Live Hundreds of Years With a Healthy Brain

Scott: I think a lot of people can wrap their heads around replacing a liver, pancreas, certain organs, and repairing damage at the tissue level. How do you keep the brain functioning normally? Is that a separate entity when we talk about anti-aging or longevity?

Aubrey de Grey, PhD: Of course, there's no real point in rejuvenating the body unless we can also rejuvenate the brain, and keep the brain working like a young brain, same as the rest of the body. The good news is that the brain is made of more or less the same sort of stuff as the rest of the body. It's made of cells, and stuff between cells, and cells are made of DNA, and proteins, the same way as anywhere else in the body. 

For sure, tissue engineering is not available in the brain. We can't replace the whole brain in one go like we could with the liver. That would rather defeat the object. But we certainly can do other types of regenerative medicine. We can do stem cell therapy, as I mentioned, for Parkinson's Disease. We can also do molecular regenerative medicine, removing things like the amyloid plaques that accumulate during Alzheimer's disease, and that's actually something that's, again, already in clinical trials. We're interested in removing amyloid from other parts of the body, as well, and we have research projects at Harvard and other places doing that. 

Also, then, there's molecular garbage inside cells. There are things called tangles, which accumulate in Alzheimer's Disease. In other neurodegenerative conditions, like Huntington's Disease, there's also various different types of molecular garbage that accumulate in the cell. We have research programs to get rid of those, as well.