The Global Story: Have we already found the fountain of youth?
en
January 26, 2025
TLDR: Research progresses on drugs to slow or potentially reverse ageing, aiming to prolong life by slowing down the effects of aging.

In the recent episode of the Global Story podcast, host Lucy Hawkins engages with Dr. Andrew Steele, a scientist and author of Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old, to explore the fascinating topic of aging. This discussion revolves around the scientific understanding of aging and the potential for drugs to not only slow down but possibly reverse the aging process, offering hope for healthier, longer lives.
The Quest for the Fountain of Youth
The concept of a fountain of youth has captivated humanity for centuries. From ancient Greek mythology to modern scientific inquiries, the desire to halt aging is timeless. Dr. Steele highlights significant advancements in our understanding of cellular aging, suggesting that some existing drugs could facilitate longer, healthier lives than we previously thought possible.
Key Insights from the Podcast:
- Aging Defined: Aging is not merely a cosmetic decline; it involves various cellular and molecular processes that increase susceptibility to diseases such as cancer and dementia.
- Cellular Aging Hallmarks: Dr. Steele identifies multiple hallmarks of aging, including DNA damage, accumulation of senescent cells (cells that no longer divide), and aging of the immune system. These interconnected processes contribute massively to global mortality.
The Ethical Questions Around Longevity
As research into aging gains traction, so do ethical concerns, such as the potential for overpopulation. Dr. Steele argues that extending lifespan through medical advancements can be viewed similarly to existing medical research fields like cancer or heart disease, emphasizing that the ethical implications are not as pronounced as some might believe.
Common Ethical Concerns:
- Overpopulation: The fear of exacerbating issues like climate change and resource scarcity.
- Equitable Access: Who will have access to potential life-extending treatments?
Biological Age vs. Chronological Age
A significant point made in the podcast is the distinction between biological age and chronological age. Advances in science now allow for measuring biological age—how healthy your body is—through markers in DNA. For example, epigenetic clocks can provide insight into an individual's risk for age-related diseases based on cellular health rather than just the number of years lived.
Practical Implications for Individuals:
- Understanding biological age encourages proactive health management to delay the onset of aging-related conditions.
- Encouraging habits such as exercise and a balanced diet can contribute to both health span (years of healthy life) and lifespan.
The Science of Aging Treatments
The discussion also covers emerging drugs and treatments that might slow aging:
- Senolytic Drugs: These drugs target senescent cells, which could potentially reverse aspects of aging. Drug combinations like dasatinib and quercetin have shown promise in laboratory settings, rejuvenating animal models.
- Rapamycin: Originally an immunosuppressant, this drug has potential anti-aging effects observed in mice, extending lifespan without increasing frailty.
- Metformin: Commonly used for type 2 diabetes, metformin is another drug being studied for its possible effects on aging.
The Future of Aging Research
The podcast emphasizes the importance of funding and support for aging research. Significant advancements in laboratory settings demonstrate potential applications in humans, but rigorous trials are essential to ensure safety and efficacy for aging treatments.
Lifestyle Changes for Better Aging
Despite the excitement around potential treatments, Dr. Steele stresses that no magic pill exists yet. The best course of action for individuals looking to combat aging remains grounded in simple lifestyle changes:
- Healthy Diet: Consuming a balanced diet rich in nutrients.
- Regular Exercise: Staying active can extend both lifespan and health span.
- Oral Hygiene: Maintaining dental care to prevent inflammation linked to systemic health issues.
Conclusion: In Search of the Fountain of Youth
The conversation concluded on a hopeful note, suggesting a shift in societal perceptions of aging. With ongoing research and understanding, humanity might soon embrace a new narrative about aging—one that opens the door to longer and healthier lives.
Final Thoughts:
- The journey toward understanding and eventually conquering aging is just beginning.
- Individual health practices today can contribute to future advancements in aging treatments, potentially benefiting society at large.
This engaging episode offers not only scientific insights but also a beacon of hope in the pursuit of longevity and health. As the landscape of aging research evolves, staying informed and adopting healthy habits can prepare us for whatever lies ahead in our quest against time.
Was this summary helpful?
