JAD: Ready?

ROBERT: But what am I supposed to do? I don't have to do anything, right?

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And today we're talking about aging.

ROBERT: Yup.

JAD: Do you ever wonder why it is that human beings live like—well, how long do we live?

ROBERT: About 70-ish, something like that.

JAD: Roughly?

ROBERT: Something like that.

JAD: Yeah, so why 70?

ROBERT: As opposed to?

JAD: Seven? Or, like, 700? Why that number?

ROBERT: Well, that's—you know, that's a good question because apparently every creature has for some reason a sort of natural range. So you want to hear a very cool one? How about a rat. Got a rat in your head?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: [laughs] And a squirrel.

CYNTHIA KENYON: The rat and the squirrel. Here you have two animals people call—I have friends who call squirrels "tree rats."

ROBERT: That's Cynthia Kenyon from the University of California-San Francisco. I recently paid her a visit.

CYNTHIA KENYON: You know, they—so in other words they're very similar to each other. They're rodents. But a rat has a three-year lifespan, whereas a squirrel has a 25-year lifespan. And no one knows why really. There are theories, but no one really knows why. I got the idea that maybe somehow lifespan was evolvable in the sense that there might be genes in the animal which when changed allow big leaps in lifespan to take place.

ROBERT: So you figured you could just hunt the genes down?

CYNTHIA KENYON: Exactly.

ROBERT: And this is exactly what she seems to have done. But not with rats and squirrels.

JAD: With what?

CYNTHIA KENYON: Why don't I show you the incubator, where we keep all the worms?

ROBERT: With worms.

CYNTHIA KENYON: Come with me. Little round worms, yes. Called C. elegans. Actually, you can't see them with the naked eye. They're just a little speck, but when you put them under a microscope you see how beautiful they are. So first, I'm showing you here a normal worm when it's a young adult. and what you can see is it's very active, and it's healthy looking. It's moving around.

ROBERT: So we're looking at this dish, and in the dish is this worm moving back and—it's a wiggler.

CYNTHIA KENYON: Moves really nicely. Okay, now let's fast forward two weeks.

ROBERT: Then she showed us a different set of worms in a different dish. These worms were 13 days old.

CYNTHIA KENYON: Day 13 of adulthood.

ROBERT: They only live to 14, so ...

CYNTHIA KENYON: Just live two weeks.

ROBERT: They're at the very, very end of their lives.

CYNTHIA KENYON: And what we see here is a dead one, so one has already died. And another one that's clearly in the nursing home, just lying still, not moving at all. And you can tell immediately that it's old. It looks kind of wrinkled and lethargic, and even if you've never seen a worm ever, you can tell that one is old.

ROBERT: So there you have it. You have a young worm, you have an old worm, and essentially what Cynthia Kenyon is trying to do is she's trying to hunt down the gene that could turn that old worm backwards in time and make it look like a young worm.

CYNTHIA KENYON: The worms have about 20,000 genes. So the idea is really simple: you just go and change genes at random one by one.

ROBERT: One at a time.

CYNTHIA KENYON: And see whether any of these gene changes can extend lifespan.

ROBERT: How long did it take you to bump into a good one?

CYNTHIA KENYON: Well, we actually were really lucky to find a gene pretty quickly. And we found that if we change this one gene called DAF-2, if we change this one gene called DAF-2 then the worms live twice as long as they normally would.

ROBERT: Just like that. And pretty much by sheer luck, she'd taken this worm and stretched its lifespan from 14 days all the way out to about 28 days.

JAD: Just 28?

ROBERT: Yeah, it doesn't sound like a lot to you, but to a worm that's double!

ROBERT: Can you tell me—like, when you ran into it did you do, like, a little war dance around the lab? Were you ...

CYNTHIA KENYON: Yeah, it was amazing. I mean it was incredible. I had a person in my lab who said, "DAF-2 is magic." And she's right. Okay, I'm gonna show you these magic worms, which are exactly the same as the normal worms except that we've changed one gene, the DAF-2 gene.

ROBERT: So remember that old wrinkly worm that we saw before?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: The worm she's about to show me is the same age as a 13-day-old, really old worm ...

CYNTHIA KENYON: Okay, and it's bolting out of its—bolting into the picture here. It looks young, it's moving, it's very healthy, it's active. And actually, if you take a microscope and you look at the tissues, what you see is the tissues of the worm look young. If you just look at that, you just sit there and you just look at it and look at it and look at it, and just let it sink in what it means, it's really amazing. It's really very deep and fundamental. You're looking at something that I guess wasn't supposed to happen in some funny way. They were supposed to die.

