anybody's ever measured this competing effect between carbon dioxide 01:03:34.860 --> 01:03:40.780 interfering with glycation reactions and the fact that glycation reactions themselves are 01:03:40.780 --> 01:03:48.940 dehydrations and therefore would be enhanced by a drier environment? Therefore you predict 01:03:48.940 --> 01:03:57.660 that they would go the other direction in terms of aging itself becoming dehydrated? 01:03:57.660 --> 01:04:10.980 Well I think some of the dehydration with aging is a normal defensive process. In extracts 01:04:10.980 --> 01:04:22.540 of tissue, slices and cell cultures and whole animals and organ treatments, if you inject 01:04:22.540 --> 01:04:32.380 a hypertonic solution, which remember the hypotonic causes tissue swelling, excitation, 01:04:32.380 --> 01:04:40.380 inflammation. The hypertonic solution like sea water instead of isotonic saline so-called, 01:04:40.380 --> 01:04:46.780 sea water is about seven times stronger than the salt solution of the blood or even ten 01:04:46.780 --> 01:04:53.700 times stronger. But a lot of hospitals are using the concentration of sea water, seven 01:04:53.700 --> 01:05:01.100 times normal strength to revive people and it works better than isotonic saline. And 01:05:01.100 --> 01:05:09.060 in the individual cells and tissue cultures and so on, it has an antioxidant effect, it 01:05:09.060 --> 01:05:20.060 protects against oxidation, free radical damage. All kinds of damage are protected by not just 01:05:20.060 --> 01:05:30.180 concentrated salt, sodium chloride, but concentrated sugar and urea have similar effects in protecting 01:05:30.180 --> 01:05:38.940 cells. So I think the dehydration of the fluids with aging, part of that is a defensive reaction 01:05:38.940 --> 01:05:50.300 reaction. During a seminar once in 1991, one of my professors said, you know I read, unlike 01:05:50.300 --> 01:06:01.220 the other people at the university, he said, do you think that is true that all of these 01:06:01.220 --> 01:06:07.060 tissues, different tissues of the organism are isotonic with the blood? And so I went 01:06:07.060 --> 01:06:16.340 down and in about an hour found an experiment which took out very fresh snips of tissue 01:06:16.340 --> 01:06:24.300 and dropped them in isotonic double concentration, triple concentration and so on solutions and 01:06:24.300 --> 01:06:35.820 found that most tissues from an adult organism are stable only at about a triple osmolarity, 01:06:35.820 --> 01:06:43.700 two or three times more concentrated than the blood stream. And so there seems to be 01:06:43.700 --> 01:06:53.540 something special about the blood that makes us able to handle it at the isotonic but hypotonic 01:06:53.540 --> 01:07:03.780 to our functioning tissue cells. And I think that's a barrier of fibrin, largely fibrin 01:07:03.780 --> 01:07:13.540 on the inside of capillaries, interacting with the movement of carbon dioxide out of 01:07:13.540 --> 01:07:19.780 the cells. Did you have a comment? 01:07:19.780 --> 01:07:40.740 Is there any relation between your comment on the story that high altitude populations 01:07:40.740 --> 01:07:41.740 age slowly and the fact that writers from Kenya and Ethiopia sent world directors on 01:07:41.740 --> 01:07:42.740 a regular basis and also is there any relation between that and caloric restriction slowing 01:07:42.740 --> 01:07:43.740 the aging process? 01:07:43.740 --> 01:07:49.740 Yeah, caloric restriction reduces the amount of damage to the mitochondria and energy produced 01:07:49.740 --> 01:07:55.980 by the producing system so that the cells are actually metabolizing at a higher rate 01:07:55.980 --> 01:08:05.940 than animals that are eating lots of vegetables and such. The toxins from a freely chosen 01:08:05.940 --> 01:08:14.940 diet quickly slow down the metabolic rate and in calves which are born with very saturated 01:08:14.940 --> 01:08:21.860 brains because they're basically getting butterfat incorporated into their brains rather than 01:08:21.860 --> 01:08:31.220 vegetable oil. Their mitochondria slow down in proportion to the linoleic acid getting 01:08:31.220 --> 01:08:39.980 incorporated into the mitochondria in the cardiolipin that regulates the mitochondrial 01:08:39.980 --> 01:08:53.140 energy production. And there's a paper you can find on the internet called "Uncoupled 01:08:53.140 --> 01:09:04.380 and Surviving" it's about a mouse that is naturally very hyper metabolic, burns energy 01:09:04.380 --> 01:09:11.860 at a tremendous rate and lives much, much longer than ordinary mice. And that's the 01:09:11.860 --> 01:09:18.980 general rule that the high metabolizers live longer than the low metabolizers and they 01:09:18.980 --> 01:09:31.700 tend to have bigger brains. The biggest fossil brain skull ever found was on Mount Kilimanjaro 01:09:31.700 --> 01:09:40.020 and I've always thought that that was probably a combination of some kind of a good diet 01:09:40.020 --> 01:09:49.180 plus the high altitude because when you do the opposite, when you increase the oxygen 01:09:49.180 --> 01:10:00.220 tension or do any of these things such as disturbing the amount of water the tissue 01:10:00.220 --> 01:10:09.780 can handle, the brain gets smaller. Radiation causes the tissue to swell and take up water 01:10:09.780 --> 01:10:18.420 and the chronic effect is to cause the offspring to have smaller brains. So I think all of 01:10:18.420 --> 01:10:24.740 these things, polyunsaturated fatty acids, radiation, estrogen and too much oxygen are 01:10:24.740 --> 01:10:34.340 all doing exactly the same thing which is over exciting the tissue and keeping it from 01:10:34.340 --> 01:10:42.220 going along the normal path of complexification and adaptive complexity. 01:10:42.220 --> 01:10:59.900 I've always thought Heraclitus had something when he said dry souls are best. Heraclitus, 01:10:59.900 --> 01:11:06.180 the Greek guy that said you can't step in the same river twice, he also said dry souls 01:11:06.180 --> 01:11:13.180 are best. What's that? 01:11:13.180 --> 01:11:41.700 When I went to graduate school I was intending to become a nerve biologist primarily and 01:11:41.700 --> 01:11:51.780 the professor would refer us to articles in journals that seemed pretty irrelevant to 01:11:51.780 --> 01:11:58.700 the actual problem it was supposed to be solving. But I would look through the same journal 01:11:58.700 --> 01:12:06.020 and found that there were articles published the same year that were much better solutions 01:12:06.020 --> 01:12:11.580 than the professor had referred us to. And eventually over a period of three or four 01:12:11.580 --> 01:12:19.900 weeks, first term in graduate school, I saw that Gilbert Ling was turning up more and 01:12:19.900 --> 01:12:27.620 more often as a person who had solved the problems that were being not solved by the 01:12:27.620 --> 01:12:36.620 conventional mainline biologists. So I wrote to him and he answered nicely and said you 01:12:36.620 --> 01:12:44.580 just don't understand what science is. Science is about money and prestige and power. And 01:12:44.580 --> 01:12:53.260 he's the one that developed the glass microelectrode which used to be called the Ling-Gerard microelectrode. 