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Discover how to lead a better life in our age of confusion. Enjoy this BBC audiobook collection, written and presented by bestselling author Oliver Berkman, containing four useful guides to tackling some central ills of modernity. Busyness, anger, the insistence on positivity and the decline of nuance.
Our lives today can feel like miniature versions of this relentless churn of activity. We find we're rushing around more crazily than ever. Somewhere, when we weren't looking, it's like busyness became a way of life. Start listening to Oliver Berkman, epidemics of modern life. Available to purchase wherever you get your audiobooks.
Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson with your weekly bonus from the Global Story, which brings you a single story with depth and insight from the BBC's best journalists. There's a new episode every weekday, just search for the Global Story wherever you get your pods, and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode. Here's my colleague, Lucy Hawkins.
For thousands of years, people have dreamt of and searched for the fountain of youth.
It may have eluded the ancient Greeks in 16th century Spanish explorers, and in the 20th century, the idea of turning back the clock might have been resigned to science fiction. In recent years, though, scientists have slowly but surely been understanding more about how our bodies age at a cellular level. And there's increasing evidence that some drugs might be able to reverse that process, giving humans longer and healthier lives than ever before. What's more, you might already know people taking some of these drugs.
So could we really drink from the fountain of youth in our lifetime?
With me today, hopefully not to crush all of our dreams is Dr Andrew Steele, a scientist, campaigner and author of the book Ageless, the new science of getting older without getting old. Good to have you with us, Andrew. Hey, how you doing? Andrew, I'd love to know when you meet people for the very first time and you say to them, my work focuses on aging. What sort of questions do they ask you?
All kinds of things. I think one of the most popular is obviously, what's the magic pill if you got one for me? Where can I sign up for the trial? But another question you get surprisingly often, and this sort of shocks me in a way, or did initially at least. You get a lot of really complicated, naughty ethical questions. So people ask, what about overpopulation? Haven't we already got a planet that's, you know, heaving at the seams with people? And if we have people living longer, aren't we going to have an even larger problem? And the reason I find that a bit strange is that I see it as just an extension of modern medical research. It's much the same as being a cancer researcher or a heart disease researcher.
If I introduce myself at a party and say, hey, I researched cancer, everyone says, fantastic, it's brilliant, I really want to cure cancer. And yet, if you talk about the idea of treatments for aging, let alone a cure for aging, people have a very different emotional, ethical reaction to it and I find that absolutely fascinating.
Andrew, this just might be a sign of how superficial I can be. But when I heard about us doing this podcast together and I thought about anti-aging, of course, I thought about how I look. And I think a lot of people also, because of the success that the beauty industry has in marketing anti-aging treatments, that's where we go when we think about anti-aging. But that isn't what we're going to be talking about today. What aspects of aging does your work focus on?
Well, the idea is that actually those external cosmetic sightings are clearly an aspect of aging. But the same processes that give us wrinkles, that give us gray hair, are also happening inside our bodies on a microscopic scale. And those processes massively increase the risk of disease. They increase the risk of cancer, dementia, all of these are called age-related diseases because the single biggest risk factor isn't smoking, isn't diet. It is ultimately the accumulation of the cellular, molecular damage and changes that go along with aging.
Say you're 30, you can have a terrible diet, you can smoke, you can do all the wrong things, health advice-wise. But you are still much safer from a sort of medical point of view than someone who's 80 and has led a completely clean lifestyle until that point, because the risks that are associated with aging massively increase their risk of disease. But it's also the frailty, it's the incontinence, it's the impotence, it's all of this sort of constellation of things that go wrong with our bodies as we get older.
And actually, if you add up all of those different things, aging is responsible for more than two thirds of deaths globally. And that's because of cancer, it's because of dementia, it's because of heart disease, it's because of the increased risk of dying on other things, like infections as you get older. And if you add all of those together, you find that aging is our single biggest challenge, I think. Andrew, why is it that all of my social media feeds at the moment, I am seeing wellness experts and fitness people and beauty experts as well, talking about their biological age? What do they mean?