JAD: So what exactly is this gene doing to make them live longer?

ROBERT: Well, maybe we should ask the question a different way, because the worms that lived longer, they didn't actually have this working gene.

CYNTHIA KENYON: Right. When we make a mutation in the DAF-2 gene we damage it. That actually causes it not to work as well. So that actually is kind of profound. That tells you right away that the worm has a gene in it that's shortening the worm's lifespan.

ROBERT: Which is why she calls it the grim reaper gene.

CYNTHIA KENYON: The grim reaper gene.

ROBERT: It's the gene that makes you die.

JAD: If you're a worm.

ROBERT: Right. So by damaging this gene, Cynthia and her team essentially are taking the Grim Reaper and knocking his knees out.

[Grim Reaper voiceover: Ow, no! Stop that! Ow!]

CYNTHIA KENYON: Okay, so the question is what exactly is the DAF-2 doing to make the cell age more quickly?

ROBERT: Here's where the story gets a little weird.

CYNTHIA KENYON: Well, we found another gene whose name is also DAF, but it's a different DAF. It's called DAF-16, and this is a gene whose normal function is to keep you young. It's like a fountain of youth gene.

JAD: So wait, there was a grim reaper gene before.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: And now there's a fountain of youth gene?

ROBERT: That's what she discovered. And inside the worms, these genes are struggling with each other. Here's how it works when a worm ages normally.

CYNTHIA KENYON: The DAF-2 receptor kind of squashes the activity of DAF-16. It turns it down.

[Grim Reaper voiceover: Silence!]

ROBERT: And so the worm ages.

CYNTHIA KENYON: Okay? So when you come along and you inhibit the activity of the DAF-2 receptor now you liberate DAF-16. It's free, it springs into action and it activates about 100 genes in the DNA. These 100 genes, each do a little tiny good thing for the cell, and altogether it makes the cell live twice as long.

ROBERT: So let me just back up here. So there's the bad gene, the gene that says "All right, everybody die." But the way that it tells everybody to die is it goes particularly over to this little guy over in the corner who's the good guy, who's repairing and protecting and fighting disease, and it says—it conks it on the head like some kind of Three Stooges thing and says, "You shut up!"

CYNTHIA KENYON: Exactly.

ROBERT: So if that good guy can stay vibrant, then we're in the ballgame for a little while longer.

CYNTHIA KENYON: Exactly. Very good. And you can get a lifespan that may increase, say, 100 percent like the one I mentioned. Even longer. Even threefold.

ROBERT: Threefold! How'd you do that?

CYNTHIA KENYON: Well, we found that the signals from the reproductive system affect aging, it turns out.

ROBERT: Kenyon and her team found that if you steal away some of the worm's baby-making powers, that alone makes them live longer. If you do that, and if you cripple the grim reaper gene, and if you strengthen the fountain of youth gene ...

CYNTHIA KENYON: The best possible change we knew how to make.

ROBERT: ... well, now we're talking!

CYNTHIA KENYON: We get incredibly healthy animals that are—live to be six times as long on average. Which would be like 500 years for a human. And they're so healthy it's incredible.

ROBERT: Five hundred! So that would be like Ben Franklin still being around playing golf.

CYNTHIA KENYON: It's—yeah, it just blows your mind to think about it. Which by the way, that doesn't mean it will ever be possible in humans.

ROBERT: Then why do we turn—why are we listening to this program? No, she kind of has to say that because she's a scientist. She doesn't know yet whether it affects us. On the other hand, she has started a company.

CYNTHIA KENYON: Yes, Elixir.

ROBERT: And the company is making a pill, and it's a pill for people, interestingly.

ROBERT: Have you any notion of how much you could slow down the process?

CYNTHIA KENYON: Well, we don't know. You know, we're just hoping that we can slow it down at all.

ROBERT: But just imagine!

CYNTHIA KENYON: Used to be people would talk about that, but it's the world of fairy tales and fantasy. And now it sort of reopens the quest for the fountain of youth in a new molecular way.

JAD: But wait a second, though. What happens if she, dare I say it, succeeds with this little pill of hers? Do we necessarily want a lot of 500-year-old golfers hanging around, you know, not getting out of the way?

ROBERT: Well, we're already there in some places in the world. In Germany and in Japan, the population of older people has grown to the point where you—if you're a middle-aged or a younger person, you feel the oppression of having so many people to support.

JAD: Well, can we talk about Japan for a second?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Japan might be a canary in the coal mine as it were. Sort of a glimpse of where we're all headed. Jocelyn Ford, a reporter, has been looking at aging societies in Asia, and recently took a trip back to Japan where she used to live to see how they're dealing with things.

