There are some animals that can live for hundreds of years. Do the secrets to human longevity live from a lobster's ability to regrow felled limbs, in a Greenland shark's ultra-slow metabolism, or in an elephant's extreme cancer resistance? Aria, Ben and Saloni discuss why human (and pet) lifespans have increased so much over the past centuries and what we else we can do to age more slowly.
For more, read Aria's piece on longevity.
You can also listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
Transcript
Ben Southwood [00:00:00]: Welcome to the Works in Progress podcast. My name is Ben Southwood. I’m one of the editors at Works in Progress. I’m here with Aria Schrecker, another one of the editors and Saloni Dattani, who’s another one of the editors, and also runs the podcast Hard Drugs. Today we’re going to talk about some of the extremely long lived animals that exist out there. There are animals, just out living there, like lobsters and axolotls and naked mole rats that can live or regenerate in surprising ways. And it might be possible for us as humans to learn from these animals, learn their secrets, and also live longer, but possibly, hopefully without having to be naked and bald, underground or live with a heartbeat many times slower than our own in extremely cold water. Aria, what got you onto the subject of longevous animals?
Aria Schrecker [00:00:55]: I want to live forever. That’s the starting point here. And there are lots of people who are spending lots of money on different research labs that are trying to figure out what is a secret to human longevity or aging, and can we figure out a way to overcome it? I think the most intuitive way to get a grip with that is to see some animals with these adaptations. There are things that are actually happening in nature and if we understand them, we know which of those things might then apply in people as well. So that’s the logical reason for being interested. There’s a fun reason, which is that animals are cool, and I like to know fun facts about animals and this is another reason to know fun facts about animals.
Saloni Dattani [00:01:58]: Do you have a favorite long-lived animal? Or a fun fact about them?
Aria Schrecker [00:02:03]: I am particularly compelled by naked mole-rats. I think naked mole-rats are maybe the weirdest animal I’ve come across. So they’re eusocial mammals, which is strange.
Saloni Dattani [00:02:15]: What is eusociality?
Aria Schrecker [00:02:16]: So they’re basically creatures where each one has a really specialized role in its hive. So in ants you’ll have the breeding queen, and then you’ll have the worker drones. Naked mole-rat colonies usually have one breeding queen and usually three breeding males, and then all of the others they’re known as socially infertile as opposed to actually infertile, but they don’t reproduce at all, and you get weird hive-bullying behaviors where it’ll be that more dominant females will encourage more submissive females to do work by shoving them. Another interesting thing about naked mole-rats, they don’t really regulate their temperature at all. They will at very high temperatures, they will start to do other physiological normal things that animals will do to cool themselves down, but at low temperatures, they don’t warm themselves up except socially, they warm themselves up by huddling.
Saloni Dattani [00:03:14]: Does that mean their body just works at any temperature or do they just happen to be in environments that are stable?
Aria Schrecker [00:03:21]: They’re largely from very warm places in Africa, so it doesn’t come up that much. But anything below 29 degrees Celsius, they’ll just keep getting colder and they’ll keep getting colder, and they’ll just change the amount of activity they do in response to that.
Saloni Dattani [00:03:34]: Do they hibernate?
Aria Schrecker [00:03:36]: I didn’t read about them hibernating on their Wikipedia page, so I’m going to gently say no.
Ben Southwood [00:03:43]: So they just run at a lower clock speed when they’re at a lower temperature. They just sped up when there was a higher temperature?
Aria Schrecker [00:03:50]: Yeah. It seems to be.
Saloni Dattani [00:03:51]: That’s so fun! A sloth.
Ben Southwood [00:03:54]: So eusociality means just very, very social. They basically put the interests of the overall group ahead of their own personal interests.
Saloni Dattani [00:04:04]: Got it.
Aria Schrecker [00:04:04]: Yeah, I feel eusocial animals, the way I think of them anyway, is they’re one step closer to each animal as a cell and the entire hive or colony is the organism.
Saloni Dattani [00:04:16]: Right.
Aria Schrecker [00:04:16]: And I think they make more sense if you think about that.
Ben Southwood [00:04:19]: In bees and ants, that works because everyone is a clone of each other. If you’re a worker, you are basically a clone of all the other workers.
Aria Schrecker [00:04:36]: I know that there are complicated genetic relationships there, because I know that sisters, though this is maybe a type of ant rather than a type of bee, but it’s another type of eusocial creature where the sisters are more related to each other than they are to their own children. Where children have only 50% of the DNA, sisters are a 75% match. And so the best reproductive strategy for them is to farm their mother for more siblings, through a selfish gene way of thinking about this.
Ben Southwood [00:05:08]: And what I was building to with that is do naked mole-rats also have the strange genetic thing or are they more like us?
Aria Schrecker [00:05:14]: I don’t think so. They’re more like us.
Saloni Dattani [00:05:17]: Do they live long?
Aria Schrecker [00:05:19]: So they live weirdly long for a rodent. They’re the longest lived rodents but it seems their environment is actually quite dangerous.
Saloni Dattani [00:05:31]: What eats a naked mole-rat?
Aria Schrecker [00:05:34]: Snakes mostly.
Saloni Dattani [00:05:35]: Oh, that’s sad.
Aria Schrecker [00:05:37]: But in captivity I don’t think - in captivity, a naked mole-rat has never died of anything that is age. They just seem to keep going and keep going. So I think the oldest one in captivity is now in its forties, and everything seems okay.
Saloni Dattani [00:05:53]: I read a study that contradicted the general trend even though it seems some of them live really long, and I think the disagreement was that the people who studied how long naked mole-rats live only looked at those that had already survived to a given age. Then after that they didn’t have that many. They looked at naked mole-rats who have lived to this age, or were born after that age, and looked at their mortality rates in that sample.
Aria Schrecker [00:06:24]: So the conventional opinion is that for most creatures, each year that they live, their odds of dying go up. So usually your safest age are your first reproductive years. Though it varies so much from animal to animal - like one year old, it would be about that for a naked mole-rat. And then each year your risk of dying goes up and up and up and up and up and up. So you have fewer and fewer older ones. But for naked mole-rats, their odds of dying are stable over each year. You are saying that that is only true for the naked mole-rats that made it to a certain age.
Saloni Dattani [00:06:57]: I’m saying that it’s not true, and that it seemed like it was true because people were only looking at a very selected sample.
Aria Schrecker [00:07:04]: Okay. But it’s not that the very selected sample is just the older naked mole-rats?
Saloni Dattani [00:07:08]: Yes.
Ben Southwood [00:07:09]: So naked mole-rats, we’re not sure if it’s actually true that they live very long, but they might do.
Saloni Dattani [00:07:14]: But some of them do.
Ben Southwood [00:07:15]: But some of them do, and the potential to live very long is very interesting to us anyway, because it might just be that we can just get those naked mole-rats and learn from them. I think we need to categorize the kinds of different long lived animals, and I think there are multiple different categories right? So naked mole-rats, what category are they?
Aria Schrecker [00:07:37]: I think they basically standalone. There is another eusocial rat that I think has some of its features.
Ben Southwood [00:07:43]: Another long-lived eusocial rat.
Aria Schrecker [00:07:45]: I’m not sure.
Ben Southwood [00:07:46]: Okay. Well, I’m thinking of the long lived creatures, some of which you’re going to tell us about, I imagine they fall into categories of why they’re long lived or maybe they’re all long lived for the same reason, but if they fall into categories, I would love you to give us those categories.