Well, that's because there have been advancements in the science in the last sort of five, ten years that have allowed us to come up with various measures of how old you are, not chronologically. It's not how many candles are on your birthday cake, not how long ago you were born, but biologically. If we look down at these fundamental cellular and molecular changes, we can measure some of those changes and we can work out not just how old you are from how long you were born, but also your risk of disease, your risk of frailty, all these other things added together. And actually one of the most popular are something called the epigenetic clocks.
So to do one of these things you might do a blood sample or a saliva sample, then the scientists will test some markers on your DNA. We know that these markers change as you get older. When the scientists first did these experiments, they were just trying to predict how old people were, see if they could even detect these changes.
But what they noticed was that, you know, say I did an epigenetic age test, I'm 39. If the scientists, you know, went away and took my saliva sample and it came back as 45, they noticed that people with this accelerated epigenetic aging, as it's called, had a higher risk of disease, they had a higher risk of dying than people who had an epigenetic age that was equal to or less than their chronological age.
Andrew, when I think about aging, I think about my back and my knees that didn't used to be sore that are now, the fact that I'm starting to get gray hair, the wrinkles that are appearing on my face. That's what aging means to me and I'm sure to a lot of people. But what exactly is it? I mean, what is happening at a cellular level?
Well, it's a variety of different things. We now know that aging isn't one single process. This is actually the reason we're never going to have some single magic pill that allows us to just completely solve the problem. But what we understand is we can break it down into what are called hallmarks of the aging process. In my book, I've got 10, some scientists say 9, some scientists say 12. There's a little bit of debate in the field. But there's a broad consensus about what's going on there.
And so we can have a look at a few examples just to sort of make that a bit more concrete. The first hallmark is sort of the most fundamental, the smallest microscopic one, which is looking at damage to our DNA. Now our DNA, as you know, is the instruction manual that's found at the center of every one of our cells. But as we get older, that instruction manual effectively accumulates typos because there are various processes from the air that we breathe can actually damage our DNA. But when cells divide, they have to copy that DNA and they can make essentially copying mistakes. And over time, these tend to accumulate.
And the most famous example of this is probably cancer, which is that if you accumulate enough damage, enough mistakes in your DNA, then eventually that cell forgets how to stop dividing. And so it carries on dividing and dividing and dividing and eventually grows into a tumor and that's something that can kill you. We also think that other aspects of aging are caused by damage to our DNA.
If we zoom out a little bit further, we can see the fifth hallmark is what are called senescent cells. And senescent is just the biological word for getting older, sort of the technical term. And these are cells that have divided too many times. Maybe they've got a bit of DNA damage, they've got a variety of things wrong with them. What they do is in order to protect the body, they stop dividing. But unfortunately, when they stop dividing, they actually eventually accumulate in our bodies and can cause all kinds of damage that can go on to accelerate the aging process more broadly.
And if we zoom out even further, the last hallmark on my list is the aging of the immune system. And I think we're all reminded of that particularly starkly in the last few years because of the COVID pandemic. We know that older people were dramatically more likely to die if they got a COVID infection than a younger person was. But the immune system also has a variety of other roles around the body. It's not just for fighting disease. It also seeks out cancer cells. It also actually clears out those senescent cells I was just talking about.
So as the immune system weakens, it causes a whole range of other issues. And as you can see, just in these three examples I've given, these hallmarks are all very interconnected as well. The hope is because these are the fundamental drivers of the aging process. If we can go in and intervene in those, then potentially we can stop not just one, perhaps many or even all of the age-related diseases with a few treatments. And I found it really interesting that you describe aging as the biggest humanitarian crisis facing us. How did you come to that conclusion?
Well, the first thing is just what I've already mentioned, actually, is the sheer number of deaths that it causes. So 150,000 people die every single day on planet Earth, a variety of things. But over 100,000 of them die of aging. More than two-thirds of people die because of the cancer, because of the heart disease, because of the dementia, because of the increased risk of disease, and so on. So what that means is that it's by far our largest cause of death.
And actually in the rich countries, it's even more extreme than this in a country like the UK or Germany. About 90% of deaths are caused by the biological process of aging. So there's just no argument that this is a single largest cause of death. And as life expectancy's rise globally, countries in the developing world are rapidly catching us in the rich world up.