JOCELYN FORD: When I arrived in Japan, it was immediately obvious that there was something different here. I went into the closest little town to the airport and there was a festival, a street festival going on. I thought, great. Went down the street, and what really surprised me is I think of street fairs and kids playing and, you know, "Let's go out with the family," but everyone sitting around listening to the music was—I mean, there were a lot of gray heads. I met a guy who was like 90 years old and he was on a bicycle. And when he cycled off I thought, "It's a different society."

HIRO OGAWA: Bottom line is this: in Japan, aging is very fast. The fastest ever in the entire world.

JOCELYN FORD: This guy banging the chalkboard?

JAD: Yeah?

JOCELYN FORD: That's Hiro Ogawa.

HIRO OGAWA: Hiro Ogawa. I'm a demographer at the Nihon University Population Research Institute.

JAD: Where is that, by the way?

JOCELYN FORD: Nihon.

JAD: Is that in Tokyo?

JOCELYN FORD: In Tokyo, yup. And he said that the reason that Japan looks so old all of a sudden is because, in part, people are living longer, but that's not the big reason. The big reason is that the birthrate is falling.

HIRO OGAWA: Look, I mean, Japanese population is shrinking.

JAD: They're not having as many kids?

JOCELYN FORD: That's exactly it. And this is something that's happening all over the developed world: people are having smaller families, and as a result, there are fewer young people, more older people.

HIRO OGAWA: Right now in fact, the proportion of the elderly, I mean 65 and over is more than 21 percent, which is the highest in the entire world.

JOCELYN FORD: 21 percent elderly. Can you imagine what that looks like?

JAD: No, help me.

JOCELYN FORD: Just think Florida. What do you think of when you think of Florida?

JAD: Florida. I think of beaches and I—well, that's where a lot of old folks go to retire, so I think it's a lot of you know, 70 and 80 year olds.

JOCELYN FORD: Florida is the oldest state in the United States, but compared to Japan it's young. It's only 17 percent over 65 and Japan is 21 percent.

JAD: Whoa!

JOCELYN FORD: So imagine that all of Japan looks like Florida—just older. And Ogawa expects that percentage to double in 40 years.

HIRO OGAWA: Right now I mean, we cannot really picture the future scenario, but it's gonna change.

JOCELYN FORD: Well, I got some insight into that change back at the street fair. I went to get some tea and rice crackers, and in that shop there was a 103-year-old granny. I tried to talk to her, but she couldn't really communicate. She didn't really know what was going on. Her daughter who's in her 60s is the main caretaker.

JAD: In her 60s. Wow.

JOCELYN FORD: In her 60s. And she has to—the granny can no longer get out of her wheelchair by herself. She can't take a bath. She's completely dependent on her daughter like a baby. But she's a lot heavier than a baby, and her daughter had really strained her back and hurt herself. I mean, it's the elder looking after the aged, basically. And that's probably the biggest—the biggest problem.

HIRO OGAWA: The problem is that the caregivers, the primary age of the caregivers is about 40s and 50s, so we are sort of short on caregivers.

JAD: That never occurred to me that from society's perspective, the reason kids are good, are useful, is so that they take care of the old people.

JOCELYN FORD: Yeah. A government spokesman I spoke with, Mr. Tamaguchi, he was quite concerned about that.

1. TAMAGUCHI: There's going to be a shortage of labor as society ages, and someone has got to fill the void.

JOCELYN FORD: In countries like the United States, we might import foreign labor.

JAD: Sure, yeah.

JOCELYN FORD: Bring in immigrants to care for the elderly, you know? But in Japan ...

1. TAMAGUCHI: It'll happen only reluctantly ...

JOCELYN FORD: ... it's not so simple.

1. TAMAGUCHI: ... because this society is still debating whether it's gonna be a good thing or not to increase the number of immigrants.

NISHIMURA YASUTOSHI: We have decided to open our labor market to some extent.

JOCELYN FORD: Nishimura Yasutoshi. He's another government spokesman.

NISHIMURA YASUTOSHI: First we start ...

JOCELYN FORD: He said the government has decided they can allow 100 Filipino caregivers to come into the country.

JAD: Just 100?

JOCELYN FORD: Just 100.

JAD: Huh.

JOCELYN FORD: I know what you're thinking.

JOCELYN FORD: Is it basically because Japan is xenophobic?