01:12:53.260 --> 01:12:59.620 And he not only developed it but he decided that it wasn't measuring the membrane potential 01:12:59.620 --> 01:13:10.020 which everyone since him has claimed that it does. He says there is no membrane potential. 01:13:10.020 --> 01:13:20.860 In my lab with that same nerve biologist, I was using a Ling electrode in a muscle cell 01:13:20.860 --> 01:13:28.500 on an oscilloscope and with a micro manipulator I would move it into the cell and back different 01:13:28.500 --> 01:13:34.020 places in the cell. And a professor came by and was watching what I was doing and I said 01:13:34.020 --> 01:13:42.820 look each place in the cell has its own distinct electrical potential. And he turned so fast 01:13:42.820 --> 01:13:51.540 he couldn't look at the evidence because if there is a membrane which is creating the 01:13:51.540 --> 01:14:00.460 potential everything inside is a dilute solution. You can't have regional potentials. But Gilbert 01:14:00.460 --> 01:14:10.300 Ling explains why a cell is analogous to a water softener which retains ions passively 01:14:10.300 --> 01:14:18.140 doesn't expend energy to do that. You can take hair, clean all of the ions out of it 01:14:18.140 --> 01:14:25.900 and dip it into blood serum and it will take up magnesium and potassium just like a living 01:14:25.900 --> 01:14:32.700 cell. But people are still talking about membrane pumps and at Gilbert Ling's site on the internet 01:14:32.700 --> 01:14:43.140 at gilbertling.org you can read a lot of his papers on how basically silly and corrupt 01:14:43.140 --> 01:14:55.100 mainline biology and medicine are. He is following up on A.S. Troshin who was more or less a 01:14:55.100 --> 01:15:02.020 contemporary of Gilbert Ling who wrote a very good book. You can find it in one of the big 01:15:02.020 --> 01:15:09.020 science libraries here on the behavior of ions in cells. 01:15:09.020 --> 01:15:20.020 Did you go back to VH how should one measure VH then? 01:15:20.020 --> 01:15:34.020 A guy named VH at the National Institute of Alcoholism, one of the national institutes, 01:15:34.020 --> 01:15:45.020 has demonstrated that we can use NMR to measure intracellular pH distinct from the extracellular. 01:15:45.020 --> 01:15:52.020 He was the first one I know of who demonstrated that tumors have higher intracellular pH. 01:15:52.020 --> 01:16:02.020 It's the extracellular acidity that lactic acid causes but the tumor itself intracellularly 01:16:02.020 --> 01:16:11.020 is excited and alkaline relative to normal cells. And excitation of any sort will eventually 01:16:11.020 --> 01:16:18.020 produce an alkaline field around the nerve of the muscle as well as swelling. It's just 01:16:18.020 --> 01:16:23.020 like any gel that gets alkaline will swell up. 01:16:23.020 --> 01:16:29.020 Is it necessary to make the body alkaline if it's acidic? How does one determine that? 01:16:29.020 --> 01:16:37.020 Well acid basically is protective as long as it's involving carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide 01:16:37.020 --> 01:16:50.020 is oil soluble and if you added 1% or so to the air here we would add it to our blood 01:16:50.020 --> 01:16:56.020 and soft tissues it would concentrate inside cells more than in the water. But it would 01:16:56.020 --> 01:17:04.020 go on increasing for months at just breathing the same concentration. It finally builds 01:17:04.020 --> 01:17:12.020 itself into the bones, strengthens the bones as calcium carbonate before the calcium phosphates 01:17:12.020 --> 01:17:23.020 form. So we're as if we've been deprived of carbon dioxide chronically and I think that's 01:17:23.020 --> 01:17:32.020 one of the things that causes the tendency to inflame and tumify and atrophy with aging. 01:17:32.020 --> 01:17:35.020 Does the carbon dioxide help osteoporosis? 01:17:35.020 --> 01:17:45.020 Yeah. And that's how vitamin K works. Vitamin K activates carbon dioxide and helps to integrate 01:17:45.020 --> 01:17:47.020 it into the bones. 01:17:47.020 --> 01:17:51.020 So we should all walk around with a bag over our heads? 01:17:51.020 --> 01:17:59.020 Yeah. I have an osteoporosis bonding bag for watching television. 01:17:59.020 --> 01:18:12.020 Are you contradicting Anderlin's theory of morphism as to if the body becomes more acidic 01:18:12.020 --> 01:18:19.020 all these inoculant protids or whatever your name would be for it normal down around the 01:18:19.020 --> 01:18:29.020 verouse clock into these viruses, bacteria, fungus and then cancer? 01:18:29.020 --> 01:18:37.020 The carbon dioxide, while it acidifies inside cells and stabilizes them, it's regulating, 01:18:37.020 --> 01:18:45.020 it's hauling calcium outside cells and helping to deposit it in the bones or send things 01:18:45.020 --> 01:19:00.020 out the kidneys. Its ability to combine with water and become a counter ion to metals accounts 01:19:00.020 --> 01:19:08.020 for I think all of the so-called active transport of metals, the active streaming of metals 01:19:08.020 --> 01:19:19.020 out of cells or in the cells that people used the idea of pumps to account for those kidney 01:19:19.020 --> 01:19:27.020 movements and so on. Gilbert Ling several times has calculated that the cell just to 01:19:27.020 --> 01:19:36.020 operate one or two of its pumps would need 15 times more energy than it could possibly 01:19:36.020 --> 01:19:49.020 derive from the energy available as food and oxygen. But the blood is alkaline because 01:19:49.020 --> 01:19:59.020 of the movement of carbon dioxide keeping the alkaline metals in motion. 01:19:59.020 --> 01:20:22.020 About 30 years ago I was thinking about this carbon dioxide thing and I had mentioned how 01:20:22.020 --> 01:20:27.020 it regulates brain circulation to one of my nutrition classes and the next week I had 01:20:27.020 --> 01:20:36.020 said soda, meaning soda pop as a carbon dioxide source, but next week a girl said that she 01:20:36.020 --> 01:20:43.020 had given her paralyzed mother who was hemiplegic from a stroke, six months she had been half 01:20:43.020 --> 01:20:49.020 paralyzed, she gave her a spoonful of baking soda and a glass of water and in 15 minutes 01:20:49.020 --> 01:20:57.020 the paralysis lifted. So then I started trying it every time I heard of someone who had a 01:20:57.020 --> 01:21:06.020 stroke. Recently in Mexico a guy had been basically just a blob on his bed for three 01:21:06.020 --> 01:21:14.020 weeks after a stroke and a guy gave him a spoonful of baking soda and a glass of water 01:21:14.020 --> 01:21:20.020 and within a few minutes he could move his hand and the next day he could walk across 01:21:20.020 --> 01:21:31.020 the room, but not very well. And dementia, I think I told you before about the woman 01:21:31.020 --> 01:21:40.020 who had had epilepsy for 20 years, 15 or 20 years, and her neurologist had documented 01:21:40.020 --> 01:21:47.020 her IQ decline, that was all he did on his annual checkups, and said she must not go 01:21:47.020 --> 01:21:55.020 out of the house by herself, she was so demented she couldn't find her way home. And she took 01:21:55.020 --> 01:22:06.020 progesterone and three or four days later she came back all by herself and she was recovered 01:22:06.020 --> 01:22:11.020 and able to do everything on her own. She went to graduate school