Presentation videos – The Science and Technology of Longevity

By Vince Giuliano

On Thursday June16, 2016, I offered a pair of talks on The Science and Technology of Longevity at a meeting hosted by the Silicon Valley Health Institute  in Palo Alto California. The talks were recorded and you can access them here at your convenience – videos of me talking and slides.

The overall theme of the two talks is The Prospects that Emerging Science Offers us for Longer Healthy Lifespans – a scientific and personal perspective.

PART 1 offers An overview of the science related to aging: where we are and where we are not as I see it.

PART 2 is about Science-based actions and interventions for extending healthspan and lifespans, with focus on the personal and practical.   

The following background and summary information on the talks are adapted  from the original meeting notice:

Personal introduction

In these presentations, I explore some of the most important current scientific understandings about longevity, health and biology – from both scientific and personal perspectives.  I share a number of personal interpretations based on ten years of extensive study that cut across multiple areas of science that normally do not communicate with each other.  Some of these are quite conventional, others fairly unique.  Further, I suggest a number of daily actions for maintaining a healthy and productive life in the face of advanced aging. These interventions are science-based and ones that I personally pursue to maintain my own health, vitality and productivity. They are ones, I believe, that have been key in enabling my health and cognitive capability now at the age of 86, so I am productive now at the same or better level than I was at age 55.

When I finally decided to make a full-time career longevity science nine years ago, I was 77.   At the time, I saw this career as having at least a 30 year duration, and still see it that way. My thought was that as I proceeded I would identify and adopt personal interventions that would keep me healthy enough to keep going with this career until well beyond age 100.  So far, I believe I have been fairly successful at hacking aging. The challenge for me as I see it now is not how to make it to 100 or 107, but how to make it maintaining full health and productivity. Given the multiple degenerative conditions that for everybody become more and more intense with advanced aging, this is turning out to be a major challenge.  This presentation is intended to be a snapshot of where I am now, both with respect to the science of aging and longevity interventions I have been pursuing.

I was introduced at the meeting by my colleague the naturopath Dr. Bernd Friedlander. I devoted about an hour to each Part with significant audience interaction. In the process I was delighted to meet a few loyal readers of this blog. My colleague Melody Winnig was there too,  She participated in the lively discussion session which followed the talks but which were not completely captured in the recordings.

Abstracts

Among the topics I touch on are:

The sciences – Part 1

• the nature of human biology – the most complex system of systems known in the universe.
• Societal and personal stakes related to aging – why it is so important to crack open a deep understanding of it
• Multiple interacting biological feedback loops – the challenges they pose
• Why no single blockbuster anti-aging breakthrough is likely
• Why billions are repeatedly spent on clinical trials for drugs that won’t work
• The epigenetic drift to longer lives
• Leading theories and causes of aging – all mostly right, all incomplete
• Tribes of scientists who talk about aging but who do not listen well to each other – a tower of babel
• Limits to the scientific culture of reductionism
• Biomes and circadian regulation
• Metabolic pathways – linking them with others
• Things that can go wrong with aging: protein misfolding, intra-cellular railway breakdowns, NAD deficiency, mitochondrial breakdowns, mTOR overexpression, IGF-1 overexpression, etc.
• DNA weirdness – non-coding RNAs, transposable elements, aneuploidy, etc
• Towards a unified theory of biology and aging

Actions and interventions –  Part 2: practical actions and interventions for 10-20 year extension of expected healthspan and lifespan

• Conventional approaches – diet, exercise, etc.
• Taking advantage of the many things that are known to science.  E.g. focus on plant- based substances, inflammation, inflam-aging and NRF2
• Multiple synergistic incremental interventions, personal health Total Quality Management
• Applications of stresses as health interventions
• Liposomal delivery of health producing phyto-substances
• New wearables health-monitoring technology – biomonitoring during sleep

I hoped to allocate plenty of time for discussions and interactions with audience members and learn about their interventions as well.  However, I was able to cover some of these final topics only in limited depth.

Logistics of original meeting

Meeting on June 16 2016 was @ 7:00PM PDT in Palo Alto, California. Location of the talks was at the  Cubberly Community Center 4000 Middlefield Rd., Palo Alto, The sponsoring organization is the Silicon Valley Health Institute.  (SVHI).  SVHI notice for meeting

You can also visit www.SVHI.com    If you have questions or comments, please post them here or email me.  For more  information on SVHI, you can write susanrdowns@hotmail.com.