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I just want to point out that Ray has a PhD in biology and biochemistry with a specialization in physiology from the University of Oregon. From '59 to the early '80s he taught courses in anthropology, biology, physics, nutrition, immunology, metabolism, and psychology at colleges in Oregon and Mexico. And he also conducts private nutritional counseling. He started his work with progesterone-related hormones in 1968. And I don't know if most people know that John Lee got his material from Ray Peat. His pot, not Crystal and Dr. Crystal's pot, but the work that John Lee proposed and that
most people have read has come from Ray. And as you probably know, Linus Pauling said, "If you're 10 years ahead of your time, you get a Nobel Prize, but if you're 15 years ahead of your time, you get called a quack." And unfortunately, Ray is 15 years ahead of his time, as is also shown with coconut oil, which 15 years ago he was promoting and everybody thought it was poison. And now every health food store has about six varieties of coconut oil and everybody's using it. But they didn't believe him 15 years ago.
So he's been working on both practical and theoretical aspects of the energy in the body's structure or independent at every level. Anyway, he says, "Marketing of products without understanding just what they do and why they do it seems to be adding confusion rather than understanding as hundreds of people sell their misconceptions with products. The very concept of marketing is at odds with the real nature of these materials, which has to do with protection and expansion of our nature and potential. The distorted idea of human nature is sold when people are treated as the market."
Anyway, I give you Ray Deaton. The reason I was late getting into biology, starting graduate school in 1968, even though I graduated from college in 1956, it was my first experience of biology classes in 1950 and '53 that made me think that biologists were sort of demanding or doing something completely anti-scientific. Because in the 1940s I had read people, for example Russian psychologists, in about 1948 I read an article that explained the distribution of chromosomes in the population. Forty-six chromosomes was the modal number, but there were perfectly healthy people who
had 47 or 45 and even some with two more or less. But usually the farther you were from 46 chromosomes the more likely you were to have some kind of a syndrome. But anyway, they looked at it statistically and 46 was very clearly the modal, most common number in the population and they looked at lots of people. But then two years later when I got into high school biology the textbook said humans simply have 48 chromosomes, period. And then in college biology, same thing, humans have 48 chromosomes, nothing but statistical variability.
It was 1956 before American biologists discovered that we have 46 chromosomes. And the textbooks never made a big thing about why they were eight years behind other relatively backward countries, backward economies in something that seems as simple as counting chromosomes. Anyway, when I graduated from college I had a very bright literature teacher, literature and humanities, so I decided that maybe the real understanding of the world could be by studying literature and philosophies. But when I got to university, this was in the peak of McCarthyism, the English department
was one of the basically most cowardly, closed off parts of the university. And I tried several different departments, the psychologists were the best people I could find at the university at that time. And so I almost majored in psychology but then I found that you had to believe in Watsonian behaviorism or at least Skinnerian behaviorism to get through the biology department. Consciousness was not a reality at that time and my professors actually explained why you don't need to use an anesthetic for circumcising babies because they're not conscious.
And the fact that they rise around and scream and turn red when they're being cut, that's just a reflex. Consciousness develops at the age of one and a half years when the myelin is completely deposited. And that's the time at which the brain stops growing. Brain cells multiply. At one time they said only up until the sixth month of gestation, then they gradually extended to a year and a half. But consciousness at that time was said, if there's such a thing as consciousness at all,
it doesn't begin until a baby is a year and a half old when there's no longer any division of brain cells. You remember at that time brain cells didn't reproduce, heart cells didn't reproduce. It was in 1990 when brain cells and heart cells were discovered to be able to reproduce even in adults. But one of the other people I read in the 1940s was Gelfi Polizhaev, a developmental scientist who had been demonstrating organ regeneration in the 30s and all through the 40s. And the brain cells and heart cells can be stimulated to regenerate.
The last ten years or so, the advent of cloning and stimulated regeneration in stem cells and so on, this is causing a lot of turmoil in the biological world. You don't get a sense in the newspapers of what this is doing to professors who have... Until Dali, I guess, there were still people who were saying Dali is impossible because in principle you can't clone an animal from a somatic cell. You can clone vegetables because they're different. But people were saying right into the 1990s it's impossible to clone an animal.