So that's the first thing, this huge, huge number of deaths. But it's the way those deaths happen. Maybe deaths not so bad, you know, you don't have to be afraid of dying to want to do something about this. It's because as you get older, there's this huge decline that comes along with it. You've already mentioned your knees and your back, but obviously these things get much, much worse if you're in your 70s or your 80s. That frailty can really start to kick in and impact on your activities of daily living. You can't get around the house, you can't go on holiday, you can't play with your grandkids, you can't engage in your hobbies.
And then the way these diseases kill you is often, you know, drawn out and very unpleasant. With cancer, it can be years of grueling treatment before you finally die. And so I think aging is our greatest cause of suffering as well, not just death. And that's why I think it's our greatest humanitarian challenge. There's just nothing else on the planet that causes this degree of suffering. And that means I'm hugely excited by the idea that we might be able to do something about it.
I mean, I'm dreading that, Andrew, the fact that the pain I've got on my knees and my back now are only going to get worse as time passes. But I think we also have this notion that aging and then death is inevitable. It's going to come to all of us. Is there a narrative though around aging that is changing? Are we starting to think about it in a different way?
I hope so, and I think that for a long time it has been inevitable, and I think it's been a very rational position for humans to adopt, because we've seen that we age, our pets age, our friends, our families age, everything around us. Even in animal objects, your phone starts to get a bit slower after a few years of use because it's aging in various ways. It just seems like this natural process of falling apart. But I think what's really changing, fundamentally driving this social change, is the scientific change.
It's the fact that we now understand so much more about what's going on in the aging process. And this has happened in the last 10 or 20 years. This isn't something that's been going on for decades and decades. There's really been a revolution in our understanding. And we've now got dozens of different ways that we can intervene, we can slow down, maybe even reverse aging in the lab. The data are still coming in. And because we've got these dozens of different ways of doing that, I think people are sitting up and paying attention and going, well, if you can make this mouse younger, why can't you do it for me?
These changes happening in our bodies at a microscopic and cellular level might feel beyond our grasp and beyond our ability to control. But next, the research into drugs that might slow down aging, drugs that some of us might already be taking.
Discover how to lead a better life in our age of confusion. Enjoy this BBC audiobook collection, written and presented by best-selling author Oliver Berkman, containing four useful guides to tackling some central ills of modernity. Busyness, anger, the insistence on positivity and the decline of nuance.
Our lives today can feel like miniature versions of this relentless churn of activity. We find we're rushing around more crazily than ever. Somewhere, when we weren't looking, it's like busyness became a way of life. Start listening to Oliver Berkman, epidemics of modern life. Available to purchase wherever you get your audiobooks.
You're listening to The Global Story from the BBC World Service. There's a fresh episode available as a podcast each weekday. Just search for The Global Story, wherever you get your podcasts. Today, I'm with Dr Andrew Steele. Now, Andrew, I want to talk to you about how all of this research might be used to improve our lives. And there's a really interesting concept I've seen in some of your writing. Can you explain the difference between a lifespan and a health span?
I think this word health span is really, really important because nobody, and this includes the scientists working on the biology of aging, want to drag out that period of ill health at the end of life. And so, you know, we don't just want to extend how long you live, but we want to extend how well you live as well. And that's the idea of health span. It's not just how long, but it's how long you spend free from disease. And the good news is that basically every way that we know of to extend lifespan also extends health span.
So we can just look at this from everyday life. We know that if you exercise, if you eat well, if you don't smoke, all of these things will make you live longer. But they also extend that period of life in good health before you get sick at the end of life. You can also look at an example of human centenarians. So these are people who lived over the age of 100.
And what you find is that the average person who lives beyond 100 lives independently until they're 100 years old. And what this shows us is that there's something in their biology that isn't just extending their lifespan. It's not making them old and frail for an extra 20, 30 years, you know, more than the rest of us have to deal with. They're actually delaying the aging process by that period of time instead. And so hopefully if we can count with a way to bottle that, we're going to have potentially, you know, the ability to keep ourselves healthy for longer. And I think that's what all of us really care about.
