Tony Wyss-Coray studies the impact of aging on the human body and brain. In this eye-opening talk, he shares new research from his Stanford lab and other teams which shows that a solution for some of the less great aspects of old age might actually lie within us all.

.

Glossary

• eternal – lasting or existing forever; without end
• rejuvenate – make (someone or something) look or feel better, younger, or more vital
• intact – not damaged or impaired in any way; complete
• deteriorate – become progressively worse
• outlier – a person or thing situated away or detached from the main body or system
• soluble – (of a substance) able to be dissolved, especially in water
• dementia – a chronic or persistent disorder of the mental processes caused by brain disease or injury and marked by memory disorders, personality changes, and impaired reasoning

 .

Think about it

Answer the questions below.

• What is a fountain of youth? What beliefs have been associated with it?
• What kind of phenomenon has been observed in Siamese twins and mice sharing blood circulation?
• What happens to the brain at the age of about 60?
• What have you learned about blood as a tissue?
• What kind of prediction can be rather accurately made based on the research conducted by the speaker?
• What result did the study of mice with shared circulation yield?
• Did you, even for a second, consider becoming a vampire as you were watching this talk? :)
  

.

Practice makes perfect

Fill in the blank spaces with the missing words.

And then we take these top factors ________ I showed you, and we calculate their relative age, their biological age. And what you see ________ that there is a pretty good correlation, so we can pretty well predict the relative age of a person. But ________ is really exciting are the outliers, as they so often ________ in life. You can see here, the person I highlighted with the green dot is about 70 years ________ age but seems to have a biological age, if what we’re doing here is really true, of only about 45. So is this a person that actually looks much younger ________ their age? But more importantly: Is this a person who is maybe ________ a reduced risk to develop an age-related disease and will have a long life — will live to 100 or more? ________ the other hand, the person here, highlighted with the red dot, is not even 40, but ________ a biological age of 65. Is this a person at an increased risk of developing an age-related disease? So in our lab, we’re trying to understand these factors better, and many other groups are trying to understand, what are the true aging factors, and can we learn something ________ them to possibly predict age-related diseases?

.

Explore it more

(887)