and got her master's 01:22:11.020 --> 01:22:21.020 degree in three days and she met her doctor. I tried to get her to go back and talk to 01:22:21.020 --> 01:22:27.020 him, but in general these people who have these sudden total recoveries embarrass their 01:22:27.020 --> 01:22:40.020 doctors I think. A guy with Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS, he had a doctor that said he 01:22:40.020 --> 01:22:46.020 would work with him, but that involved just watching him rather than actually participating 01:22:46.020 --> 01:22:52.020 in prescribing. But anyway this guy was declining along with the other patients in the waiting 01:22:52.020 --> 01:22:59.020 room that he saw every week. And when he started using niacin, progesterone, light on his head 01:22:59.020 --> 01:23:13.020 for a couple hours every day, just infrared, a clear light bulb. Anyway he, after a few 01:23:13.020 --> 01:23:20.020 months of declining, started improving. I think it was six or eight months after he 01:23:20.020 --> 01:23:30.020 started he sent his toilet equipment, wheelchair and all those things back to the store and 01:23:30.020 --> 01:23:35.020 showed off that he could do leg lifts and went back to work at his company and had no 01:23:35.020 --> 01:23:43.020 problem with Lou Gehrig's disease. And baking soda and salt and sugar is another thing. 01:23:43.020 --> 01:23:51.020 Sugar stops the excitotoxic process. It works with niacin to stop the lipolysis that produces 01:23:51.020 --> 01:23:59.020 the fatty acids that activate the excitotoxic process. And so sugar and salt and baking 01:23:59.020 --> 01:24:10.020 soda and breathing in a paper bag and getting a lot of light and taking thyroid and progesterone. 01:24:10.020 --> 01:24:15.020 The only thing wrong with it is that some of the people recover so fast that no one 01:24:15.020 --> 01:24:18.020 believes they could have been terminal. 01:24:18.020 --> 01:24:22.020 >> Would you talk more about the red line? 01:24:22.020 --> 01:24:29.020 >> Okay, at a hardware store or a chicken store you can get these things called infrared 01:24:29.020 --> 01:24:36.020 light bulbs. They have a cone shaped aluminumized reflector and a clear front and they cost 01:24:36.020 --> 01:24:45.020 about three dollars. And they just run, they're designed to run at 130 some volts and so at 01:24:45.020 --> 01:24:52.020 120 volts they put out a lot of infrared and red light compared to ordinary incandescent 01:24:52.020 --> 01:25:01.020 bulbs. And that's good enough. It saves thirty, what, thirty-eight hundred dollars cheaper 01:25:01.020 --> 01:25:03.020 than a laser. 01:25:03.020 --> 01:25:06.020 >> What does the cone shape look like? 01:25:06.020 --> 01:25:08.020 >> That's just the reflector. 01:25:08.020 --> 01:25:10.020 >> Reflector flood. 01:25:10.020 --> 01:25:12.020 >> Yeah, floodlight. 01:25:12.020 --> 01:25:17.020 >> Could you talk about coconut oil? 01:25:17.020 --> 01:25:25.020 >> Yeah, coconut oil is anti-inflammatory. If you look up, if you put EFAD, essential 01:25:25.020 --> 01:25:33.020 fatty acid deficiency, into PubMed and do a search, you'll find that animals that are 01:25:33.020 --> 01:25:40.020 deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids, who have none of those fats in their 01:25:40.020 --> 01:25:53.020 diet, are hard to kill with endotoxin or mechanical trauma or a variety of poisons. They don't 01:25:53.020 --> 01:26:02.020 get arthritis or inflammatory diseases from the normal causes. So coconut oil and butter 01:26:02.020 --> 01:26:09.020 and the waxes from sugar cane and beeswax are being used for the same protective 01:26:09.020 --> 01:26:16.020 anti-inflammatory effect. The fats that we make based on palmitic acid, which is found 01:26:16.020 --> 01:26:25.020 in butter and coconut oil, these are anti-inflammatory things. The mead acid and this derivative 01:26:25.020 --> 01:26:32.020 are powerfully anti-inflammatory. And when we eat vegetables and vegetable oils, we stop 01:26:32.020 --> 01:26:39.020 making these anti-inflammatory substances and instead make the prostaglandins and inflammatory 01:26:39.020 --> 01:26:48.020 things. And one of the differences between palmitic acid and linoleic acid is, besides 01:26:48.020 --> 01:26:54.020 their effect pro- and anti-thyroid and pro- and anti-testosterone and progesterone and 01:26:54.020 --> 01:27:03.020 so on, the cell tends to take up more water when it has polyunsaturated fats, just because 01:27:03.020 --> 01:27:11.020 the double bond tends to associate with water more easily than the purely hydrocarbon saturated 01:27:11.020 --> 01:27:13.020 fatty acid. 01:27:14.020 --> 01:27:38.020 [audience member asks question] 01:27:38.020 --> 01:27:46.020 Full spectrum does stimulate, for example the ultraviolet stimulates your production 01:27:46.020 --> 01:27:55.020 of vitamin D, but ultraviolet and blue light are both toxic, for example to the retina. 01:27:55.020 --> 01:28:02.020 Blue light is destructive to the retina and one of the main things that causes blue light 01:28:02.020 --> 01:28:08.020 and ultraviolet light to be toxic are the polyunsaturated fatty acids, because they 01:28:08.020 --> 01:28:13.020 react with high energy radiation. 01:28:13.020 --> 01:28:24.020 [audience member asks question] 01:28:24.020 --> 01:28:34.020 Gail and Tom Brewer, man and wife couple, wrote a book on what every pregnant woman 01:28:34.020 --> 01:28:42.020 should know about nutrition or something like that. And he had two associates, Shanklin 01:28:42.020 --> 01:28:49.020 and Hoden, who wrote a book more technical than the Brewer's wrote, about the importance 01:28:49.020 --> 01:28:56.020 of salt in preventing high blood pressure in pregnant women. Salt restriction is pretty 01:28:56.020 --> 01:29:05.020 sure to cause hypertension in pregnancy. And so I made the analogy between premenstrual 01:29:05.020 --> 01:29:13.020 syndrome and pregnancy and suggested that women who swell up before their period try 01:29:13.020 --> 01:29:18.020 eating as much salt as they crave during that time, and usually they crave extra salt like 01:29:18.020 --> 01:29:25.020 pregnant women. And when they ate lots of salt, they didn't swell up. So then my old 01:29:25.020 --> 01:29:31.020 friends who were taking high blood pressure stuff, I suggested that they try the same 01:29:31.020 --> 01:29:39.020 thing. And I found that other people had tried that and saw that a salt restricted diet raised 01:29:39.020 --> 01:29:47.020 adrenalin, made them have insomnia as well as high blood pressure. And when you gave 01:29:47.020 --> 01:29:55.020 them more salt, you lowered their adrenalin and generally tend to lower their blood pressure. 01:29:55.020 --> 01:30:06.020 A man named McCarron demonstrated that calcium deficiency is more important than sodium excess. 01:30:06.020 --> 01:30:14.020 But extra sodium and calcium really will protect you against most high blood pressure. 01:30:14.020 --> 01:30:21.020 So the kind of salt, is that important at all? Like, salt is pretty strict and should 01:30:21.020 --> 01:30:23.020 it be a minimal balance? 