Aria Schrecker [00:08:00]: So I think naked mole-rats are probably a subset of what I’m going to call the group that we are part of which is highly social mammals with interesting cancer adaptations and maybe slower metabolisms. But that’s not necessarily the massive part of the reason for their longevity.
Ben Southwood [00:08:22]: So we don’t have a core reason because I guess you’re about to tell me that some animals live long because they have a very slow metabolism.
Aria Schrecker [00:08:39]: Yes, and I’ll tell you the other categories. Category number one, a creature that can go back to its embryonic stage and then respawn again. So that’s it’s a particular kind of jellyfish. They, and maybe one of their cousins that is slightly less common can, under extreme stress, go back to their embryonic or polyp stage, which is very, very durable. And then it can wait out whatever the problem is and come back. The problem is usually that the water’s really polluted, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, I think sometimes blunt force trauma can also get it to do this. But also that can also kill them because they’re tiny.
Saloni Dattani [00:09:28]: Right, that could go either way.
Aria Schrecker [00:09:32]: But yeah, and then basically after that point they can then respawn again, so it’s unclear if they even have memories. They can respond to electric shocks and maybe learn that those electric shocks are bad, but that is even now a little bit suspect. So maybe that’s longevity and maybe it’s just a system spinning up and down. There’s another category, in which lobsters are the core kind, and axolotls are also like this, which is they seem to have really, really good regeneration properties. With a lobster, you can cut off bits of a lobster and it’ll regrow, you can definitely do that with axolotls. You can do that with some forms of worm as well, but lobsters are the only ones that then use that to have really, really long lifespans. Lobsters are bizarrely long lived for the kind of creature that they are.
Saloni Dattani [00:10:24]: How long do they live?
Aria Schrecker [00:10:25]: So the oldest known lobsters are hundreds of years old. Over 200 years old.
Saloni Dattani [00:10:31]: How do we know that?
Aria Schrecker [00:10:34]: That is a really good question.
Ben Southwood [00:10:50]: We’ve got a good story about how the oldest lived lobster, died.
Aria Schrecker [00:10:54]: Yeah. The oldest lobster that we ever found. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is just that lobsters grow and they never stop growing. They get bigger and bigger and bigger over their lives. So you just find a really big one, and then you can map roughly, which might be why some of the oldest living is a little bit of a suspect number. Because we can map that, assuming that this didn’t grow really, really quickly, it’s this old.
It was caught by a shipping company, and it wound up in a lobster restaurant. And the people at the restaurant thought ‘this is a bizarrely large lobster’. So they kept him on display as a mascot but then PETA, the charity, did a campaign to release him, the oldest known lobster, back into the wild. And probably he was then released into the wild and starved to death, because the problem with lobsters is they don’t die the normal way. They don’t get more and more diseases as they get older. They just at some point need to shed their shell and regrow it and the bigger they get, the harder it is for them to eat enough calories in order to energetically do that. So when lobsters die of old age, they starve to death basically. Saloni Dattani [00:12:01]: That’s really sad.
Aria Schrecker [00:12:02]: So he’s probably starved to death. This was around 2006.
Ben Southwood [00:12:05]: So we have; category one is that we can turn ourselves back into an undifferentiated mass of our stem cells, and then regenerate ourselves, maybe isn’t that good. It would be quite cool, but you would probably think of it as dying.
Aria Schrecker [00:12:19]: Well, that’s a glimmer of hope in there, in that if you can do that with individual tissues that is actually very helpful.
Saloni Dattani [00:12:26]: Yeah.
Ben Southwood [00:12:27]: Segment two is regenerative abilities. So you can either regrow your arms, or regrow a tissue or something. That’s category one-
Saloni Dattani [00:12:34]: We can regrow our liver.
Aria Schrecker [00:12:39]: And the benefit of that would also be if you can think about it in terms of your cells, your DNA is incredibly robust when you keep being able to do it. So usually as you age, you have more and more complications in your DNA. Each time each cell is copying it and makes some mistakes, lobsters don’t seem to have those mistakes.
Ben Southwood [00:13:05]: And we’re not growing inevitably anyway, so that’s not a big problem for us. And we’re not going to have an issue with calories.
Aria Schrecker [00:13:11]: Yes. It’s really obvious that if lobsters had human’s ability to control the world, they would just stop dying.
Ben Southwood [00:13:22]: Or if they had automatic hormones that kicked in saying, you’re an adult now, you don’t need to grow anymore, which is what we have. So category one, polyp stage, go back to stem cells, category two, regenerate. Category three?
Aria Schrecker [00:13:36]: Category three, and this is a very, very big category. Most of the creatures that you’ve heard of that have weirdly long lifespans fit into this which is that they just have really, really slow metabolisms. They don’t do anything. I think of them as creatures that have the same life in total that you would expect a species of their kind, but they just have it on slow.
Ben Southwood [00:14:21]: They’re mostly quite big, right?
Aria Schrecker [00:14:22]: Yes. So it’s the Greenland shark, the Bowhead whale, the Aldabra tortoise, and they’re basically the biggest of their kind. So I think it’s interesting that the Greenland shark and the bowhead whale both have this, the Greenland shark lives for much longer, but it’s quite a bit smaller because it’s a shark. And then the bowhead whale is massive. It’s 70 tons. They eat one meal a year and then they just sit in really, really, really cold water. They wait for their prey to come by them. They don’t do anything. And the Greenland shark can live for about 500 years doing this, and probably it’s the same number of meals that we do in that time, which is it’s weird thought. Maybe fewer.
So the bowhead whale is the one where we didn’t realize they were super long lived, and then some people were illegally trying to kill the whale, and they succeeded; they were hunting it, they found it, again this is the early two thousands. They found a Victorian harpoon embedded into the whale, and realised that someone had tried to kill it about a hundred years before and failed. And now we think that they live for about 200 years. But because they live in the coldest oceans and quite deep, we actually know surprisingly little about them. We don’t know, for example, what their litter sizes are, there are really, really big ranges on this.
Ben Southwood [00:16:05]: So categories one, two, and three are; undifferentiated polyp state, regenerate bits, and move very slowly and live in the cold, and be large enough that people don’t eat you during that time.
Aria Schrecker [00:16:16]: Essentially. And clams, which are technically the longest living creatures, are in that category, probably live for 500 years. But they literally do nothing and vegans will sometimes eat them.
Then, there’s the final category, which I think is a bit more complicated. The weird thing that we and naked mole rats share, and also elephants share, is that we seem to be very, very social creatures that are very helpful to others of our own species. And so therefore seem to live much longer than other animals that are similar to us; humans live much longer than other apes and chimps, and apes and chimps also live much longer than other categories of mammal. Elephants are like this too. And it seems the ways in which we biologically manage to do this are because we’ve had convergent evolution of longevity. It’s not exactly the same, but we have some genes that that seem to protect us from cancer. We have two of those genes, elephants have 16 of those genes. Naked mole rats have some of those genes. Obviously these categories are fuzzy, but some of the animals with very slow metabolisms also have some of these genes as well. And if you look over the entire animal kingdom, having a bigger brain and having more neurons is pretty well correlated with having a longer lifespan. I suspect because being a social creature probably means that you adapt to a bigger brain, but also probably means that you are better served by living longer, and learning from other animals. So the bigger brain is more useful only if you have a social community and also a long lifespan in which to exploit it. It’s a complicated set of things that all seem to go together.