HIRO OGAWA: Well, let's put it this way: Japanese people tend to have this island concept. Having more international workers in our neighborhood might dilute that kind of tradition. I think that's what the Japanese people might be worried about.

JOCELYN FORD: What's wrong with that? Things change.

HIRO OGAWA: I think basically communication. Particularly when you're sick, I mean, when you're bedridden, if the nurses are foreigners you have to communicate and it's very difficult.

JOCELYN FORD: You know, some people might think that's xenophobic, that people don't want to deal with foreigners, but that's not really what it's about. People don't want to be a burden to anybody. They don't want to depend on anybody.

1. SUGA: I don't want to—how you say, burden?

JOCELYN FORD: This is Mr. Suga. He's a demographic researcher.

JOCELYN FORD: You just don't want to be a burden.

1. SUGA: No.

JOCELYN FORD: This feeling that you shouldn't be a burden, it runs very deep.

JOCELYN FORD: Physically, psychologically?

1. SUGA: Both of them. I just prefer I will be helped not by any other people.

JOCELYN FORD: Why is that?

1. SUGA: Just a feeling. It might cause problem with them, with other people.

JOCELYN FORD: So you'd be more comfortable knowing that you're not putting anyone else—causing them trouble?

1. SUGA: Yep. Yep. Yep. So if I would need some help from other people, I might want to kill myself.

JOCELYN FORD: That's how extreme it gets. This is a young man who's 30. He said, "I would rather commit suicide than be taken care of by somebody who doesn't want to take care of me, who—who I'd be a burden on."

1. SUGA: You know, there is a culture like 200-300 years ago in Japan. If the old woman is alive and you're, like, 70 years old, then the family take this old mother to a mountain and stay there, make the mother stay there.

JOCELYN FORD: There is a very long tradition in Japan of…They call it Ubasute.

JAD: Ubasute.

JOCELYN FORD: Ubasute. And 'Uba' means grandma, and 'sute' means to throw away.

JAD: You're serious.

JOCELYN FORD: They have whole movies about this in Japan. There's one called The Ballad of Narayama. It's set in a very poor, rural village about a hundred years ago. It tells the story of a son taking his old mother up the mountain. On the way up they pass by another son literally throwing his father off of a cliff.

1. SUGA: It makes a family happier.

JOCELYN FORD: So grandma stays in the mountain and starves to death.

1. SUGA: Yup. Yup.

JOCELYN FORD: And the family is happier because there's less of a burden.

1. SUGA: Right.

JOCELYN FORD: It was understood among all the generations that this is the way the problem was solved.

JAD: Not anymore, obviously.

JOCELYN FORD: Right. Right. Japan is really quite socialist these days, they look after everyone in society. But that idea is still out there. So what do you do today? You don't want your kids to take care of you, you don't want foreigners to take care of you. Who's left? One solution is instead of having people do these jobs, have machines.

JAD: Machines?

JOCELYN FORD: Robots.

JAD: Robots? [laughs] Are you joking?

HIRO OGAWA: It's not actually a joke. Panasonic and others are manufacturing robots as caregivers.

JOCELYN FORD: When you think about it, it sort of makes sense. Why don't we automate the heavy duty work?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Welcome to Miricon.]

JOCELYN FORD: I visited a bunch of labs and met with some scientists.

SCIENTIST: This robot is connected to here.

JOCELYN FORD: Can I ask what that is?

JOCELYN FORD: They've got robots that will ...

JOCELYN FORD: It looks like a dentist chair.

JOCELYN FORD: ... tell your wheelchair where to go.

JOCELYN FORD: I wonder how fast this is going?

JOCELYN FORD: There's a special pair of trousers that you can put on, and if your legs are weak and you can't walk, well, it will help you walk. There's a washing machine robot.

JOCELYN FORD: It looks like it's got a fancy handle.

JOCELYN FORD: It's actually for washing people.

JOCELYN FORD: Are any of these in actual use?

SCIENTIST: Yes they are.

JOCELYN FORD: People do not want to have to ask somebody to clean their diapers, to wash their bum.

JAD: Right.

JOCELYN FORD: I think for anybody in any society ...

JAD: Absolutely.

JOCELYN FORD: ... that is a difficult thing to have to ask somebody.

HIRO OGAWA: Robots help more. I mean you don't have to talk, you just press a button.

JOCELYN FORD: Now this is where I start to get weirded out [laughs]. I went to a nursing home about an hour and a half outside of Tokyo.

JOCELYN FORD: Big room with lots of people mostly sitting around. There's a television. About three people are watching the TV. One is looking out the window.