So now to the big question, what we all really want to know, how can this all be applied to actually slow down our aging?
Well, the idea is that by looking in the lab at these various changes, we can come up with ways to intervene in those changes. And I think the most intuitive one to explain is actually those senescent cells that I talked about earlier. So these are cells that old cells, essentially, they build up in our bodies as we get older and they drive a whole range of different diseases. So scientists thought, well, if these things are growing in numbers as we get older, then maybe if we could clear some of those cells out, that could help.
And so in the sort of 2010, scientists were looking for various different ways that they could clear out these cells. And they happened upon a couple of drugs. There's a drug called the satinib, which is normally used as a chemotherapy drug, and something called quesatin, which is a flavanol. It's sort of sometimes used as a nutritional supplement, normally found in fruit and veg. And they found that by combining these two things together, they could actually remove the senescent cells from mice, but leave the rest of the cells of their body intact.
And they found that by doing this, they essentially made the mice biologically younger by a number of different measures. So the first thing is they live a little bit longer. That's a good start. But these mice were acting in a younger way as well. So they actually send the mice to the gym in these experiments. They use sort of an experiment in frailty. And the mice that had been given the drugs could run further and faster on the tiny mouse-sized treadmills that they used than the mice that were the same age that hadn't been given those drugs.
They found that it improved their brain aging as well. I think a lot of us are rightly very scared of dementia and cognitive declines we get older. But they found that by giving them ice these senelitic drugs they're called, they cleared out those senescent cells, and they actually made the mice more curious, which is when you put a mouse in a maze, a young mouse is often quite curious, really wants to explore its environment. An older mouse might be a bit more anxious and a bit less willing to explore. And by giving them these drugs, they could rejuvenate some of that youthful curiosity.
And finally, I just really recommend that your listeners go away and look for some pictures of these mice online. The mice that have had the drug sources, those that haven't before and after shots, because you do not need to be an expert mouse biologist to see. They just look fantastic. They look like different mice. They've got thicker fur, they've got less grey fur, they've got plumper skin, they've got shinier eyes, they've got less age-related weight gain. They just look younger and hopefully we can start putting these through trials in humans and create something that humans can be taking as well.
So there's no drug currently, Andrew, that's licensed to broadly treat aging, but are there some that are showing promise?
They definitely are. And I think it's going to be a bit of a challenge at first to get a drug licensed for aging per se, because you have to demonstrate somehow that it makes people live longer and healthier. And that's going to be a long trial, right? You know, humans live 70, 80 years or more. And that means that particularly if your drug works, that trial is going to take even longer. One of the drugs that's really showing promise in the lab is a drug called rapamycin. And this drug has an absolutely fascinating backstory.
It was first isolated in a soil sample from east to island, that's the one with the massive stone heads people might have seen. They isolated this bacterium, they found it produces this molecule called rapamycin, and to cut a very long and fascinating story short. In 2009, scientists showed that you could give it to mice. You could even wait until the mice were pretty late in life, so they waited till they were 20 months old, about 60 years or so in human terms. They gave them some rapamycin, and they found that they made them live longer, maybe 10-15% longer in fact.
And again, they weren't dragging out that period of frailty. They were keeping them healthier for longer as well. And what's really fascinating is that this is a drug that humans are already taking. They're not taking it in the longevity context, but what they're doing is taking it as a transplant drug. So if you've had an organ transplant, then one of the big risks from that transplant is that your immune system will recognize that that organ doesn't come from your body and attack it. And rapamycin was actually first developed as a really effective immune suppressing drug, but it turns out if you take it at much lower doses, it might have an effect on lifespan.
Now, this probably isn't ready for the prime time. I don't think these people should be going away and, you know, start popping back their hypomycin pills. We haven't got the proper randomized controlled trial data I would like to see, provide, you know, start recommending this to people to actually take for aging. But the fact is, this is a drug we've been using for a couple of decades now. We understand its safety profile. We understand how it works. We've got really solid evidence that it works in the lab. So we just need to start doing some more experiments and see if this could be used to slow down aging in people as well.
I mean, these trials sound really impressive and I think people will find it exciting that the drugs already exist and are being used by humans, Andrew. But what are the difficulties in getting trials like this up and running?