Saloni Dattani [00:18:14]: Some of this longevity, especially in humans, isn’t that because we’ve made lots of innovations that have helped us live longer? Which is part of what you are describing?
Aria Schrecker [00:18:25]: You will know far more about that than I do. I think It seems implausible to me that it’s only that on the basis that even if you look at our natural hunter gatherer times, I still think we live a weird amount of time for how big we are. Creatures usually live longer the bigger they are - tigers for example, are only moderately bigger than us, and a tiger life expectancy is 25 years. And it seems once you’d made it out of extreme childhood mortality, humans even as hunter gatherers were living longer than that.
Ben Southwood [00:19:03]: There’s obviously a distinction as well between, when we’re talking about longevity, what actually matters to us as people living in the world which is how long am I likely to live? Which factors in a bunch of social considerations. Such as, if I live in a country with lots of disease and poor healthcare institutions, I’m going to live for a shorter period of time. It doesn’t really matter to me that the theoretical maximum limit of human lives is X. But when we’re thinking about longevity, we’re also often thinking about how long can this animal live even if you’re trying really hard? I gather in captivity, you can’t keep a tiger alive for more than about 40 years. Whereas with humans in captivity you can keep ‘em alive for 80 years quite reliably.
Saloni Dattani [00:19:49]: Right.
Ben Southwood [00:19:50]: That’s our maximum now. Yeah. 90.
Saloni Dattani [00:19:52]: Well, in Hong Kong, the life expectancy right now is 88 years. Pretty high, but it’s part of a distribution. People live different lengths of their lives, some people live much longer than others and we’ve been able to move the entire distribution. So on average, life expectancy has risen, but also the people who live the longest are living longer than before and I think there’s pretty good evidence of both of those.
Ben Southwood [00:20:21]: Here’s a question, is it correct that the actual longest ever life hasn’t really gone up that much over the last thousand years as far as we know? So they thought there were people who had lived a hundred years a thousand years ago. They certainly thought there were some people who’d lived a hundred years, and now we can get to a hundred years. Basically maybe we can get to 112 now? It’s the actual verified maximum?
Saloni Dattani [00:20:51]: So I think that it’s hard to find the longest lived people, and that’s quite hard to do historically as well because they had poor record keeping. But if you look at people who live over a hundred years old, that fraction has increased over time, so there’s pretty good databases where they’ve verified when was this person born? When did they die? And that fraction has been increasing over time. It’s mostly women who live that long, which is very similar to how women tend to have longer lifespans on average than men. But it’s really rare to see people right at the extremes. And that means that it’s hard to tell if there’s been a change over time, even though I would guess that there probably is. If you can increase the number of more than a hundred year old people, then you probably are also increasing the longest lived people.
Aria Schrecker [00:21:43]: I have a question; so I hear that people basically age bimodally and that one subset of the population, so by the time they’re 60, they’re starting to accumulate lots and lots of different diseases, and they’ll get diabetes or whatever, they’ll stack and they’ll stack and they’ll have several decades of accumulating these problems until one of their problems eventually kills them. And that the other subset of people who live totally healthily until they’re in their nineties and then suddenly something will kill them. Is that accurate or is that a massive oversimplification?
Saloni Dattani [00:22:17]: I haven’t heard, I would guess that these are just extremes of a range. Because one thing that you do see is that when people live longer, they tend to live healthier. They tend to get diseases later as well.
Aria Schrecker [00:22:36]: If you die at 90 do you still spend 10 years before you are 90 with loads of chronic problems? If you die at 60, do you also spend about 10 years like that?
Saloni Dattani [00:22:46]: So you start getting diseases later on. The total amount of time you spend with a disease might be different. But the longest lived people, people who live over a hundred years — and there’s this big study in Sweden that looked at this — tend to have developed cancer much later than other people who died earlier.
Ben Southwood [00:23:07]: Lots of people have made the case to me that we’re just dragging the end of people’s lives out. So we hit the ability to get to 80 years at some point in the past, and then now we just add on extra years of being ill. So health span doesn’t go up much at all, we just drag out people being demented and having cancer in hospital but we keep whacking the little moles to keep them just about alive.
Saloni Dattani [00:23:41]: I think this is the common perception, and I think this is why people are skeptical of attempts to live longer. They just think “I don’t want to live longer because I’ll just have more unhealthy years at the end of my life.” But I don’t think that’s true. So I think that, as I said, people who live longer tend to live healthier lives. There are a few exceptions to that, we haven’t made that much progress on Alzheimer’s disease for example. And once you get that, you’re going to live with it for how ever many years you have left. But that could change. We could get a new drug that actually treats or prevents Alzheimer’s and that would change the picture.
Aria Schrecker [00:24:19]: How much of the improving lifespans is tackling childhood mortality? Diseases that people get when they’re young? Maybe it’s actually really difficult to decompose that.
Saloni Dattani [00:24:28]: No, it’s actually not. So would look at mortality rates across different age groups and how that has affected the life expectancy metric that you get. So in the past, most gains in life expectancy were because of reductions in child mortality. Child mortality used to be really high in the past. 200 years ago, it would be about 15% of kids in France or Western Europe would die in infancy, that’s really high. And if you think of the life expectancy metric, it’s basically a summary of your risks of dying across your lifespan. If your risks at infancy are so high that massively reduces the average life expectancy that people have, so if you’re able to reduce infant or child mortality, that makes a massive difference. But at a certain point, those rates are already so low that reducing them doesn’t get you very much, and so from the 20th century onwards in Western European countries and North America, most of the gains in life expectancy have actually been improvements in middle age and old age. So we’ve actually made quite a lot of improvement in reducing cardiovascular disease, cancer mortality, infectious diseases especially. And those things have actually made a big difference since the mid 20th century.
Ben Southwood [00:26:46]: So when people think about aging, there’s a divide between people who think that maybe there is an underlying cause for everything, and the only valuable thing we can do is tackle that underlying cause. And then other people who think that there are just lots of different ways that your body becomes unhealthy, decrepit, and dies, and if we can just tackle them individually, we can have big benefits as well. Would you say you’re in the second camp?
Saloni Dattani [00:27:23]: I would say so far, most of the gains have come from the second. I don’t know if the first could also be true, maybe there is some secret thing that if we unlock, we can live forever or we can live much longer. And I can imagine that there are certain things that would help with that. So improving our DNA repair mechanisms, or reducing our metabolism. I could see that having very broad effects, but I don’t think we’ve found that so far, and I also think there’s still a lot you could gain from just using the second method of just whacking all the moles.
Saloni Dattani [00:27:54]: What about you, Aria?
Aria Schrecker [00:27:57]: I’m a total centrist on this issue actually. I think there will probably be some massive gain that we can get from one of the things that you can hint at with longevity research. Maybe cellular reprogramming or DNA repair or something like that. And you’ll get a lot of gains on lots of things, but there’ll be a handful of systems that are still held back. So I suspect if we did that, our skin would still age a lot. Or our skin would age slightly more slowly because part of it’s caused by the DNA repair, but some of it is just caused by being subjected to light. So I suspect there’s a little bit of both. What I could imagine being a problem is doing lots for our bodies, and lots of our brain is our body, but there is maybe a RAM problem that we’d reach.
Saloni Dattani [00:28:49]: Wait, what do you mean? So you could increase the RAM in your brain?