01:30:23.020 --> 01:30:28.020 It's good to use natural foods like lots of milk for the calcium, lots of fruit for the 01:30:28.020 --> 01:30:41.020 potassium, and any source you can get, sodium, seawater if you like. To a great extent, one 01:30:41.020 --> 01:30:48.020 salt can substitute for the other because it's the ionic strength and the osmolarity 01:30:48.020 --> 01:30:50.020 that's important. 01:30:50.020 --> 01:30:54.020 Is there one salt that doesn't need potassium or sodium? Or do you need a different source 01:30:54.020 --> 01:30:56.020 of sodium? 01:30:56.020 --> 01:31:05.020 Sea salt without additives is a good practical source. An English woman doctor who went back 01:31:05.020 --> 01:31:15.020 to her native Mongolia, where they averaged 30 grams of salt per day. She gave blood pressure 01:31:15.020 --> 01:31:22.020 tests to everyone she could find and couldn't find a hypertensive person all the way up 01:31:22.020 --> 01:31:30.020 into their 90s. She didn't say anything about the rest of their diet, but I think that's 01:31:30.020 --> 01:31:36.020 an example that even 30 grams is compatible with good health. 01:31:36.020 --> 01:31:42.020 Great. Two questions, one for her. I just have a comment. I had a friend who taught 01:31:42.020 --> 01:31:49.020 chemistry and medicine at a university in Buffalo. He cured himself of cancer by drinking 01:31:49.020 --> 01:31:55.020 sea salt and saturated it, like we talked about at dinner. He had huge amounts of salt, 01:31:55.020 --> 01:32:01.020 litter of water a day, and completely nothing else. He didn't change his diet or anything. 01:32:01.020 --> 01:32:07.020 There have been studies recently of treating ulcers with different concentrations, and 01:32:07.020 --> 01:32:16.020 10 times isotonic is curative for ulcers. Stomach ulcers included, like seawater, tends 01:32:16.020 --> 01:32:20.020 to be strong enough to help cure stomach ulcers. 01:32:20.020 --> 01:32:25.020 Give me your explanation of coffee. I tried it. 01:32:25.020 --> 01:32:30.020 Coffee is our richest nutritional source of magnesium. 01:32:30.020 --> 01:32:36.020 And also progesterone. 01:32:36.020 --> 01:32:45.020 Caffeine, I think of it as a vitamin because it so closely fits into our system of uric 01:32:45.020 --> 01:32:52.020 acid and so on. And empirically, the people who drink the most coffee tend to have the 01:32:52.020 --> 01:32:56.020 best health, the lowest cancer and heart disease and so on. 01:32:56.020 --> 01:32:57.020 Is that true? 01:32:57.020 --> 01:33:00.020 You guys drink it within 30 minutes of you putting it in your mouth. 01:33:00.020 --> 01:33:05.020 [Audience chatter] 01:33:05.020 --> 01:33:10.020 Well, it's caffeine, but you don't have to caffeine right now. 01:33:10.020 --> 01:33:16.020 It can, it makes you hyperventilate, but you can use it with food. 01:33:16.020 --> 01:33:22.020 It helps you burn sugar specifically, so it helps you to sit right. 01:33:22.020 --> 01:33:31.020 [Applause] 01:33:31.020 --> 01:33:36.020 I have heard that Ray Peat recommends eating ice cream. 01:33:36.020 --> 01:33:40.020 I want to know what the real truth of this matter is. 01:33:40.020 --> 01:33:46.020 For about, I guess, 15 years, I ate a quart a day and it didn't affect my weight, but 01:33:46.020 --> 01:33:52.020 when I added about an ounce of coconut oil, my weight went down in spite of eating the 01:33:52.020 --> 01:33:56.020 same quart of ice cream plus an ounce of coconut oil. 01:33:56.020 --> 01:34:04.020 But then Peninsula Creamery over here got squeezed out of the market by evil distributors. 01:34:04.020 --> 01:34:12.020 And so then I went to Breyers, which was the next best thing, but then Breyers started 01:34:12.020 --> 01:34:18.020 adding horrible gums to make the product have a long shelf life. 01:34:18.020 --> 01:34:26.020 And so there's only one or two flavors of Breyers that are still really edible, vanilla 01:34:26.020 --> 01:34:28.020 and French vanilla. 01:34:28.020 --> 01:34:36.020 You might add that Ray has an excellent website and a very, very readable letter. 01:34:36.020 --> 01:34:42.020 I went onto his website for the first time and it's absolutely excellent. 01:34:42.020 --> 01:34:45.020 I didn't understand some of the things he was talking about. 01:34:45.020 --> 01:34:48.020 [Laughter] 01:34:48.020 --> 01:34:53.020 The website is outstanding, except there's naked women. 01:34:53.020 --> 01:34:55.020 [Laughter] 01:34:55.020 --> 01:34:57.020 There's one other thing too. 01:34:57.020 --> 01:35:00.020 Is it true that you do counseling for a small fee? 01:35:00.020 --> 01:35:01.020 Yeah. 01:35:01.020 --> 01:35:03.020 Yeah, this is one of the best bargains in the world. 01:35:03.020 --> 01:35:06.020 It's like Steve Fox does counseling for a small fee. 01:35:06.020 --> 01:35:10.020 If you have some questions and want to get another perspective, call that phone number 01:35:10.020 --> 01:35:12.020 up there and talk to Ray. 01:35:12.020 --> 01:35:18.020 And here's a man who's not in science for the money, but on the other hand, he's got 01:35:18.020 --> 01:35:20.020 bills like everybody else. 01:35:20.020 --> 01:35:24.020 So I really think that it would be good for both of you if you give this man a call. 01:35:24.020 --> 01:35:25.020 Anyway, thanks very much, Ray. 01:35:25.020 --> 01:35:26.020 Thank you. 01:35:26.020 --> 01:35:33.020 [Applause] 01:35:33.020 --> 01:35:39.020 [Background conversation] 01:35:39.020 --> 01:35:46.020 There's a product out there on the market right now called Oregasillium that actually 01:35:46.020 --> 01:35:49.020 has been shown effective against the bird flu. 01:35:49.020 --> 01:35:55.020 And it's produced by Physician Strength, and they do have a protocol, and they use it in 01:35:55.020 --> 01:35:57.020 combination with oil of Oregano. 01:35:57.020 --> 01:36:01.020 And I can bring you the card, email you the protocol. 01:36:01.020 --> 01:36:08.020 [Background conversation] 01:36:08.020 --> 01:36:09.020 So are you an MP? 01:36:09.020 --> 01:36:10.020 No, I'm an MD. 01:36:10.020 --> 01:36:11.020 MD, okay, good. 01:36:11.020 --> 01:36:15.020 That's one of the things we should know about, then bring that in so we can investigate that. 01:36:15.020 --> 01:36:21.020 Now, hey, Dean, you're late. 01:36:21.020 --> 01:36:25.020 [Laughter] 01:36:25.020 --> 01:36:28.020 Okay, now I'm going to get, since we have two reports, I want to get right to our first 01:36:28.020 --> 01:36:29.020 report. 01:36:29.020 --> 01:36:30.020 Okay, one more thing. 01:36:30.020 --> 01:36:31.020 Cordell. 01:36:31.020 --> 01:36:40.020 I was looking through this, preparing for the pandemic, and on page 16 it says, it talks 01:36:40.020 --> 01:36:43.020 about Tamiflu, and it mentions relapses. 01:36:43.020 --> 01:36:48.020 The one study I saw, and it doesn't seem to say Relins is better, but the one study I 01:36:48.020 --> 01:36:54.020 saw said that Relins had worked better than Tamiflu, and Relins is available. 01:36:54.020 --> 01:36:57.020 Yeah, that's the expensive one, too, unfortunately. 01:36:57.020 --> 01:37:01.020 Okay, well, anyway, so you all do your homework, and then we'll have something to talk about 01:37:01.020 --> 01:37:02.020 next time. 01:37:02.020 --> 01:37:08.020 Matt Catfiord is going to be on that panel, and so is Steve Fox and myself and Mike Coffey. 