One of the big ones is just money because these have to be big trials. There's a trial that's been proposed for another drug that actually people are probably already taking. In fact, quite a lot of listeners might already be taking this, a drug called metformin. This is the first line therapy for type two diabetes, the sort of age-related diabetes that a lot of people get as they get older. And that means it's one of the most prescribed drugs in the world. In the UK, it's been being prescribed since the 1950s. So this is a real sort of classic of the pharmacopoeia. But what scientists have found is that it might slow down the aging process.
And there was a trial proposed for a metformin called the tame trial, stands for targeting aging with metformin. And this was a trial where they get 3,000 people, 1,500 people take the drug, 1,500 people take an identical looking pill, but doesn't have any active ingredient called a placebo. And then you can watch those two arms of people and see if people in either arm get, maybe they get ill later, maybe they die later, if that metformin is slowing down the aging process.
Now, Metformin is essentially free. It costs pennies per pill. It's well out of patent. It can just be produced generically. We've known about it for decades and decades and decades now. But even though the drug essentially costs nothing, that trial would still have cost about $70 million if it were funded. And that's not a small amount of money. That's not the sort of money that an academic institution can put up. It's the sort of money that a drug company might be able to put together.
But the problem is that no drug company stands to profit. You know, imagine the tame trial works and metformin is incredible and slows down human aging. Then unfortunately, it's out of patent. So nobody can start churning out metformin and making a load of money from it. And so that's a real difficulty. And that's actually where those biological age tests that we talked about earlier could really come into their own. Because if we can get to the point where rather than doing one of these really long trials, we can just measure everyone's biological age at the start, give them a drug that we're trying to test, and then maybe six months later measure their biological age again. We can improve it on the basis of that biomarker.
Andrew, what are the therapies out there that people are getting excited about? I think one of the most exciting that's really causing a buzz at the moment is something called cellular reprogramming. And this is a fascinating therapy. I'm actually a new dad. I've just had my wife and I've just had a baby. And this is a really interesting thing from a biological point of view, thinking about it from the possibility of aging biology.
then I'm 39. My wife's 33. And yeah, our baby is zero years old. Now, I know that sounds really obvious, but bear with me here. Babies who are born to 30-year-old parents have the same life expectancy as babies who are born to parents in their 20s or even babies who are born to parents in their teens. So clearly, even though she was born from old cells, she was born from a 32-year-old egg cell from my wife and a 39-year-old sperm cell from me, somehow
that combination has managed to reset the biological clock and she's got a normal life expectancy ahead of her. So in some ways, biology has already solved the aging process. The question is, can we somehow come with a way to bottle that and give it to people? And in the lab, that has actually been achieved.
We can do this process called cellular reprogramming, where we can turn back the biological clock of a cell, and this was first used for stem cell research. You get a cell from my skin, for example, and turn back the clock and turn it into a stem cell that could then become any kind of cell in my body. But scientists noticed that while they were turning back the developmental clock on these cells, it also turned back the aging clock where they seemed to.
And so they tried this experiment in whole mice. They found that it didn't reverse the mice's cells all the way back to being stem cells. It just made them age a little bit more slowly. And there's huge, huge commercial interest in this now as well, because it's an exciting technology. The biggest sort of startup in this field is called Altos Labs, funded by amongst other people, Jeff Bezos. And they've got $3 billion to get there from investors to try and investigate this technology. This is all so cool, Andrew, but the obvious question as well is when could this all be a possibility?
And this, I think, comes to a question of funding, because I think the question that journalists have to ask and scientists hate to answer is how long is it going to be? And I think part of the reason for that is that thinking of it as a number of years away is the wrong way to think about it, because we have to actually try to get this research to work. And to take the example of the US, one of the few countries in the world that has an actual government research body specifically devoted to looking into aging biology. And if you look at the Aging Biology Division of the National Institute for Aging, so this is the part that's doing the kind of research that I care about,
Their budget is about three or four hundred million dollars a year. Now that sounds like a lot of money to you and me, but actually if you think about it, it's just over a dollar per American, which is wild because aging causes 85% of American deaths. So I think what we really need to do is increase the amount of money that goes into the field.