Aria Schrecker [00:28:53]: I don’t really know how the brain works, but I imagine the brain works a bit like a computer and at some point you just run out of memory storage space.
Ben Southwood [00:29:02]: I think that my memory’s already going in the early ones to make space for the new ones.
Aria Schrecker [00:29:06]: That must be how it works a bit. Even if you were just a simple algorithm that worked sensibly, it would obviously be that you can withdraw the stuff. It’s why Anki decks work, right? You withdraw the stuff that you use repeatedly and more recently, right? That is how you would program it if we were a computer.
Ben Southwood [00:29:25]: So you said maybe our skin would continue aging. But it seems to me one of the areas where we have made the most progress on aging, especially in recent years, and especially if you look at the extreme cases, celebrities and rich people, it seems that we’ve made incredible progress. People like me will see pictures every day of ‘This is what a 20-year-old looked like in the 1980s.’ They look like a 50-year-old. People’s hair and skin seem to be an area they care about a lot and maybe they are tackle-able. One way of looking at things is we’re all doomed to aging and death unless we can find the secret formula. Another way of looking at things is we’ve tackled hair and skin, we’ve tackled all the diseases that we know. Each year we are coming up with new ways to tackle disease. But what else is there? All our organs are still working individually sorted. And if you can tackle all the problems in principle?
Saloni Dattani [00:30:32]: The disagreement is about just how much risk we accumulate with age. So for most organisms as you age, you have an exponentially increasing risk of death. I think the question with longevity is, is there a way to prevent that from rising at all? What we’ve seen so far is that it still rises, but starts out at a lower level. So at each age you’re delaying death. But is there a way to just prevent death entirely? And I think that’s what people who believe this first idea — that there’s some secret — would say.
Ben Southwood [00:31:11]: I think an area that would be interesting to think about is that yes, most of the stuff we’ve done on longevity is this second type we’re talking about, which is tackling specific problems. Making it much less likely that you’ll die of cancer or heart disease. It’s crazy how if you watch any film, read any book, talk to your family of people who were men in their fifties in the 1960s and 1970s, they just died all the time, randomly, they’d be in the peak of life and just suddenly die from a heart attack.
Saloni Dattani [00:31:40]: They didn’t have AEDs (Automated External Defibrillators) back then, they had just barely invented CPR.
Ben Southwood [00:31:43]: They were just constantly dying of heart attacks. And now that just doesn’t seem to happen. If you follow academic research, you’ll see there are findings of everything all the time; ranging from green tea to any compound that exists, finding that they increase longevity. But followers of the replication crisis will know that a lot of this is dubious, and they didn’t pre-register their findings, they p-hacked a result, et cetera. But there is an interesting set of studies where they are using normal mice, doing pre-registered studies and then going through all of the standard compounds that people think might extend life and trying them. And by the way, green tea, no result. Aspirin also did not extend life.
They have found four compounds that extend life in mice. Obviously we’re not mice, but we’re close enough to mice that maybe they have some effects. So I’d like to talk about these four compounds.
Saloni Dattani [00:33:09]: It’s the US’s National Institute of Aging’s program called the Interventions Testing Program, ITP. And they have a lot of different labs in different countries or different places to run the same tests. So they’re testing the same compound, with different types of mice, different labs, and they see if there are replicable results. There were four, rapamycin, acarbose, Metformin, and one of the SGLT2 inhibitors.
Ben Southwood [00:33:58]: It was for diabetes first, and then it got a heart disease and the kidney disease indication.
Saloni Dattani [00:34:04]: It removes excess blood sugar and something else from your urine, from your blood, and it means that you excrete more in your urine salt.
Ben Southwood [00:34:17]: So SGLT2 reuptakes sugar from your urine so that you don’t waste calories by urinating them away. And SGLT2 inhibitors stop you from doing that.
Saloni Dattani [00:34:27]: Right. So you excrete more, that reduces blood pressure, which reduces the pressure on your kidneys and heart.
Ben Southwood [00:34:34]: And reduces blood sugar so that you don’t have as many diabetic problems. It turns out that reducing your blood sugar extends life by about 10% in mice.
On the one hand, that’s great. That’s amazing; imagine we could extend all of our lives by 10% on a drug that is quite simple and easy to make and will be out of patent in 10 years. On the other hand, it’ll be quite disappointing if 10% is the max we can get out of these metabolic improvements. Maybe if you stack the other metabolic drugs. So acarbose, the other one you mentioned, stops you from digesting carbohydrates, so you don’t make amylase. Amylase is what digests most carbohydrates, so this effectively turns every carbohydrate you eat into a fiber. So, if you are eating 200 grams of rice every day, you’re getting 200 grams of fiber, five times the really high targets that people are going for. But one third of people withdraw from the drug for gastrointestinal reasons straight away. And the other two thirds I suspect either develop machine-like gut bacteria systems that can churn through so much fiber so that it doesn’t become really troubling, or they just stop eating carbs altogether because you don’t get any gastrointestinal symptoms if you do it. Saloni Dattani [00:35:53]: Right. And they might live longer for that reason.
Ben Southwood [00:35:56]: Exactly. So I suspect that what this is finding, the fact that all of these things go in the same direction, is that there is a metabolic effect. We know that animals live longer when they have slow metabolisms. We have reasonable evidence that humans and other species will live longer if you control the calories, and then if you give them drugs that mimic controlling calories, they also live a bit longer. So maybe we can get 10 to 20% out of these.
Aria Schrecker [00:36:27]: There was a big study of Ashkenazi Jewish people who lived to over the age of a hundred, and they found that a lot of them had a gene that imitated some diabetes outcomes as well, essentially they were better at controlling their blood sugar and insulin.
Saloni Dattani [00:36:49]: Well also GLP-1 agonists, a lot of these are for some weight loss or some diabetes reduction. It also gets to the point where some of the interventions that you could have in your life to live longer are fairly simple things that people have recommended for ages and ages, which are exercise, lose weight.
Ben Southwood [00:37:11]: It’s so distressing when you discover those things are true.
Aria Schrecker [00:37:21]: And I think there’s a study in chimps which shows that if you are already calorically restricting the chimps, then give them one of the big diabetes drugs, there is no increased lifespan at all.
Saloni Dattani [00:37:39]: I would guess that you can’t stack them all up because some of them will just tackle the same pathways and once you’ve reduced that risk, it’s gone. You don’t need to worry about that anymore.
Ben Southwood [00:37:50]: But. We mentioned three drugs, all of which tackled the one pathway. But we’ve got one other drug here; tell us about rapamycin.
Aria Schrecker [00:38:02]: This tackles a part of your body that, as far as I can tell the acronym — it’s mTOR — but the acronym is just ‘target of rapamycin’. And that seems to be involved with signaling about cell growth, and so rapamycin the drug deals with immunity and deals with cell repair. So if you take rapamycin, your wounds don’t heal very well. And in large amounts, it’s an immunosuppressant in people, which is it’s current use, but in small amounts it seems to make your immune system work better, especially in older people, and is somehow also related to your metabolism. So it seems there is some relationship between cell repair and your metabolism that exists.
Ben Southwood [00:39:15]: It also turns off too much growth is what you were suggesting.
Aria Schrecker [00:39:18]: And it may also turn off growth. If you grow very quickly, you probably won’t live very long, that seems to be a general rule across the animal kingdom. And also actually within humans if you take growth hormone, it’ll probably also decrease your lifespan. We know short people live longer.