But a guy named Gurdon was cloning frogs and amphibians back in the 60s. That was impossible too because frogs are animals and animals can't be cloned from somatic cells. So there's this sort of underground fact in biology that the superstructure mainstream, the people that educate medical students, this reality is something very different from science. In the 1970s, all of my professors, I think I heard every one of them at some point say something like, "Today, 100,000 of my brain cells die." At that time it was 100,000 per day. Previously it was 10,000 per day.
In 1970, an article in Science took advantage of this background. All biology professors believing that their brains were dying massively every day of their life. And of the knowledge that people used to program computers by punching holes in cards, introducing information by punching out pieces of card. This article in Science explained memory and learning through the lifespan in terms of selective death of brain cells. If we're losing 100,000 brain cells every day, just think how this compares to a computer
where you can punch out hundreds of thousands of bits of information on each card that you put into the computer. This, I could name probably 20 completely insane ideas that were current in the biological community. For example, probably half of my biology professors at one time cited a study by August Weismann who in 1889 or 1890 cut the tails of 1,500 mice over a period of 22 mouse generations. And so this just proves Lamarckian and Darwinian inheritance or evolution of acquired traits.
Of course Lamarck, even when I was 8 and read this in an encyclopedia, it was obvious that Weismann was making propaganda because Lamarck said animals that strive and adapt and acquire new traits by this striking adaptation pass some of those traits on to the next generation. And Darwin, my parents had some books including Darwin's first editions that had the introductions like the Descent of Man had an introduction in which Darwin said people are saying that I base evolution on the Malthusian idea of the survival of the fittest and elimination of unfit and so on.
He said no, here are the things that I believe account for evolution. And he named the things that Lamarck and Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin was an evolutionist in the 18th century at the very end of the 18th century Erasmus Darwin was saying exactly the same things that Lamarck said that sexual selection and adaptation and inheritance of acquired traits. Darwin as slaves of the 1860s said you're distorting me, I agree with Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck on these points. But by the end of the century Weismann was typical of the social Darwinist said Malthus
had the right idea that weak people are eliminated and so the human species is improved by misery, poverty, disease and war are improving the human species. A literary critic wrote that he had seen evidence that the king hired Malthus specifically to help put down the revolutionary spirit because the monarchy was realizing that they were in danger because people were impoverished, diseased and hating to be killed in pointless wars so he had Malthus say it's good to suffer poverty, disease and war are creative, they eliminate the bad stuff.
And this is Weismann's mouse tail experiment was just one wildly propagandistic thing that he did to knock down Darwin and Lamarck. His main work was counting chromosomes even though he had such bad vision that he couldn't use a microscope. In 1890 he determined that the development of an individual from an ovum is possible because the genetic material such as Mendel identified, the genetic material is all there in the ovum and when that fertilized egg divides each of the subsequent divisions loses some genetic information and obviously you couldn't clone from a somatic cell because not all
of the genetic information is there so he said the germline is immortal, the body, the soma is mortal and he said each time you differentiate to a new tissue or organ that's because you've lost some of the genetic information that was in the ovum and remember this was 60 years before Americans learned to even count the average number of chromosomes in people. A guy who couldn't use the microscope because of bad eyes created the doctrine of the deletion of information to explain the expansion of complexity from a fertilized egg to an adult organism.