And these developments, they aren't decades and decades away. The fact is we've got a lot of these working in mice in the lab. We just need to do the human trials. We just need to try and make sure they're safe and effective in people. So I think this is going to happen in time for most people alive today. What do I mean by that? Well, the average person on planet Earth today is somewhere under 40. And what that means is that if you live to an average life expectancy of, say, 80 in a rich country, then you've got 40 years of biological developments ahead of you.
We've got AI, we've got loads of new tools arriving in biology and gene editing and stem cell therapy. That's a huge amount of time for those developments to happen. And if we can do the science, if we can invest in that science, it could definitely arrive, you know, well before all of our 80th birthdays. So that's in plenty of time to make a difference to the trajectory of our aging. So my call to action here is we've got to fund the science and then it can happen sooner for all of us, for our parents, for everyone we love and care about.
Andrew, you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that people often raise ethical issues with you when you tell them what you do. What do you think are the key ethical issues that people could have if we produce a pill or some kind of treatment that slows aging?
I think the most common question I get is about population. It's about, you know, people do live longer. Aren't we going to end up cramming the earth full of humans? It's already pretty full of humans. We're already, you know, emitting too much carbon dioxide, too much plastic pollution. And isn't this only going to increase as the number of people does? Actually, the answer is it makes a surprisingly small difference. Even if you completely remove age-related causes of death, it only makes, by my calculations, maybe a 10-15% difference to global population by 2050.
And that assumes that we do that change today. And I'd happily work 10 or 15% harder to cut back my carbon emissions, to cut back my plastic use and so on, if that meant that people were living much, much longer healthier lives.
Andrew, people have been searching for the fountain of youth for centuries before we had social media. And now we are inundated by, I've already mentioned it, sort of wellness experts, people talking about longevity. Lots of people promising that if you do certain things, you know, you can reverse aging. It's really complicated landscape for people to navigate. What's your advice?
Yeah, it really is. The first thing to say is there is nothing yet available to consumers that can slow down the aging process in any way that goes beyond the basic health advice. And I think this can sound quite boring. This is why it doesn't necessarily get you millions and millions of views on social media. But the best advice that people can follow right now is eat well, get some exercise, get a good night's sleep, all of the basic stuff they know they should already be doing.
This excites me a lot because if you understand the biology of aging, you can see that it's impacting on all those hallmarks we talked about. You can understand the connection between all of those things. And you also know that these drugs, these medicines are potentially coming quite soon. So if you can extend your lifespan by doing that, you know, eating well, by getting enough sleep, by doing some exercise, you aren't just buying yourself health and quality of life today. You're also potentially buying scientists the time to do that work, which then means you can benefit from those drugs in the future.
I think the real challenge is that, you know, longevity has become a bit of a buzzword. I think the science does underpin that. But I think that it's sort of escaped beyond the lab. It's got got out of the lab and got a bit out of control in some ways. And, you know, as we mentioned, there's this huge economic incentive. There's a huge market to be got here. And so if you can come up with some quick fix, some supplements, some tests that can allow you to live that little bit longer, there's a huge, huge temptation for people to go for it.
I think by the time these drugs are being offered by health services you know you can be pretty sure they've been thoroughly vetted because there are lots of hurdles things have to jump through. I think before that we've got to find some scientists I think to follow people who've actually got the scientific credentials rather than people who are just you know fitness influencers online. You can't tell how healthy someone is from their social media profile.
and it might be that actually although they look very healthy externally you know they might not be healthy internally if they're posting all their sort of biomarkers online are you sure those biomarkers are really the tests they've done either even actually done any of those tests or are they just using it to try and sell you a supplement or sell you a product you know think about are these claims too good to be true
We're entering a difficult time because things that sound too good to be true are going to be true potentially. We are going to be able to slow down and reverse the aging process scientifically. But I think until that time comes, we've always got to be very, very careful not to be drawn in by these big, big promises.