Saloni Dattani [00:39:34]: I didn’t know. I would’ve guessed that it’s the opposite because people who are taller tend to have better nutrition.
Aria Schrecker [00:39:39]: So I suspect that in the modern west, if everyone is well nourished then smaller people do live longer. And smaller dog breeds also live longer than big dogs as well, which is interesting.
Saloni Dattani [00:39:57]: I read a study about how domestic pets are living longer than in the past. So there’s this data set of millions of domestic dogs and cats in the US, and over the last 10 years, they’ve gained one year of life expectancy. I would guess from better healthcare, better medicine.
Ben Southwood [00:40:20]: I would’ve thought that it was just that Americans have gotten much richer and they’re spending a lot more money on keeping their dogs alive when they’re reaching the end of their lives. Because usually we’re a bit more utilitarian about pets than we are about other humans.
And we decide is it worth $10,000 for an extra couple of years of dog life? I could get another dog and when they have enough money, people can say ‘No, I want my dog. This is my dog. I love this particular dog. Not just any dog in general.’
Aria Schrecker [00:40:53]: Also, having been a cat owner for a long while now, they are getting stricter about making sure that you vaccinate your cats if you want to do anything with them. So it used to be that you had them vaccinated once and then it could go to the kennel and it’d be okay, and now you’ve gotta do an UpToDate certificate all the time. You can’t be lax on your cat vaccines, even if your cat doesn’t go outdoors. I assume there are also lots of structural reasons that people are getting more risk averse across society with their pets as well.
Saloni Dattani [00:41:19]: That reminds me of other things that help us live longer. Flu vaccines are actually very effective at reducing the risks of heart attacks and strokes. People don’t really know this, but they reduce those by roughly the same amount as statins do. Statin’s are another great example.
Ben Southwood [00:41:36]: The preventative ones appeal to people more than the responsive, because the preventive ones feel like you are healthier. What people want is not to age in the conception we have - if you can not visually age, and also survive, and also stay fit, what is it that’s different?
Aria Schrecker [00:42:04]: I think you just run life on slow. Or maybe you get more conscious moments per unit age, or something like that?
Ben Southwood [00:42:14]: I agree that that’s what people want, but I think it’s very hard to map our intuitions. I think a lot of people have the intuition that the things we have done so far have not slowed down aging. I think that it’s very hard to justify that if you compare it to any possible yardstick you could have.
Aria Schrecker [00:42:32]: I think it’s definitely slowed down aging; there are so many ways in which it just feels obviously true that we are younger than other people were when they were at our ‘clock’ age.
Ben Southwood [00:42:41]: Yes. So here’s another thing people say is that we’re going through life stages more slowly. The claim is that people get their driving licenses later, they lose their virginity later. They spend longer in education. Now, do you think that’s related to the fact that we live longer?
Now people are hitting puberty later as well. Lots of things are happening later. There are lots of people who used to do their first job when they were 14 or they would oft be in the world of work.
Aria Schrecker [00:43:22]: People are definitely having children later.
Ben Southwood [00:43:25]: All of those things. I wonder if you think those things are related by the fact we know we’ve got longer to spread out into?
Saloni Dattani [00:43:29]: Oh, I see. So you’re saying- Well, I guess there’s two ways. There’s one, we’re living longer and therefore we can delay these things and we don’t have to worry that much. Or is it, we’re delaying these things, which helps us live longer.
Aria Schrecker [00:43:41]: Oh I think what Ben’s saying is that we are biologically at younger life stages. So mentally we are choosing to not worry.
Ben Southwood [00:43:52]: Saloni’s one is one route. Yours is another, and mine was the third one. They could be unrelated as well. I think that the baseline view would be that they’re unrelated. The baseline view would be that we have a coddling society now. In a totally unrelated way to how we have done lots of medical interventions that make us live longer.
Saloni Dattani [00:44:21]: There’s one version of it that I actually do believe, that coddling in terms of reducing our risks of injury or accidents actually does make us live longer.
Ben Southwood [00:44:32]: I’ve totally changed my mind on this since having children; now it may possibly be because my children are more danger seeking than other children, or they’re a mixture of being extremely malcoordinated like me, or extremely brave and danger seeking like Eloise, my wife, and when that crosses over, you get children who go to hospital lots.
But billions of people have had children. It’s the most normal thing in the world. Keeping children alive must be very easy, you shouldn’t worry about it too much. Then I remember, no! Loads of children just died in horrible accidents all the time! What’s actually happening here is that we have more free time, we have more wealth, and to some extent, coddling is just rationally ‘I love my children. I don’t want any harm.’ They could get a traumatic brain injury and you could get a disfigurement across their face and people might treat them differently. All these things can just happen. And it’s just wrong to think that it was all happening at the same rate. No, it was happening much more often. People were getting hit by buses and cars and everything all the time. Saloni Dattani [00:45:43]: I take that view as well.
Aria Schrecker [00:45:45]: From my own family story, my mum was one of six in India in the sixties. She lost one sibling to typhoid, but she lost another to a car accident. I just don’t think most parents let 17-year-old boys ride motorcycles like that now. Whereas at the time is was more normal.
Ben Southwood [00:46:29]: We want to keep our children alive, and probably that’s just a social wide thing of, ‘We are coddling them collectively because we are trying to keep ‘em alive and trying to keep ‘em healthy’.
Aria Schrecker [00:46:46]: Yeah. I guess I intuitively agree with your model, but I do think it is true that even though the world is so much safer, we still don’t let teenagers have the same freedom to roam that clearly we did historically. You see those little maps where it’s family that grew up in the same house and it’s grandfather was allowed when he was seven years old to go all the way down to the creek and fish. That actually seems insane.
Ben Southwood [00:47:15]: In that specific map, that he goes to Rotherham, he’s allowed to go 11 miles.
Aria Schrecker [00:47:19]: There you go.
Ben Southwood [00:47:20]: And then the today one is allowed to go to the end of the street with slight supervision. I think there are lots of things going into that. I don’t think it’s just an increase in coddling. I think that although the world is much safer in general, there are certain features of the world that are totally different. So in 1911 there weren’t motorways between his house and Rotherham. That’s a really dangerous thing where young people under the age of 10 are not reliably to be trusted to stay safe from. So I think that’s probably the overwhelming thing, and I think if you find places where that isn’t the case, even at high levels of wealth Japan, for example. They’ll let children go out and roam relatively freely.
Aria Schrecker [00:48:09]: And Japan is actually very very safe.
Saloni Dattani [00:48:10]: Have you seen that show where they do that? They’re kids that are one or three years old just going out doing groceries.
Ben Southwood [00:48:18]: I have watched clips from it. Okay. And it’s very funny how easily they get distracted from their mission. They have no long term ability to keep to the same plan. There’s immediate stimulus and then they keep going home because they forget what they’re supposed to be doing.
Aria Schrecker [00:48:35]: Other coddling related ways that we have definitely increased lifespans - I’m endorsing them here, which is there are lots of interventions that can actually stop people from committing suicide by, making it harder for them to unscrew pesticide caps, or even just the American way of taking paracetamol just makes it easier for them to commit suicide, the British way of paracetamol, you’ve got to pop each individual one.
There we go, that’s coddling, which has definitely increased lifespans. That is good. Banning drunk driving, that’s obviously one of those things.
