The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health (2 page)

When Miss Lunsford, a nutritionist and graduate student at Cornell University working in the lab of biochemist and gerontologist Clive McCay, shared these results at a gathering to focus on the problems of aging led by the New York Academy of Medicine, no one—not even Lunsford and her teammates—could explain this “age-reversal” transformation. The year was 1955, the same year the Food and Drug Administration approved the polio vaccine, the power of the placebo effect was first written about, Albert Einstein died at the age of seventy-six, and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were born.
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Miss Lunsford’s procedure, anatomically linking two organisms, had a name by then—parabiosis. But while this wasn’t the first time it had been performed, her explorations were among the first to use parabiosis to study aging. And they weren’t without their challenges. According to one description of the research, “If two rats are not adjusted to each other, one will chew the head of the other until it is destroyed.”
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Of the sixty-nine pairs of rats that Lunsford had helped conjoin in Clive McCay’s lab, eleven died from a peculiar condition that developed about one to two weeks after partners were united; it was likely a form of tissue rejection. But the pairs that survived gave a glimmer of hope for reversing the maladies we all face.

In February of 1956, McCay, Lunsford, and a third Cornell researcher, Frank Pope, published their findings on the procedure’s overall restorative effects in the
Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine
with an apt title: “Experimental Prolongation of the Life Span.” In 1960, the results of Miss Lunsford’s investigations in McCay’s lab culminated in her thesis dissertation.
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But the research didn’t take off as you might expect in light of such intriguing findings. It pretty much sputtered and stalled for the next sixty-odd years. Interestingly enough, you can get a sense of the climate in which these scientists were working by reading a line in the opening paragraph of their paper: “Thus far man has made little progress in [studying aging] because human beings have chosen to expend their energies in improving the supposed comforts of living and methods of warfare.”

The studies done in laboratory mice indicate that young blood can reverse some signs of aging when given to an older mouse, suggesting that young blood contains “rejuvenation” factors. This figure demonstrates the two ways to reverse aging in the studies. (A)
Heterochronic parabiosis
is the process by which an old and a young mouse are joined surgically at the skin (where the arrow is pointing), thereby allowing their blood supplies to mix as the skin grows together. (B) Plasma from a young mouse (containing all of the proteins) is regularly injected into the tail vein of an old mouse.

When researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and the University of California, San Francisco, studied the life spans of old-young rat duos in 1972, they noticed that the older rodents lived four to five months longer than controls did.
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This was another important clue suggesting that young blood might affect longevity if it’s allowed to circulate in an aged animal. But that wasn’t enough to stimulate the research in this area either, and parabiosis became obsolete. However, early in the twenty-first century, a Stanford stem-cell biologist brought the technique back to life. He was then working under a mentor who’d learned how to join mice together as a teenager in, believe it or not, 1955, while assisting a hospital pathologist in Montana. This ultimately paved the way for breakthroughs in cancer biology, endocrinology, and immunology today.
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In 2014, researchers at UC San Francisco, Stanford, and Harvard each independently repeated Lunsford’s nifty little experiment and discovered that you can reverse aging in older mice by hooking them up to younger ones and splicing their bloodstreams together.
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So what is actually going on physiologically when the old and young combine? This procedure activates dormant stem cells in the older mouse, which turns back the clock and allows the stem cells to restore function to tissues. Stem cells are mother cells with the potential to become any type of cell in the body—from those that allow your heart to beat to brain cells that make you smart—and that also have the power to renew themselves or multiply. The surprising conclusion drawn from this recent parabiotic research is that the secret to reversing aging organs is lying asleep inside each of us!

Future research will figure out how exactly this age-reversal phenomenon works. In almost every tissue examined, including those of the heart, brain, and muscles, the blood of juvenile mice seems to “zap” new life into aging organs by awakening the sleeping stem cells through infusing substances normally associated with youth—proteins and growth factors that are particularly prominent in young blood but not old. Youthful blood sparks the birth of new cells in the brain and the system that governs our sense of smell. It’s also been shown to reverse thickening of the heart’s walls due to aging, increase muscle strength and stamina, and reverse DNA damage inside muscle stem cells. Young blood can promote the repair of damaged spinal cords in older mice and improve learning and memory. A study from a laboratory in Canada in 2015 reported that fractured shin bones of old mice healed faster and better when they were joined to young mice rather than to mice their own age.
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No one paid attention to Miss Lunsford’s work in her day, with its air of science fiction, but everyone in the scientific world today is taking notice, and a groundswell of exciting new research is emerging. What was once an implausible, preposterous idea swiftly cast aside has become a hypothesis in need of serious validation. Are we “de-aging” animals? Are we resetting the aging clock? Or are we merely restoring function to tissues and helping them repair damage?