JOCELYN FORD: I walked in, and there were a lot of old people just sitting around, each keeping mostly to themselves, sitting very quietly, not talking. It was sort of sad. In steps PARO the seal. PARO is one of the world's first therapy robots. Get it?

JAD: No, what does that mean? [laughs]

JOCELYN FORD: [laughs] What they've done is they've made this sort of like a large stuffed animal—white, furry, long eyelashes. And it flutters them at you, and it squeals!

[PARO squeals.]

GRANDMOTHER: Konnichiwa!

JOCELYN FORD: When PARO came out, one of the grannies just lit up. Got so excited. She peered into the seal's eyes and she tried to talk to it.

SCIENTIST: She said "I'm happy to come to PARO." It's the same feeling of when her family comes here.

JOCELYN FORD: I was taken back. I mean, it's not much more than a moving stuffed animal. And how could you look at it and see company, see something alive, see something comforting?

JOCELYN FORD: It feels a little bit warm. Is PARO warm?

TAKANORI SHIBATA: Yes, PARO has a kind of temperature control.

JOCELYN FORD: I spoke to the developer, Mr. Shibata.

JOCELYN FORD: So you're warm-blooded, huh?

JOCELYN FORD: He said yeah, they wanted a creature that would give them positive feedback but also sort of needed them.

TAKANORI SHIBATA: For example, being stroked is good for PARO, so PARO tries to be stroked by the owner.

JOCELYN FORD: Like you're doing right now?

TAKANORI SHIBATA: Yeah.

JOCELYN FORD: Did you program him to want to be held?

TAKANORI SHIBATA: Yeah.

JOCELYN FORD: He also programmed him to respond to different names.

TAKANORI SHIBATA: Yeah. So for example, I call him PARO. If you give new name like John or something ...

JOCELYN FORD: Or like Kokochan.

GRANDMOTHER: Kokochan!

TAKANORI SHIBATA: ... and call the new name again ...

GRANDMOTHER: Kokochan! Kokochan!

TAKANORI SHIBATA: ... PARO gradually learns the new name and starts to respond.

GRANDMOTHER: Kokochan!

JAD: So it's learning?

JOCELYN FORD: Put you down carefully because we don't want to hurt you. Oh, you want to be held again, huh?

JOCELYN FORD: They learn from their environment. Now these are really rudimentary, you know, beginning baby robots. But it worked, Jad. It worked. They adored it. They were loving it, and it was loving them in their minds. I started to think maybe this is a solution. People might actually be able to engineer compassion and engineer companionship. But then I started asking a lot of people around me, took an informal straw poll: would you feel comfortable with a robot taking care of you? And most people said, "No, not really." Like this woman Kako Sugi. She actually came up with a brilliant idea which seems like a no-brainer. She has a nursing home which is together with a preschool.

KAKO SUGI: So I would like you to take a tour.

JOCELYN FORD: You walk into the room, and you are bombarded by these little bodies ...

JOCELYN FORD: Screaming and flying around and ...

JOCELYN FORD: The vitality ...

JOCELYN FORD: Man!

JOCELYN FORD: ... is just over the top. And it's infectious. You know, and if you're an old person in that environment, you have no time whatsoever to dwell on the idea that you are dying. The kids are—they demand your attention, they need you. They're needed again.

JAD: But—but the first thing that you told us at the very beginning was that there are more old folks, less kids. So what happens when these kids we're listening to right now, when they dwindle?

JOCELYN FORD: Mm-hmm.

JAD: There's just a bunch of old people around, and there's gonna be one kid left and they all go to visit that one kid. I mean that—that can't work.

JOCELYN FORD: You expect me to have an answer?

JAD: [laughs] I don't know.

JOCELYN FORD: Maybe we should import kids, I don't know!

JAD: No. I mean, you're joking obviously, but I guess what I'm asking is like, are we left at the end to think that a society cannot support all of its members getting old? That somehow the old have to step out of the way?

JOCELYN FORD: Jad I think your thinking is basically old fashioned.

JAD: [laughs]

JOCELYN FORD: There will be more old people and fewer young people. That's a fact. You're not gonna turn the clock back on this. Societies do change, people do come up with new ideas, and right now hey, they're stabbing in the dark after them. But one day they'll come up with a solution, so learn to deal with it.

JAD: Damn, you just bitch-slapped me!

JOCELYN FORD: [laughs] Well, what do you expect? You called me all the way across the Pacific Ocean, across a whole continent.

JAD: Whew! We gotta go to break now 'cause I gotta sort of pick up my ego here.

JOCELYN FORD: [laughs]

JAD: Radiolab will continue in a moment.

 

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