Saloni Dattani [00:49:24]: Seat belts.
Aria Schrecker [00:49:25]: Seat belts.
Saloni Dattani [00:49:26]: Vaccines.
Aria Schrecker [00:49:28]: Yes. We definitely have a social infrastructure that is pro-longevity.
Ben Southwood [00:49:31]: Okay. So we’ve talked about every possible way that we stop people from dying in accidental ways. Are there any promising things for the other method? The the underlying aging idea. Do you go to bed at night thinking, I probably won’t die of the same diseases that we have now, but I will die of something?
Aria Schrecker [00:50:09]: I think this belies a whack-a-mole mentality, but there are a couple of ways where I think that we’ve fixed that for the time when I get old. I think I won’t go through menopause. We’ve already started to give lots of women HRT, who are already of menopause age. I’m almost 30 and when I’m 50, 60, I think that is going to get much, much better. That’s a form of aging that I’m going to be able to skip out on. I think I probably won’t die of most of the major cancers that people die of now. I think that seems to be just getting better and better and better. I probably won’t get diabetes.
Saloni Dattani [00:50:53]: I’m somewhat optimistic about Alzheimer’s disease as well. I think if we just try enough things, maybe we’ll find something, but also we’ll probably get better at measuring the brain and understanding it and finding medicines that work.
Ben Southwood [00:51:06]: What did you think about that viral nature study where they said that people rarely get cancer and Alzheimer’s at the same time?
Saloni Dattani [00:51:15]: I didn’t read that, but I just assumed it was some statistical artifact. Sadly.
Ben Southwood [00:51:20]: Skeptical Saloni, we should have you on everything. Sorry. It’s probably just statistical.
Aria Schrecker [00:51:25]: Naked mole-rats probably don’t even age that badly. I think there is other stuff that you can do in your personal life that mean will achieve slowing your aging rate. So the biggest one is if you’re not fat, you’re doing so much more than the average person in a developed nation now, and if you are staying at one of the lowest possible healthy weights for someone of your size, you’re doing even more. would put money on rapamycin being a drug that lots of people take in a few decades.
I think we are also going to get new drugs. Let’s cast back to a piece in issue 21 of Works in Progress, Nature’s Laboratory. about how genes seem to be a source of new drugs. I think we are going to get much, much better at measuring people’s genomes and picking up statistical signals that show that some genes help you live longer, which will be a source of novel compounds that we learn about. We will find some useful genes and we will start to make drugs that replicate that effect. I think we will actually get to having novel compounds if the course of science continues, I think we probably will get some all-cause mortality tackling drugs from genomes. That’s one guess. Saloni Dattani [00:53:24]: That has actually happened in a few high profile examples of drugs that have come from studying some population or some family that either has a very high risk of dying early or lives longer for some reason, and then trying to understand what gene is linked to that and then developing drugs against that. So I think the famous one is PCSK9 drugs, which reduce cholesterol levels, but then there’s also various other cholesterol and other drugs that are in the pipeline for things like that.
Aria Schrecker [00:53:55]: The big thing I’m hoping for is an ozempic style thing, but instead of meaning that you eat less it just burns all the energy without it going into your body and coming out as fat in you somehow.
I had a crackpot idea a while ago which is that Vaseline Petroleum, it’s basically a fat. If you fried your food in it, you would still get the Maillard reaction. It would taste like fatty food but you can’t digest it.
Ben Southwood [00:54:48]: We discussed acarbose earlier, it works by stopping you from producing amylase, so you can’t digest carbohydrates. There was an equivalent for fat called lipase. I would rather have the gastrointestinal symptoms of acarbose, which is just lots of bloating and gas than what they call greasy stools. All the fat you’re eating is just going through. That’s an option that’s open to you right now; it’s a generic drug.
Aria Schrecker [00:56:04]: This is not diet advice.
Ben Southwood [00:56:04]: It’s perfectly safe, it was approved through the normal process then on very large studies and then post-market, very large studies. There are no health downsides, it’s just quite unpleasant to have lots of actual oil in your stools. So that would be a downside of your petroleum jelly frying.
Saloni Dattani [00:56:41]: Well, I think the better drugs that work on cardiovascular risks, like cholesterol reducing drugs and triglyceride reducing drugs are better because they’re not engulfing - they’re not leaving fat in your digestive tracts, but you mop up more LDL cholesterol and that’s probably better.
Ben Southwood [00:57:00]: A favorite fact of mine - So I spend a lot of time on the internet consuming on a superficial level research about health, diet, all those sorts of things, and one of the things that I discovered in all of this is that in a lot of studies, raw correlation between cholesterol levels and lifespan is positive, not negative. And I was confused by this because there are loads of drugs that reduce cholesterol and appear to be good for you.
And so I presented this to Stefan Guyenet, who is a nutrition expert and wrote for Works in Progress, and he said, yes, strangely enough, having genetically higher cholesterol is good for you, but also reducing it is good for you. And so clearly having genetically high cholesterol is a signal of overall body health in some sort of way. And cholesterol itself is probably bad for you, but the mechanisms of action of how these things actually work is slightly more confusing than when we started using them. Saloni Dattani [00:58:02]: So we’re going to talk about this in an episode of Hard Drugs, but the problem with cholesterol is not the cholesterol itself, it’s the particles that carry it. And if those particles are small enough, they get into your blood vessels and just stick there, and that causes atherosclerosis, and that can reduce your ability to circulate blood efficiently.
So it’s not about the total amount of cholesterol in your body that is a marker for poor health. It’s about the type of cholesterol particles and how big they are and how, where they stick, things that. Ben Southwood [00:58:46]: You mean it makes intuitive sense.
Saloni Dattani [00:58:48]: Yes.
Ben Southwood [00:58:49]: So we talked about some drugs that seem to extend the life of various different groups of mice when we really test them. There are some other things that probably extend life. I don’t think that they’ve been tested to the level where we can say with absolute certainty that in a normal person they would extend life. But I gather from the kinds of evidence I’ve seen, they’re pretty good. I said before, green tea doesn’t extend life, or at least that there’s no compelling evidence that it extends life. But with coffee it seems that if you go in big studies of a population, like Americans, and then you look at how much coffee they have per day from zero to say six cups, it’s pretty dose dependent on lots of different diseases, especially kidney. They’ve never done a proper randomized control trial on coffee, because the cost of doing that would be too expensive, and then everyone’s already allowed to sell coffee, so you can’t make any money from that. But there are lots of small, randomized control trials and they usually find the same results, especially if you add them all together. And then there are bigger cohort studies where they’re looking at people through their life, how much coffee they have, and they all find coffee extends life.
Saloni Dattani [01:00:16]: I’m skeptical of this. I would guess that there is a confounding there and that people who drink more coffee are healthier and that if you drink coffee, you wouldn’t be able to take various drugs and things that you would need if you had a disease. So I feel there are probably various things that and I’d want to look into how they actually did those studies.
Ben Southwood [01:00:36]: The reason why I don’t jump to confounding in my own head, is that the usual confounder is socioeconomic status. I just do not think coffee has that correlation at all. And if anything, I’ve lived a life of people propagandizing and intuitively believing that having too much coffee is bad. And so I would’ve guessed that in the US, coffee drinking is flat or negatively correlates coffee.
Aria Schrecker [01:01:38]: Conscientious people are always giving up coffee.