01:37:08.020 --> 01:37:15.020 And the rest of you will have plenty of chance to add into it, because we really want to 01:37:15.020 --> 01:37:20.020 know what would Bob Cathcart do if he got the flu? 01:37:20.020 --> 01:37:24.020 What would you do if you got the flu if you had done some research and preparation and 01:37:24.020 --> 01:37:27.020 so forth, so we can all take advantage of each other's ideas. 01:37:27.020 --> 01:37:31.020 And here's Steve Fox, and we're going to ask him next month what he would do if he got 01:37:31.020 --> 01:37:32.020 the flu. 01:37:32.020 --> 01:37:35.020 [Laughter] 01:37:35.020 --> 01:37:42.020 Okay, now, I wanted to talk about this article on Herceptin today, but we don't have time, 01:37:42.020 --> 01:37:43.020 unfortunately. 01:37:43.020 --> 01:37:53.020 The Mercury News today, studying advancing cancer drug Herceptin, and as it turns out, 01:37:53.020 --> 01:38:01.020 for $366,000, you can have a 50/50, if you have a certain kind of breast cancer, for 01:38:01.020 --> 01:38:08.020 $366,000 over five years, you can reduce your risk of relapse by 50%. 01:38:08.020 --> 01:38:10.020 And that's good news in a way. 01:38:10.020 --> 01:38:12.020 Of course, the bad news is that the price tag. 01:38:12.020 --> 01:38:13.020 So there's two issues there. 01:38:13.020 --> 01:38:14.020 [Laughter] 01:38:14.020 --> 01:38:15.020 50% the other bad news. 01:38:15.020 --> 01:38:24.020 But the thing that struck me, I just want to mention briefly, is that in the October 01:38:24.020 --> 01:38:31.020 issue of Life Extension magazine, they had an article on CoQ10 and cancer, which we sold 01:38:31.020 --> 01:38:33.020 out of already, unfortunately. 01:38:33.020 --> 01:38:35.020 But I'd like you to take a look at it. 01:38:35.020 --> 01:38:41.020 And in that article, they report, they have four articles, excuse me, they refer to four 01:38:41.020 --> 01:38:42.020 articles. 01:38:42.020 --> 01:38:45.020 You know how Life Extension is great with references, scientific studies. 01:38:45.020 --> 01:38:51.020 This article, about six-page article, 30 scientific studies cited and footnoted into the article. 01:38:51.020 --> 01:38:57.020 So, you know, they give you, they make a claim and then they put a footnote after it. 01:38:57.020 --> 01:39:01.020 You look in the footnote, what article that goes to, which I really like. 01:39:01.020 --> 01:39:05.020 So they're not just kind of puffing up their bibliographies. 01:39:05.020 --> 01:39:13.020 But anyway, this article shows, I think, that CoQ10 is so much better than Herceptin, and 01:39:13.020 --> 01:39:15.020 yet, what do we hear about? 01:39:15.020 --> 01:39:17.020 In the newspaper. 01:39:17.020 --> 01:39:19.020 This costs $50 a month. 01:39:19.020 --> 01:39:23.020 Herceptin costs $3,220 a month. 01:39:23.020 --> 01:39:30.020 And we hear about Herceptin, which is, of course, another story about the great Satan, 01:39:30.020 --> 01:39:34.020 also known as Big Pharma. 01:39:34.020 --> 01:39:37.020 So, you know, keep track of that. 01:39:37.020 --> 01:39:41.020 And if you can get a hold of that article in Life Extension magazine, it's well worth 01:39:41.020 --> 01:39:42.020 well. 01:39:42.020 --> 01:39:45.020 Because here, just to read you a little bit about it. 01:39:45.020 --> 01:39:50.020 Several women in the study, first they started with 90 milligrams and they got partial remission 01:39:50.020 --> 01:39:51.020 and so forth. 01:39:51.020 --> 01:39:55.020 Then they went to 390 and the tumors disappeared. 01:39:55.020 --> 01:39:58.020 Not in every case, but in several cases. 01:39:58.020 --> 01:40:03.020 And so I think 4 out of 32 of the tumors disappeared completely. 01:40:03.020 --> 01:40:09.020 So this is a way of a treatment, not just prevention cancer, but a way of treating cancer. 01:40:09.020 --> 01:40:19.020 And as you know, CoQ10, one of the more expensive supplements still, you can take 400 milligrams 01:40:19.020 --> 01:40:23.020 a month for about probably $25 or something like that. 01:40:23.020 --> 01:40:25.020 So I would look into that. 01:40:25.020 --> 01:40:29.020 The other thing is the vitamin C treatment, which we've been talking about before. 01:40:29.020 --> 01:40:33.020 And the NIH study just came out, which I referred to last month. 01:40:33.020 --> 01:40:43.020 Again, the vitamin C treatment, vitamin C, IV, increasing hydrogen peroxide, and doing 01:40:43.020 --> 01:40:47.020 other things, such as we'll learn more about next month when we talk more about vitamin 01:40:47.020 --> 01:40:49.020 C with Bob Cuthart. 01:40:49.020 --> 01:40:56.020 Vitamin C is also a tremendously powerful treatment for cancer. 01:40:56.020 --> 01:41:03.020 And now the NIH itself has established that in a very carefully done NIH type of study. 01:41:03.020 --> 01:41:07.020 So I want you to kind of investigate those things, because if you go by what you read 01:41:07.020 --> 01:41:11.020 in the newspaper, all you're going to do is feed Big Pharma, and you're not necessarily 01:41:11.020 --> 01:41:12.020 going to be doing what's best for yourself. 01:41:12.020 --> 01:41:18.020 Now the first report that we have is on our board meeting. 01:41:18.020 --> 01:41:25.020 We were very blessed, really, by the fact that Dave Asprey had a friend by the name 01:41:25.020 --> 01:41:27.020 of Ron Snyder, who he recommended to us. 01:41:27.020 --> 01:41:31.020 He said, "Ron, can you come and help us kind of launch ourselves?" 01:41:31.020 --> 01:41:35.020 I mean, we're all aware that we've got a tiger by the tail here, that there's a tremendous 01:41:35.020 --> 01:41:39.020 need for the kind of information that we get at these meetings. 01:41:39.020 --> 01:41:41.020 We don't get it from our doctors. 01:41:41.020 --> 01:41:48.020 We get misinformed and misled by Big Pharma that tells us what's in their interest, not 01:41:48.020 --> 01:41:52.020 what's in our interest. 01:41:52.020 --> 01:41:58.020 And so we want to become the best and biggest organization we can become. 01:41:58.020 --> 01:42:01.020 So we brought Dave Asprey on as vice president to do that. 01:42:01.020 --> 01:42:05.020 He said, "Okay, what I want to do is bring my friend Ron Snyder on, who's an expert 01:42:05.020 --> 01:42:10.020 and kind of just gifted in getting groups together and trying to figure out what they 01:42:10.020 --> 01:42:12.020 want to do and how they want to do it." 01:42:12.020 --> 01:42:14.020 So we had a meeting, and it was dynamite. 01:42:14.020 --> 01:42:16.020 The report was in the newsletter. 01:42:16.020 --> 01:42:18.020 I want to bring Ron up here. 01:42:18.020 --> 01:42:20.020 Unfortunately, Dave didn't make it with the projector. 01:42:20.020 --> 01:42:23.020 [Audience member] Should we wait for the projector? 01:42:23.020 --> 01:42:25.020 [Randle] Okay, let's do that. 01:42:25.020 --> 01:42:26.020 Maybe he'll still make it. 01:42:26.020 --> 01:42:28.020 Okay, so let's take our other report first. 01:42:28.020 --> 01:42:29.020 John? 01:42:29.020 --> 01:42:32.020 Let me introduce you before you get up. 01:42:32.020 --> 01:42:36.020 John Furhwer, as you know, is part of our community. 01:42:36.020 --> 01:42:43.020 And a wonderful biochemist lives in Florida, so we kind of grab him only when he's in town. 01:42:43.020 --> 01:42:52.020 Now he came in town this time, partly at least, to go to the Symposium on Stem Cell Research 01:42:52.020 --> 01:42:59.020 and Regenerative Medicine, which was held last Tuesday in San Francisco by the AFAR, 01:42:59.020 --> 01:43:02.020 I think it's the American Federation for Aging Research. 