Everyone will die, but we can live healthier, longer lives until that day comes. This is the guiding principle that motivates the work and advocacy of Nir Barzilai, longevity researcher and president of the Academy of Health and Lifespan Research.
“As an industry, we are leading a revolution in anti-aging and disease prevention,” says Barzilai, who heads the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
Aging is the cause of many diseases, including heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's disease. Many scientists, including Barzilai, believe that the aging process can be reversed, thereby preventing disease and helping people stay healthy longer. Researchers are studying ways to reverse aging, including through exercise, diet and medications.
Within series TIME After interviewing leaders in the longevity field, we spoke with Barzilai about what attracted him to longevity science and some of the areas of anti-aging research that particularly intrigue him.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What sparked your interest in longevity research?
It started when I was a child, when I was about 13. I remember walking with my grandfather, who was 67 years old at the time, and he was telling me about all the things he did when he was young. I remember looking at him and thinking he looked old. He is balding and walks slowly. I just realized that one day I will be old too, and I want to be able to age so that I can still do things. I became very interested in understanding the biology of aging.
Later learning that there is a difference between chronological age and biological age gave me hope that we have this flexibility [to age better].
Aging was considered inevitable. In my opinion, death is inevitable, but aging can be completely reversed. It was a hope, but now it's a promise. What we are doing now as a field is realizing that promise…how to die young at a very old age.
Are you interested in living forever?
No, no, I have no fear of death, and I am not an immortalist. I know such people, but this is faith, this is religion. For me, I'm interested in intervening in the aging process so we can prevent disease. I want us to be healthy and die one day.
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Just 150 years ago, life expectancy was between 20 and 30 years. Today, life expectancy has tripled. This is a huge achievement. We used agriculture to make people eat well, we purified water, we built sewers, we developed vaccinations. Improving public health is what has really helped us. During those 150 years, each year we lived a little longer than the year before… until we were about 60 years old. And suddenly we had diseases that had never killed us before. Throughout human evolution, there have been pandemics and wars, but people have not died from Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, or heart disease. These are new diseases, right? Aging is the cause of many diseases, so we need to intervene in the aging process before it causes disease.
So, are you sure that the aging process can be reversed?
Yes, it's possible. I collected data from approximately 850 100-year-olds and their families. We found that centenarians developed the disease 30 years later than most people. They also experienced what we call “declining morbidity,” so they were only sick for a very short time at the end of life.
So, there is an example of people who can live healthier and longer. It's within our power.
It's true that for long-livers it's mostly genetics [that is driving longevity]. So people might say, “Oh, I wasn’t born with these genes, too bad.” But no – once you find these genes, you can usually develop a drug that will do what that gene does.
Read more: Revealing the secrets of life up to 100 years
I'll give you one example. In nature, small dogs live longer than large ones, and ponies live longer than horses. In the laboratory, when we turn off growth hormone, [animals] live much longer than if we called it. It appears that growth hormone plays a role. [in lifespan]. About 60% of our centenarians have something in their genome that interferes with the action of growth hormone.
We think HGH is good for you when you're young. It protects you from many things. But when you're old, you start to break down and don't want to waste your energy on growing. In fact, you will have to spend energy on repairs. This might explain why so many of our centenarians are protected: because they don't expend as much energy growing.
Read more: Scientists say these daily routines may slow cognitive decline
We took an antibody against growth hormone and gave it to animals, and they live longer.
So we study these mechanisms, these long-living genes (it's not just one gene, but several) and develop treatments and give them to animals that age like humans. We are trying to find out whether these treatments increase the lifespan of animals. If they do this, we can move on to clinical trials and drug development.
The American Federation for Aging Research is currently conducting a “superaging” study in which we are recruiting 10,000 centenarians to validate our research and find more longevity genes. We are looking for people who register. This is a cool project.
Are there already treatments or other interventions that slow down aging?
Optimization sleep, exercise, diet and social connections they all have a biological basis and these interventions are good for any age.
The enemy of our field right now is the noise we hear about all the time: everything that is marketed as the fountain of youth.
Supplements are a huge, huge problem. First of all, the bottles you buy may not contain what they claim. Also, some people say that you should take a lot of these supplements, but there may be interactions that we don't always know or understand about. We know from recent article that people who took multivitamins did not have a lower risk of mortality.
On the other hand, there are FDA-approved medications that also appear to address the biology of aging. They include [the diabetes drug] metformin, GLP-1 drugs and bisphosphonates, which are used for osteoporosis. We are trying to determine [their safety and efficacy]. This work is still ongoing.
Read more: Do you want to live longer? First find out how old you really are
Personally, I do intermittent fasting for my health. When I began studying the biology of aging, I noticed that laboratory animals that had their caloric intake restricted lived longer than their siblings and were healthier. People have realized that if you have less food, you live longer, but what really matters is fasting.
It's not for everyone, but the people who do it really enjoy it. I fast for about 16 hours every day; I start counting after I finish dinner. This had a big impact on my health. I lost some weight, but also gained muscle mass. I lost the haze that I sometimes had during the day.
Looking at the longevity space as a whole, what excites you most right now?
As president of the Academy of Health and Lifespan Research, I try not to take sides, right? But I will only mention three things. First of all, there is what I would call the left field player: hyperbaric oxygen. Sounds crazy… a very high oxygen chamber for several hours. But it's actually not as crazy as it seems. I brought these cameras into my laboratory to understand in animals how they affected the biology of aging.
Secondly, these are mitochondria, the powerhouse of our cells. With age, the number and function of mitochondria decrease. But it seems that it can be replenished by infusing mitochondria into the blood. There are companies that are now doing this.
Finally, the future of this field for me is the ability to take a young person in their 20s, give them a treatment and repeat it every few months or years to reverse their aging. We already know a way to partially reprogram our cells to think they are young again, and this method is already in preclinical research and even applied to humans.
Do you remember this? video that went viral where the leaders of China and Russia talked about longevity and how we can get organ transplants and live to be 150 years old? Well, that won't happen… but there is a company that takes organs and uses partial reprogramming to rejuvenate them. The big problem with organ transplantation is that we don't have enough organs, and many donor organs are discarded because they are too old and have other problems. This technology could make organ transplants much more accessible.
This article is part of TIME Longevity, an editorial platform dedicated to exploring how and why people live longer and what this means for individuals, institutions and the future of society. See other articles on this topic. Click here.