Ben Southwood [01:01:40]: I just don’t believe that they will find that coffee correlates with socioeconomic status.
Saloni Dattani [01:01:46]: Well, it’s also expensive if you’re having that many drinks, I do think that, I would guess that there is a correlation.
Ben Southwood [01:01:52]: Interesting, well we will have to look into this and then I’ll do an apology post on my, ‘Saloni was right again, I was wrong. Skepticism was the right answer’.
Let’s try another one. Having a walk after you eat something. Having a walk after you eat something might be good. One of the main hypotheses why all these drugs metformin, acarbose, SGLT2 inhibitors, have a positive effect on lifespan in humans is that they reduce blood sugar spikes. Having a walk after you eat reduces blood sugar levels. Aria Schrecker [01:02:52]: There’s also some evidence that if you eat the sugary things after you have already started eating, it has less of an extreme spike to your blood sugar as your insulin is already started to run, so it’s better to have ice cream after your meal and not before.
Saloni Dattani [01:03:16]: I like to have dessert at the start of the meal, because otherwise I might get too full to eat it. Now you’ve convinced me that I shouldn’t be doing that.
Ben Southwood [01:03:24]: Well look, everything’s a trade off. What else do we have in this list of potentially normal things you can do?
Aria Schrecker [01:03:29]: Blood donation.
Ben Southwood [01:03:31]: Ah blood donation.
Saloni Dattani [01:03:31]: I don’t believe that one either.
Ben Southwood [01:03:32]: I know you don’t believe that one. Fair cop governor, it obviously correlates with socioeconomic status.
Saloni Dattani [01:03:52]: But also a lot of unhealthy people are ruled out from donating blood for various reasons, like too high BMI.
Aria Schrecker [01:03:58]: But I’m told that once you control for all of that, blood donors still live longer.
Saloni Dattani [01:04:09]: I’d be skeptical. I just think that the ‘healthier people are more likely to donate’ thing is actually really strong.
Ben Southwood [01:04:15]: I’m open-minded on this. My theory was that it reduced iron stores. It is established that there is such thing as iron overload, and that you can have too much iron. The authorities agree on this. The Ben version was that there were numerous deleterious effects that you could experience prior to that point. For example, bacteria like eating iron, so it might be that you get more infections, or various other things. There are lots of angles, one study looked at coal miners and compared coal miners in ferrous deposits, coal that has iron, and non ferrous deposits, and found that black lung rates were dramatically higher in the ferrous ones - black lung being a standard disease of coal miners - I thought perhaps this person came into this with my view and they were trying to substantiate it. But if not, that’s interesting. A second interesting one is that cigarette smokers seem to have much higher rates of lung cancer than cannabis smokers, and there are lots of other things going on there, but one interesting factor is that cigarette smoke has a lot more iron in it than Cannabis smoke does, and it’s possible that that it might be related. These days I think that when you have lots and lots of small interlocking reasons to believe that something rather than one big reason? That’s a reason for suspicion because it might be that you want to find the conclusion. And then you are joining onto things that individually are not that convincing, but that join up. But I’m still interested in it as a hypothesis.
Saloni Dattani [01:06:25]: I think people should donate blood for other people to live longer.
Aria Schrecker [01:06:30]: I thought the other mechanism by which blood donation might work is - big fish have lots of heavy metals in them. If you eat a smaller fish, it’s got heavy metals in it, then your body has no way of disposing of it, so if you are higher up the food chain, you’ll accumulate more of them. And we’re reasonably high up the food chain. We eat things with heavy metals in them, and we don’t really have a way of disposing it except for literally just getting rid of that part of your body.
Ben Southwood [01:07:20]: You don’t replenish the iron straight away, this is one of the underlying reasons why people believe in it, right? So, the hypothesis is something like ‘We were made to just lose a lot more blood’ and so, for one thing is that all the things I’m talking about, women don’t have these problems in the same way that men do, premenopausal women. And obviously they’re losing a lot of blood, and the hypothesis would be that in the past people lost a lot more blood, and they sweat a lot more. So when you sweat, you lose iron through the sweat as well. And so then the people who believe in these things, they’ll attach in saunas.
Now we might be skeptical that saunas extend life, but if you already believe that reducing iron extends life, then you’re very susceptible to believing that saunas extend life, because you sweat out iron when you’re in a sauna. I wanted to ask about another thing which is, so this, I’m interested in this heavy metals theory. So this heavy metal theory gets at one of the core underlying questions; is there an inherent trade off between lifespan and other variables that we care about? Is that just an inherent trade off? Or can you have more of everything? The reason I ask this question is that - one hypothesis about what might be going wrong is that we’ve got things in our cells called lysosomes. If you can’t really process something, it’s going in there. One hypothesis you could build from this is that we’ve got basically a max lifespan limited by our intakes of all of these different things. But that’s a good answer because if we could just find some way of clearing them out with the drug, then we can just solve all our problems. If the main issue was overload, that would be a simple problem. Aria Schrecker [01:09:51]: So I guess what you say actually prompts a slightly difficult question here, which is why aging would be adaptive. If you think about us as this human species, we’re all coordinating together here, whereby if we didn’t age and die and pass on our genes to the next generation, we wouldn’t be able to evolve. We wouldn’t be able to keep adapting and so we should, from the perspective of our genes, value having two children, four grandchildren, et cetera. Those genes also get to be a bit extra selected and each time it goes on. But it doesn’t make sense to me at least why then you wouldn’t defect against the rest of your species almost by living much longer and taking up a much larger proportion of humanity.
Ben Southwood [01:10:47]: It would be intuitive for me if I believe that natural selection operated at the level of a whole species. But given that I believe it happens at the level of an individual gene then I can’t see that at all. Your intuitive thing should be, they want to live as long as possible. So there must be a trade off.
Aria Schrecker [01:11:05]: There might be a little sign here with the jellyfish that I was talking about, where it seems its population in the ocean seems to be increasing quite, quite rapidly. To the point that it is causing problems in it’s own ecological niche. It’s flooding it, at some point it could hit some Malthusian point, but it might only hit that point after the things that that jellyfish eats is totally gone, and its habitat’s totally overrun. So it might cause its own extinction.
Saloni Dattani [01:11:39]: We used to face this trade off and now we don’t.
Aria Schrecker [01:11:42]: So maybe there’s something like that that happens, where this animal might actually just die out. It’s going to take up a massive proportion of its niche and then it’s going to kill its niche off. And that maybe has happened before with other animals. I feel if that were the case, we would see it happen more often, which is why I propose this and walk it back. But this is why I find it difficult to reason about, because you can make up cases for why some things are adaptive and why some things aren’t adaptive, which I find a little bit confusing to deal with.
Ben Southwood [01:13:00]: If it’s a competition of resources issue, then that makes complete sense given what we’ve experienced where we can actually have more of everything. We get longer lived, healthier, but we also are stronger. We’re also taller. We’re also smarter. We seem to be getting all of the variables we care about at the same time over the last hundred years.
One thing I wanted to talk about is are there groups of people around the world who live a really long time that we can learn from? So, I’ve heard of this concept, ‘Blue Zones’. Tell me about Blue Zones. Does anyone know about Blue Zones?