01:43:02.020 --> 01:43:04.020 Is that right? 01:43:04.020 --> 01:43:12.020 Well, through John's intercession, we were able to go up there, several of us, 01:43:12.020 --> 01:43:15.020 and it was a tremendous event. 01:43:15.020 --> 01:43:16.020 A tremendous event. 01:43:16.020 --> 01:43:20.020 Sandy Goebel, Mike, myself, Dick Mata. 01:43:20.020 --> 01:43:21.020 Dick, are you here? 01:43:21.020 --> 01:43:22.020 Yeah. 01:43:22.020 --> 01:43:27.020 And Phil Miller were there. 01:43:27.020 --> 01:43:32.020 We heard some of the best science in the Bay Area, people doing research on stem cells. 01:43:32.020 --> 01:43:37.020 And as you know, the promise of stem cells is renewable body parts, is what it amounts to. 01:43:37.020 --> 01:43:40.020 And they're right there. 01:43:40.020 --> 01:43:43.020 I mean, they can already do a little bit of it. 01:43:43.020 --> 01:43:48.020 And there's no question there's going to be six different ways to do this, 01:43:48.020 --> 01:43:53.020 to get the kind of cells that we need to get the body to regenerate. 01:43:53.020 --> 01:43:56.020 And it's just a question of which is the best way. 01:43:56.020 --> 01:43:57.020 And so it's a very exciting thing. 01:43:57.020 --> 01:44:00.020 Well, the good news is, not only do we have a wonderful time here, 01:44:00.020 --> 01:44:05.020 all these great speakers, have a free steak dinner with wine, 01:44:05.020 --> 01:44:10.020 and all the best stuff for free, thanks to John's intercession, 01:44:10.020 --> 01:44:13.020 but we also might have four or five speakers. 01:44:13.020 --> 01:44:16.020 And we're going to have a couple of speakers from Stanford, 01:44:16.020 --> 01:44:22.020 probably Irv Weissman and Helen Blau, who are leading the charge on stem cell research. 01:44:22.020 --> 01:44:28.020 They're going to be here next month, not next month, but in the next few months, in the spring, 01:44:28.020 --> 01:44:29.020 to talk about stem cell research. 01:44:29.020 --> 01:44:34.020 So stay tuned, because that's going to be a very important part of our futures. 01:44:34.020 --> 01:44:40.020 And I'm sure you don't want to be the last one to know if you're 70 or 80 years old. 01:44:40.020 --> 01:44:44.020 So at least I don't. I'm the one kind of on the edge. 01:44:44.020 --> 01:44:49.020 They're just finding the step out in time for me, hopefully. 01:44:49.020 --> 01:44:51.020 I can just stay alive a few more days. 01:44:51.020 --> 01:44:54.020 Now, okay, John. 01:44:54.020 --> 01:44:56.020 John's going to give a report on some of the conferences he's been going to. 01:44:56.020 --> 01:45:00.020 He goes to conferences all over the world. 01:45:00.020 --> 01:45:05.020 So do you want me to-- 01:45:05.020 --> 01:45:06.020 No, I'm fine. 01:45:06.020 --> 01:45:10.020 Okay, thank you. 01:45:10.020 --> 01:45:12.020 So you won't miss much by not seeing my slides, 01:45:12.020 --> 01:45:16.020 because they're basically just keywords to remind me what to say. 01:45:16.020 --> 01:45:24.020 I've been to three conferences in Europe and about half a dozen conferences in the last six months 01:45:24.020 --> 01:45:30.020 related to research into aging. 01:45:30.020 --> 01:45:35.020 The first one in Europe was in Italy, and it was a conference on a subject called autophagy. 01:45:35.020 --> 01:45:40.020 Now, autophagy--or autophagy, there's actually two ways of pronouncing it-- 01:45:40.020 --> 01:45:46.020 is a swallowing of damaged mitochondria inside the cell. 01:45:46.020 --> 01:45:49.020 It's a way for cells to renew themselves. 01:45:49.020 --> 01:46:02.020 There is a lot of new research turning up ways that mitochondria have a half-life of about six weeks in the cell, 01:46:02.020 --> 01:46:05.020 even in brain cells, which live all your life. 01:46:05.020 --> 01:46:09.020 So if you're 60 years old, you've got brain cells that are 60 years old, 01:46:09.020 --> 01:46:12.020 but your mitochondria in your brain cells are only a month or two old. 01:46:12.020 --> 01:46:16.020 So somehow the cell is constantly recycling the mitochondria, 01:46:16.020 --> 01:46:20.020 and we've always been wondering, how is it that the cell knows how to do this? 01:46:20.020 --> 01:46:25.020 Well, there's information turning up, and I think that in the next five or ten years, 01:46:25.020 --> 01:46:28.020 we're going to see new therapies emerging out of this subject. 01:46:28.020 --> 01:46:34.020 You might want to keep a keyword in your Google News browser. 01:46:34.020 --> 01:46:36.020 You all know about Google News, right? 01:46:36.020 --> 01:46:41.020 You can put keywords into it, and any time your keyword pops up anywhere in the world, 01:46:41.020 --> 01:46:46.020 in any of the world's newspapers, it'll get sent to you as an email, and I'll link to that. 01:46:46.020 --> 01:46:48.020 Pretty handy. 01:46:48.020 --> 01:46:53.020 So look up autophagy, A-U-T-O-P-H-A-G-Y. 01:46:53.020 --> 01:46:54.020 That'll be a good one. 01:46:54.020 --> 01:46:56.020 AU, what is it? 01:46:56.020 --> 01:47:05.020 A-U-T-O, auto, P-H-A-G-Y, phagy. 01:47:05.020 --> 01:47:13.020 In June, some of you may have gone to the American Aging Association meeting in Oakland, California. 01:47:13.020 --> 01:47:18.020 The American Aging Association meets once a year, talk quality research. 01:47:18.020 --> 01:47:21.020 The next one's going to be next June in Boston. 01:47:21.020 --> 01:47:28.020 They started out the first day of the conference with a pre-meeting on nutritional interventions, 01:47:28.020 --> 01:47:34.020 and probably it comes as no surprise to anyone here that there's a lot of benefit 01:47:34.020 --> 01:47:40.020 from highly colored fresh fruits and vegetables, and even some cooked fruits and vegetables. 01:47:40.020 --> 01:47:46.020 Particularly, I found this interesting, to get the greatest benefit from things like tomatoes, 01:47:46.020 --> 01:47:52.020 you want to cook them with olive oil so that they get assimilated by your digestive system. 01:47:52.020 --> 01:47:59.020 Another thing that I found very interesting was that raw nuts like almonds are just loaded with antioxidants. 01:47:59.020 --> 01:48:03.020 I mean, I had been thinking of blueberries and blackberries, but almonds and walnuts, 01:48:03.020 --> 01:48:10.020 especially if they're raw, are just loaded with antioxidants and good fiber. 01:48:10.020 --> 01:48:13.020 Let's see. 01:48:13.020 --> 01:48:20.020 Recently, in August, the International Association of Biomedical Gerontology met in Denmark, 01:48:20.020 --> 01:48:26.020 and they meet only once every two years, but they tend to get more international speakers, 01:48:26.020 --> 01:48:32.020 more Europeans and more people from Australia and Japan than most of the American conferences. 01:48:32.020 --> 01:48:37.020 I found it very interesting that Robin Holliday showed up. 01:48:37.020 --> 01:48:42.020 Now, some of you maybe studied biology and molecular biology, 01:48:42.020 --> 01:48:49.020 and you've heard of a way that the chromosomes recombine during meiosis and sexual recombination 01:48:49.020 --> 01:48:51.020 called the Holliday Junction. 