Human trials are now underway using plasma transfusions. Plasma is a clear straw-colored liquid component of blood that contains a complex mixture of substances and proteins, some of which help the
blood to clot. Plasma is the single largest component of blood, but it’s missing from traditional blood transfusions, in which only the red blood cells are transfused. For this reason, blood transfusions aren’t fountains of youth. In 2015, a clinical trial in California became the first to start testing the benefits of young plasma in older people with dementia. Clinical trials in other disease areas are scheduled to begin in 2016. I am planning clinical trials in patients with advanced cancer that have failed treatments. Almost 90 percent of pediatric cancer is curable. If I can convince the body it is young again, maybe I can cure cancer.

Of course, certain problems still need to be worked out to prevent unwanted potential side effects, such as the body’s rejection of the transfusion with a dangerous immune reaction. We also need to figure out how much and how often to give the plasma. Plasma from donors is also not a long-term or scalable treatment option. We first need to identify the active proteins and make them into drugs so they can be made available for large numbers of people. This will be a good thing, though, because it will prevent the development of a black market for plasma, whereby young and healthy children and teenagers bleed for the highest price. Or worse, supplies of fake or tainted plasma enter the market. These fears are not unfounded. Health is one of the most lucrative sectors for con artists and criminals.

And the fact that such therapies activate stem cells is also a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gives an old body access to new and vibrant cells. But it also means that over a long period, cell division could run amok, and this has the potential to produce cancer and other disorders. Despite all this, the concept is promising on so many levels once we know how to minimize the side effects and potential for evil business trades, as well as maximize the benefits. So picture yourself receiving a dose of synthesized young blood or protein someday in midlife and in your golden years to stave off the Alzheimer’s disease that runs in your family, to help you maintain your mobility, to speed up your metabolism so you can effortlessly lose and maintain your weight, to quash chronic conditions such as insulin resistance and diabetes, to
clean your liver and arteries, to wipe out arthritis and revitalize joints, to balance your body’s flow of hormones and its circadian rhythms so that you feel good all day long, to abolish gray hairs and return your hair to its natural color, to lift your spirits and stamp out your chronically bad mood, and to trigger your body to behave—and look—as if you are decades younger. This may be possible sooner than you think.

We are indeed living in a
brave new world
, but this one won’t be dystopian as the one Aldous Huxley portrayed in his famous book.

Chances are you stand to live a much longer, more enjoyable life than you ever thought possible—thanks not only to such age-reversing remedies as plasma transfusions, but also to a staggering volume of other new knowledge and technologies in medicine. Scientists are developing drugs to reverse once-fatal ailments such as heart disease and figuring out how to harness a person’s immune system to melt away cancer. They are designing computer applications to help us regularly and effortlessly track key features of our biological functions including blood sugar, sleep quality, heart rate, blood pressure, stress levels, mileage, moods, and even risk for problems ranging from depression to cancer.

For the first time, we have at our disposal all the information we need to design our own health—and, in turn, the health of the planet. Put simply, people living in the twenty-first century are the most fortunate of all previous generations. That’s why these are the Lucky Years.

If you are fifteen years old or younger and living in a high-income country, your chances of developing and dying from breast cancer, heart disease, lung cancer, or leukemia before your sixtieth birthday are declining dramatically. Despite much higher rates of obesity and physical inactivity, premature death and disability from noncommunicable diseases (e.g., heart attacks, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes) have declined significantly in the United States and other high-income countries, thanks to inexpensive and effective prevention, early detection,
management, and treatment tools and policies. But more needs to be done, and it will come from us if we can do three things: believe that aging is optional, think about our future, and act on it today.

The Lucky Years have been the destiny of our species for millennia. But there’s a catch to benefiting from this new era. You as an individual and we as a society stand at a historic crossroads. Only those who learn how to think, act, and behave certain ways will reap the benefits of the tremendous opportunities afforded to us through the power of these medical revolutions.

Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel and a pivotal early mentor of mine, once referred to an inflection point in the development of technology—a critical moment when the curve of progress versus time changes, the things that used to work don’t work anymore, and new, necessary technologies become available. Individuals (or companies) that adapt to the shift and use those emerging technologies are wildly successful, and those that don’t adapt fail.

Andy Grove’s concept of the inflection point in the curve of progress versus time, adapted from
Only the Paranoid Survive
.
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This concept is often used in business circles, but it applies to matters of health as well. The slope of the curve of progress versus time in medicine is changing rapidly, and we all must adjust our thinking and behavior to take advantage of what the Lucky Years offer to fight against disease and premature death. Hence,
The Lucky Years
is about this inflection point that is happening in health—and how to respond appropriately to the ongoing revolution. The costs of not doing so are too high.