Saloni Dattani [01:14:53]: Blue Zones are the idea that certain groups of people in very specific places live extremely healthy lives. And I think that the examples that people give are Japanese people in Okinawa, and people in Sardinia in Italy. I have heard a lot of debunking of this idea - there are probably people who live longer, but those aren’t examples of them. And the ones that have been given as examples also happen to be places where deaths or birth registration is very poor. They just have bad administrative data, they’re also poor, they correlate with things that you wouldn’t expect to be correlated with longer lifespans. But instead they’re correlated with things that imply that we don’t actually know how long those people have lived and that their ages are inflated because of that reason.
The funniest one that I saw was discussing historical centenarians, people who’ve lived over a hundred years old. And there was one example of this guy, Pierre Joubert or something, some French guy who supposedly lived 113 years in the early 20th century. And it turned out it was two people. It was a man and his son who both had the same name and people just assumed it was the same guy.
Ben Southwood [01:16:32]: There must have been a lot of people in the middle who were like ‘no, this one’s a child’. But by the end, you know, a 60-year-old in 1904.
Saloni Dattani [01:16:38]: I think it was that they found his birth certificate, it was actually his dad’s birth certificate, and then they found his death certificate and that was a son’s death.
Ben Southwood [01:16:49]: I feel quite bad for him now because at significantly younger than 113, everyone thought he was 113. ‘Wow, you are really decrepit, man.’
Saloni Dattani [01:16:57]: This goes to your point where people seem much older than they were in the past. And that I can imagine would also cause this confusion where people are like ‘Oh wow, this person must be over a hundred years old’. And it’s no, they’re 80.
Ben Southwood [01:17:11]: I’m 25. I just smoked a thousand cigarettes every day.
Aria Schrecker [01:17:14]: I once watched a video of teenagers answering some questions- it was school students and maybe 1940. I was surprised at how much like adults all the teenagers looked as well. So I do really think that those teenagers were experiencing being in their twenties, biologically.
Ben Southwood [01:17:34]: It was that more people had to go and work at such a young age. And even if they didn’t have children super early, they got married early.
Saloni Dattani [01:17:43]: Right. They also smoked more, did more drugs.
Ben Southwood [01:18:55]: We used to drink a lot more. I think the drugs question is interesting because I just don’t know. I’m always surprised when I discover people in the past were abusing drugs heavily. Everyone knows that Blitzkrieg, the Nazis, they were all using speed as they invaded Eastern Europe. In the sixties the Beatles were using speed when they were going and playing concerts in Hamburg. I don’t have a good sense of how much drug use there was.
Saloni Dattani [01:19:26]: What was the treatment for depression back then? Wasn’t there something?
Ben Southwood [01:19:30]: There definitely were people using heroin and cocaine in a medical context, in the 1900s, there were certain rich people getting obsessed.
Aria Schrecker [01:19:37]: If the Bell Jar is anything to go on, I’d guess historical treatments for depression were insulin.
Saloni Dattani [01:19:44]: Insulin shock therapy.
Aria Schrecker [01:19:45]: Which seemed a very strange, almost random.
Saloni Dattani [01:19:48]: You could just accidentally put someone into a coma. So people didn’t really know what caused it.
Ben Southwood [01:19:53]: Yeah. We’re still not that good on that one. That would be nice to get some improvements on.
Saloni Dattani [01:19:59]: So I have a question for Aria and you, what is the long-lived strategy by animals that you would take if you wanted to live longer? Out of the ones that we talked about?
Ben Southwood [01:20:11]: I’m obviously a lobster guy.
Aria Schrecker [01:20:13]: You’re a lobster guy?
Ben Southwood [01:20:14]: I’m a lobster guy.
Aria Schrecker [01:20:15]: You want to get bigger and bigger, and bigger, and bigger?
Ben Southwood [01:20:17]: Bigger and bigger. I come back here in a hundred years and I’m taking up almost the entire room. I have to keep working really hard to get good money for food. My food consumption is so high. That’s what I would like to do.
Aria Schrecker [01:20:28]: You have to have an IV drip of just straight glucose so you can keep growing.
Ben Southwood [01:20:32]: I would have to be eating extremely nutritionally valuable foods constantly, like a big dinosaur.
Saloni Dattani [01:20:39]: Aria?
Aria Schrecker [01:20:41]: I think I feel a big kinship with the naked mole-rats. I feel like we’re basically already eusocial creatures as humans. I go into the office and I’m working on my computer doing the very important magazine making part of the social order, and everyone else is doing all the other parts of the social order that come together. I suppose there isn’t a queen naked mole-rat that’s shoving me to get me to do work, but you know I feel I’m basically already like them. I also feel I have no personal temperature control already anyway. I’m just most of the way there.
Saloni Dattani [01:21:15]: I would take the last one, which is to turn myself back into a fetus. Start life again.
Ben Southwood [01:21:21]: How many times would you do it? Would you do it forever?
Saloni Dattani [01:21:24]: Why not?
Ben Southwood [01:21:24]: Yeah. I suppose if you could do that then when you were feeling like ‘Hmm. I think it’s, I think it’s time guys’, you’re on your deathbed and your death bed is actually your regeneration bed.
Saloni Dattani [01:21:36]: That would be great.
Aria Schrecker [01:21:38]: Would you consider that to be like you continuing to live if you just respawned?
Saloni Dattani [01:21:43]: I think I would see it as another chance at a different experience at life.
Aria Schrecker [01:21:48]: I would take it over what we currently have. But I think I consider that just a cheap way of last minute creating one more child.
Saloni Dattani [01:21:56]: I don’t necessarily want to live longer. I just don’t want to die. So this feels like it addresses that problem.
Ben Southwood [01:22:04]: Do you think that getting into a teleporter and then you come out the other side is death or teleportation?
Saloni Dattani [01:22:12]: I think it’s teleportation, because I’ve watched enough Harry Potter movies where they do that and they don’t, philosophically -
Ben Southwood [01:22:20]: But you wouldn’t know from the outside because they’ve got copies of all the memories.
Saloni Dattani [01:22:24]: They seem fine.
Aria Schrecker [01:22:26]: I think copying all the memories is getting - I genuinely think the only people who think the teleporter thing is death are people who have thought about philosophy, they’ve done the architecture thing with philosophy basically, where they’ve looked at too many buildings and now they can only make ugly buildings. They’ve thought about philosophy too much and they can only have clearly false opinions. You’re going to announce yourself as a ‘It’s death; continuity of consciousness is very important thing’ person.
Ben Southwood [01:22:53]: I don’t have a theory about it just on the pure intuition, I think that it’s easy to see that if you put me to a teleporter, but for some reason it delayed for a month, or, if theres a two person problem where I actually come out of the first one. There’s another one there, the other one there isn’t me. And it’s independence of irrelevant alternatives according to normal standards of what is me and what isn’t.
Aria Schrecker [01:23:16]: The other one there is you.
Ben Southwood [01:23:18]: I think that. My personal view is that if you think about it enough, then you’re committed to ‘I die every time I go to bed in the evening’, and since I’m not committed to that. Given that, I think that it would be silly to go to that conclusion, but I’m not a philosopher, so my opinion’s probably very bad.
Okay. I think that we have tackled all of the animal longevity based topics that we’re ever going to tackle.
Aria Schrecker [01:25:04]: I think so, yes.
Ben Southwood [01:25:05]: Thank you very much, Saloni. Thank you very much, Aria, by the time this podcast comes out, there will be an article by Aria in Works in Progress issue 22, telling you in much more detail and with all the facts sourced and all the numbers accurate and remembered because they’re written down about longevous animals and their traits.