01:48:51.020 --> 01:48:57.020 This was the man who came up with the Holliday Junction, and he is very interested now. 01:48:57.020 --> 01:49:03.020 He's just recently retired, and he's still interested in studying aging. 01:49:03.020 --> 01:49:09.020 I asked him, "When you first thought of the Holliday Junction, was it immediately acclaimed? 01:49:09.020 --> 01:49:12.020 Did people pat you on the back and congratulate you?" 01:49:12.020 --> 01:49:14.020 He said, "You must be kidding. 01:49:14.020 --> 01:49:18.020 I was a graduate student, and nobody would take me seriously for years 01:49:18.020 --> 01:49:23.020 until finally we got electron microscope images of the junction, 01:49:23.020 --> 01:49:26.020 and once people could see it, they believed in it." 01:49:26.020 --> 01:49:28.020 But up until that time-- 01:49:28.020 --> 01:49:31.020 Sometimes the technology for imaging is very important, 01:49:31.020 --> 01:49:41.020 which reminds me that the National Institute on Aging is starting a massive collaboration 01:49:41.020 --> 01:49:48.020 of 30 university MRI imaging facilities to try and discover 01:49:48.020 --> 01:49:52.020 what's the best way to see Alzheimer's disease as early as possible. 01:49:52.020 --> 01:49:56.020 This is important not only clinically for diagnosis, but more importantly, 01:49:56.020 --> 01:50:02.020 suppose you've got a drug or an herb or something, and you think it does good for Alzheimer's. 01:50:02.020 --> 01:50:06.020 In the old paradigm, you give it to the person for 20 or 30 years, 01:50:06.020 --> 01:50:11.020 and then when they die, you cut open their brain and see whether it did any good. 01:50:11.020 --> 01:50:14.020 Or you give them a memory test every six months 01:50:14.020 --> 01:50:18.020 and see whether they can remember 27 words that you recite to them. 01:50:18.020 --> 01:50:24.020 So the ability to actually see the pathology of Alzheimer's developing, 01:50:24.020 --> 01:50:28.020 I think is going to be tremendously important in just the next couple of years. 01:50:28.020 --> 01:50:34.020 They're already developing, and I think the local center of greatest interest is UCSF. 01:50:34.020 --> 01:50:40.020 UCSF has a great brain imaging facility, and I believe the leader of that facility 01:50:40.020 --> 01:50:44.020 is actually coordinating this whole consortium of 30 universities across the country. 01:50:44.020 --> 01:50:49.020 So that's, I think, a very important topic to keep in mind. 01:50:49.020 --> 01:50:55.020 Right after the Denmark meeting, there was a meeting at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, 01:50:55.020 --> 01:50:59.020 which is near Martha's Vineyard, just on Cape Cod. 01:50:59.020 --> 01:51:04.020 And the Woods Hole Marine Biology Lab has been around for something like 100 years, 01:51:04.020 --> 01:51:09.020 and very well-renowned. Larry Ellison has not been around that long. 01:51:09.020 --> 01:51:12.020 He's out here in Redwood Shores. He has a company called Oracle, 01:51:12.020 --> 01:51:18.020 and he and Bill Gates are vying to become--to see who can upstage the other one. 01:51:18.020 --> 01:51:23.020 Larry Ellison has, for the last six or seven years, been funding aging research, 01:51:23.020 --> 01:51:26.020 which is very important. He has the Ellison Medical Foundation. 01:51:26.020 --> 01:51:30.020 You can find all of these things on the web, by the way. 01:51:30.020 --> 01:51:35.020 And so every year they give grants to university researchers, 01:51:35.020 --> 01:51:39.020 both senior researchers who are switching into aging, 01:51:39.020 --> 01:51:42.020 and researchers who are continuing work in aging, 01:51:42.020 --> 01:51:47.020 and new researchers who have just gotten their labs set up and are starting in aging research. 01:51:47.020 --> 01:51:53.020 And every year he has them come to a symposium to report and tell each other about what they're doing. 01:51:53.020 --> 01:51:54.020 Did you have a question? 01:51:54.020 --> 01:51:55.020 No. 01:51:55.020 --> 01:51:57.020 Oh, okay. 01:51:57.020 --> 01:52:03.020 And so they met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in August. 01:52:03.020 --> 01:52:10.020 One of the most interesting speakers was, in fact, Helen Blau, that we just saw a couple of days ago in San Francisco. 01:52:10.020 --> 01:52:17.020 But she's in Stanford here, and she's doing marvelous things with stem cells. 01:52:17.020 --> 01:52:23.020 She has developed ways of marking the stem cells so that you can see them in mice, 01:52:23.020 --> 01:52:27.020 because a lot of the early work is done in mice before you start doing it in people. 01:52:27.020 --> 01:52:36.020 And she's found that bone marrow stem cells from adults will, on occasion, 01:52:36.020 --> 01:52:43.020 go into the brain and fuse with brain cells and take over the function of a brain cell that was failing, 01:52:43.020 --> 01:52:45.020 in a sense of restoring it. 01:52:45.020 --> 01:52:52.020 So what she's doing now is learning how to take the stem cells out of the bone marrow or blood circulation, 01:52:52.020 --> 01:52:57.020 give it certain growth factors in laboratory dish culture, 01:52:57.020 --> 01:53:02.020 so that she can grow up millions and billions of them out of just one, 01:53:02.020 --> 01:53:06.020 and then re-inject them into the animal or eventually into the human. 01:53:06.020 --> 01:53:17.020 And one of the possibilities is that instead of trying to get an embryo from some unrelated fertilized egg, 01:53:17.020 --> 01:53:20.020 you take it from the patient themselves. 01:53:20.020 --> 01:53:25.020 You only need one cell. Everybody's got a few hundred at least of these cells. 01:53:25.020 --> 01:53:31.020 You take one of these cells, you grow it into, multiply it in the laboratory dish into millions or billions, 01:53:31.020 --> 01:53:39.020 inject it back in, and all of a sudden you've got a totally compatible stem cell infusion that goes in. 01:53:39.020 --> 01:53:44.020 If you've got diabetes, it goes in and takes over the islets function. 01:53:44.020 --> 01:53:49.020 If you've got liver deterioration, it goes in and takes over the liver. 01:53:49.020 --> 01:53:56.020 If you've got brain deterioration, Alzheimer's, neurodegeneration, it goes in and takes over the functions that are necessary. 01:53:56.020 --> 01:54:03.020 So I'm really glad that Phil got a chance to talk to her on Tuesday and invite her to speak here. 01:54:03.020 --> 01:54:05.020 It's going to be a very enthusiastic day. 01:54:05.020 --> 01:54:07.020 And she's got marvelous slides. 01:54:07.020 --> 01:54:11.020 I mean, when I told you about Robin Holliday and the electron microscope, 01:54:11.020 --> 01:54:15.020 she's got pictures of these cells fusing inside the brains, 01:54:15.020 --> 01:54:21.020 and there's no doubt what's going on. It's just fantastic. 01:54:21.020 --> 01:54:27.020 The following month in September, Aubrey de Grey organized a conference called 01:54:27.020 --> 01:54:31.020 Strategies for Engineered Make-Legible Senescence. 01:54:31.020 --> 01:54:35.020 I don't know if it's such a great acronym, but it does make sense. 01:54:35.020 --> 01:54:39.020 S-E-N-S. 01:54:39.020 --> 01:54:42.020 Several people in the audience went over to see it. 01:54:42.020 --> 01:54:50.020 The interesting thing about this conference is that Aubrey's focus is not primarily to understand aging 01:54:50.020 --> 01:54:53.020 and what causes it ultimately. 