I mean, getting some exercise and eating well. These are all things we've been told for years by lots of people. A good night's sleep. Tricky for you at the moment, Andrew, with a newborn. I know. Yeah, we do know these things. Is there not one other thing that you're doing? Any other pill, any other supplement, anything else that you're taking to increase your longevity?
I think the most interesting unconventional piece of advice which comes from my understanding the aging biology is actually brushing your teeth. You've discovered there's this connection between the biology that's going on in your mouth and the biology and the rest of your body. So when you get tooth decay or when you get gum disease, those are bacteria in your mouth that are invading or trying to take control in there. That's a battle that your immune system can never win.
I already mentioned aging of the immune system is one of those hallmarks of aging. Actually, one of the ways in which age is it constantly gets a little bit paranoid sort of looking over its shoulder all the time. It's sort of this increasing chronic inflammation is what it's called. And because this is essentially what's going on in your mouth, because the immune system is fighting this battle against these bacteria that it can never quite win, we now know that inflammation in your mouth can drive inflammation in the rest of your body.
so it can increase the risk of heart disease, increase the risk of stroke, all of these heart-related complications. There's even some evidence that it might be able to increase the risk of dementia if you have bad teeth and bad oral health generally. I think the evidence is compelling enough that it definitely gets me flossing, trying to clean between my teeth, pushing twice a day, all this sort of standard dental advice, but just realizing that that has a connection to the aging process has really redoubled my efforts to keep my teeth clean.
Dr Andrew Steele, that is the best bit of advice anyone has given me for a long time. Thank you so much for joining us on The Globals. You're very, very welcome. Thanks for having me. And thanks so much to you for listening. If you want to get in touch, email us at theglobalstory at bbc.com. You can send us a message or a voice note as well. Our WhatsApp is plus 44-330-1239-480. All of those details as well are in our show notes.
wherever you're listening in the world. This has been The Global Story. Thanks for having us in your headphones. Goodbye. If you enjoyed listening to The Global Story and would like to hear more, there's a new episode every weekday. Just search for The Global Story wherever you get your BBC podcasts and be sure to click subscribe or follow. We'll have another edition of The Global News Podcast later. Until then, bye-bye.
Discover how to lead a better life in our age of confusion. Enjoy this BBC audiobook collection, written and presented by best-selling author Oliver Berkman, containing four useful guides to tackling some central ills of modernity. Busyness, anger, the insistence on positivity and the decline of nuance.
Our lives today can feel like miniature versions of this relentless churn of activity. We find we're rushing around more crazily than ever. Somewhere, when we weren't looking, it's like busyness became a way of life. Start listening to Oliver Berkman, epidemics of modern life. Available to purchase wherever you get your audiobooks.
Was this transcript helpful?
Recent Episodes
Nvidia shares sink as Chinese AI app spooks markets

Global News Podcast
Chinese company develops low-cost AI chatbot causing Nvidia's biggest single-day loss in US market history.
January 28, 2025
Hundreds of thousands head home in northern Gaza

Global News Podcast
Palestinian refugees continue their displacement amidst a ceasefire; survivors honor 80 years of Auschwitz's liberation, and Paul McCartney discusses contemporary musicians lacking inspiration.
January 27, 2025
Thousands flee as rebels close in on key DR Congo city

Global News Podcast
UN Secretary General António Guterres urges Rwanda to withdraw forces from DR Congo's territory and the M23 rebel group to halt advancement on Goma.
January 27, 2025
Four Israeli hostages and 200 Palestinian prisoners released in Gaza deal

Global News Podcast
Israelis and Palestinians reunite with family members, while conflicts continue in DR Congo (13 peacekeepers killed) and Sudan (drone strike kills nearly 70 people at a hospital)
January 25, 2025

Ask this episodeAI Anything

Hi! You're chatting with Global News Podcast AI.
I can answer your questions from this episode and play episode clips relevant to your question.
You can ask a direct question or get started with below questions -
What was the main topic of the podcast episode?
Summarise the key points discussed in the episode?
Were there any notable quotes or insights from the speakers?
Which popular books were mentioned in this episode?
Were there any points particularly controversial or thought-provoking discussed in the episode?
Were any current events or trending topics addressed in the episode?
Sign In to save message history