01:54:53.020 --> 01:55:01.020 Aubrey's main focus is to understand what aging does to the body before the pathology starts. 01:55:01.020 --> 01:55:04.020 He divides things into three boxes. 01:55:04.020 --> 01:55:06.020 There's metabolism, right? 01:55:06.020 --> 01:55:11.020 You've got your mitochondria turning sugar into ATP and throwing off free radicals, 01:55:11.020 --> 01:55:16.020 which then go and the free radicals interact with membranes and proteins 01:55:16.020 --> 01:55:19.020 and cross-link them and do all these things. 01:55:19.020 --> 01:55:25.020 And eventually these cross-linked proteins aggregate and they result in damage, 01:55:25.020 --> 01:55:30.020 like Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, or even dying muscle cells, 01:55:30.020 --> 01:55:34.020 which cause old people to become more frail. 01:55:34.020 --> 01:55:37.020 Okay, so that's the ultimate pathology. 01:55:37.020 --> 01:55:40.020 Metabolism is what starts it out. 01:55:40.020 --> 01:55:45.020 If we try to stop the cause of the damage that occurs in the middle, the damaged proteins, 01:55:45.020 --> 01:55:49.020 if we try to slow down metabolism, well, that's not really so healthy. 01:55:49.020 --> 01:55:53.020 So he's not focusing on understanding how metabolism causes the damage. 01:55:53.020 --> 01:55:57.020 He's focusing on how can we engineer away the damage, 01:55:57.020 --> 01:56:00.020 which I think is a novel way of looking at it, 01:56:00.020 --> 01:56:06.020 and not all of the gerontologists in the world understand exactly the distinction yet. 01:56:06.020 --> 01:56:13.020 As a result, because he's getting a lot of press and because he looks a little unconventional in his attire and his beard, 01:56:13.020 --> 01:56:18.020 and because he's approaching it from the standpoint of cleaning up the garbage 01:56:18.020 --> 01:56:21.020 rather than slowing down its accumulation, 01:56:21.020 --> 01:56:26.020 there's been some controversy and there will be continuing to be controversy. 01:56:26.020 --> 01:56:33.020 But the lineup of speakers that he brought to this conference were all focused on how can we clean up the garbage. 01:56:33.020 --> 01:56:36.020 And he brought over experts in stem cells. 01:56:36.020 --> 01:56:44.020 He even brought over the group from South Korea that had cloned human embryonic stem cells. 01:56:44.020 --> 01:56:52.020 And he had a researcher, Ellen Ebo Katz, from Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. 01:56:52.020 --> 01:56:59.020 And she has been studying things like rheumatoid arthritis and obesity, 01:56:59.020 --> 01:57:05.020 and they made variations on mice that were genetically designed to get bad and have bad joints. 01:57:05.020 --> 01:57:12.020 And they discovered quite by accident that this mouse regenerates almost as well as a salamander. 01:57:12.020 --> 01:57:19.020 Now, those of you that have studied regeneration, what it means is if you cut them 01:57:19.020 --> 01:57:23.020 or take a bunch of skin out of their ear or cut off a digit, 01:57:23.020 --> 01:57:28.020 you don't just get scar tissue, but the tissue grows back the way it was supposed to. 01:57:28.020 --> 01:57:35.020 And developmental biologists have known this for years, that salamanders will do this. 01:57:35.020 --> 01:57:39.020 But it was commonly believed that mammals would not do this. 01:57:39.020 --> 01:57:45.020 So here they've got a mouse that's pretty much like any other mouse with a couple of genes that have changed. 01:57:45.020 --> 01:57:49.020 And all of a sudden, they have a mouse that's able to regenerate. 01:57:49.020 --> 01:57:55.020 So we've got this scientist who's an expert in rheumatism and obesity now handed into her lap 01:57:55.020 --> 01:57:58.020 a marvelous mouse model of regeneration. 01:57:58.020 --> 01:58:02.020 And she's scrambling to learn everything she can about regeneration 01:58:02.020 --> 01:58:08.020 and make the best that she can out of figuring out, well, if we've got a mammal that regenerates, 01:58:08.020 --> 01:58:11.020 mice are a lot closer to people than salamanders. 01:58:11.020 --> 01:58:15.020 So I think this is another one that you're going to want to be watching in the future, 01:58:15.020 --> 01:58:21.020 the MRL mouse from Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. 01:58:21.020 --> 01:58:23.020 What else did I want to say? 01:58:23.020 --> 01:58:30.020 Just a couple of weeks ago, up in Marin County, there's an institute called the Buck Institute for Age Research. 01:58:30.020 --> 01:58:37.020 It's the only institute in the world of its size that does nothing but aging research. 01:58:37.020 --> 01:58:40.020 And it's in Novato. 01:58:40.020 --> 01:58:46.020 And they had an annual symposium, and this time they were looking at pharmacological interventions 01:58:46.020 --> 01:58:48.020 that might affect lifespan. 01:58:48.020 --> 01:58:56.020 A lot of the interventions that the various speakers were looking at had to do with making flies or worms live longer 01:58:56.020 --> 01:58:58.020 and looking at dietary restriction. 01:58:58.020 --> 01:59:02.020 But there were a couple of talks that stuck in my mind. 01:59:02.020 --> 01:59:11.020 One was Ashley Bush from Harvard Medical School, who has been working for about 10 years now on Alzheimer's disease. 01:59:11.020 --> 01:59:21.020 And he has been looking at the interaction between metals and proteins in the brain that aggregate and form these plaques. 01:59:21.020 --> 01:59:26.020 And he found that if you could get the metals to go away, the plaques would dissolve and go away too. 01:59:26.020 --> 01:59:33.020 And not only that, I learned something from hearing him talk and then talking to him afterwards. 01:59:33.020 --> 01:59:38.020 My thought in the past had been, "What does Alzheimer's disease do?" 01:59:38.020 --> 01:59:40.020 Well, it kills brain cells. 01:59:40.020 --> 01:59:44.020 You have fewer brain cells, and you don't think so well, and you don't remember so well. 01:59:44.020 --> 01:59:51.020 He said, "Well, ultimately that's true, but a lot of the symptoms of early-stage and mid-stage Alzheimer's disease 01:59:51.020 --> 01:59:55.020 are from sick brain cells that have not died yet." 01:59:55.020 --> 02:00:02.020 And his results now are indicating that if we can get in there, get rid of the plaques, 02:00:02.020 --> 02:00:11.020 we can restore the sick cells to health and essentially not just slow the rate of decline of an Alzheimer's patient, 02:00:11.020 --> 02:00:14.020 but actually create improvements. 02:00:14.020 --> 02:00:17.020 Now, most of what he's been doing, he's been doing in mouse models. 02:00:17.020 --> 02:00:25.020 But a couple of years ago, they tried it out in a preliminary clinical trial in Australia with just 30 patients. 02:00:25.020 --> 02:00:33.020 And they used low-dose, this experimental drug called cleoquinol, because they weren't sure if it had side effects or not. 02:00:33.020 --> 02:00:37.020 But even with a low dose, they were able to slow the rate of decline. 02:00:37.020 --> 02:00:38.020 decline. 02:00:38.020 --> 02:00:38.040 And I think… 02:00:38.040 --> 02:00:48.040 [BLANK_AUDIO]