Weissman said that since the body is mortal it doesn't have everything it needs to create itself if you take only one part so it's going to wear out, the wear and tear theory started there at the same time, that the mortal tissues of the body aren't all there and they're eventually just going to wear out. Programmed aging essentially derives from this idea of the deletion of information. The whole trend of 20th century biology was building on this idea of increasing complexity
by deleting information and so the guy that said learning is because our brain is dying it was exactly analogous to Weissman's, the organism develops because it loses information and in the 50s there were people who said that you can x-ray bacteria and cause them to mutate into new forms by destroying their genes with x-rays. This was as weird as it seems, bacteria that had lost their genetic information were said to have given rise to the next higher complexity in evolution and all of the phyla of complex
organisms were believed by the Weissman principle to have derived from bacteria that had lost information. That picture of progress through loss I think traces back to the time that Erasmus Darwin he had a slogan painted on the side of his carriage, from seashells everything comes, the Latin phrase, but that got him in trouble so he had it painted out fairly quickly because people realised that evolution was contrary to the creationist doctrine and for example well into the 19th century to graduate or even to study at British universities you
had to essentially sign a loyalty oath that you believed all of the tenants of the Church of England, people like Shelley were not welcome at the English universities and earlier censorship was tightening up all through the 18th century and people like Darwin instead of writing scientific treatises about evolution as Lamarck did in France which was relatively loose, Darwin wrote a poem about the nature of life and put his ideas of acquired adaptive and sexual selection creating evolutionary progress. The deists remember didn't want to deal with church officials entering for example the
investment market and saying that God can intervene at any time to have anything secure, the deists wanted a sort of mechanical clockwork universe that was predictable so that they could start projects and have confidence that they could finish them without God intervening and so they said God was like a clockmaker who started the world running and he was such a perfect creator that he made it so that it would run all by itself forever but it was like a clock that he was winding up and setting in motion and then staying out of
it so that physicists and engineers and anyone could count on certain reliability in the world but as people started working on steam engines and understanding what happens to the energy and the fuel, the laws of thermodynamics were eventually extracted from understanding how steam engines work and they said well the nature of reality is that everything is running down in a closed system, it can't do anything but run down and so physics was set on the same kind of path that nothing can be added to the world because that's God's
province, the only thing that can be done to the world is for it to get poorer, losing information or losing organization, losing energy, difference, gaining entropy. I think this historical picture accounts for why biologists at the time I was first taking biology courses, why they could believe such impossible to believe things. In studying literature the only person that really appealed to me in English literature was William Blake who in many different places he had physiological descriptions, for example the number of nerves
in the optic nerve, his count was closer than any count until the electron microscope was developed about 180 years later or so. Blake described evolution which obviously he was getting these ideas from the culture. Erasmus Darwin was contemporary with Blake and was a very famous intellectual and so there was this oral culture in London and other big cities in which advanced 200 year advanced ideas in physiology, biology, evolution, development. For example at the same time I think it was from Swedenborg, the religious leader who
was also an engineer and biological experimenter, Swedenborg I think is where Blake got the idea that showed up in his books that the nerves develop and invade the other tissues. This wasn't demonstrated until I think 1911 how the embryo innervates the tissues, the nerves come from the top and go down into the various tissues and at a late stage of development innervate the muscles and skin and so on. Remember Malthus was not censored but everyone who had an alternative idea of what's going on in society and evolution was
likely to get hanged if they were too blatant in their description of things the king didn't like and Blake was tried for treason for sedition in 1804 and after that he was much more circumspect in the way he described his evolutionary and physiological ideas. They became very hard to interpret but that was the general situation. There was this amazingly rich scientific culture that was like a piece of the 20th century set there in 18th century London and people
that did get published like Malthus were the people who were put up to the task for a political reason. When contemporary textbooks write the history of their science they look at who got published and physicists and engineers and biologists who held the right ideas were the ones that got published but the really good ideas were things that people talked about in secret. So the idea of being ahead of your time is really more like being under your time because there's this 200 years of more or less contemporary thinking. Other
people that I read in the 1940s in the time that I was 8 to 12 years old or so, J.C. Bowes was one of the interesting people who around 1900 had been very popular and exciting as a physics researcher and a biological researcher and a radio researcher in England. But after two or three of his lectures people started thinking about the meaning that he was showing crystals and metals and vegetables and animals all had sensitivity and reactivity and you could fatigue a piece of metal for example and let it rest and it would recover just
the same way a fatigued muscle recovers. And when the British biologists started realizing the implications of what Bowes was saying they went back to a more abstract kind of biology and he didn't give any more seminars. He went back to India and Marconi sent his man to try to get Bowes to be involved in the Marconi radio company because Bowes had invented the sensor for radio detection. Ordinary sensors at that time had a, the sensor would pass a current which would turn a current into a bell that would ring the bell and activate
a hammer that would knock the sensor back into a starting position. So they were sort of like a Rube Goldberg apparatus. You could only detect a signal as fast as your hammer could resensitize the thing. Bowes by understanding the fatigue ability and recoverability of material used metal particles and mercury coatings and pressure and such so that he could tune up his radio sensor and it would spontaneously recover its sensitivity so you could keep sending a signal and do practical radio communication. And that was one of the
devices. If you used it too much, too fast, too long, it lost sensitivity just the way an overworked muscle or brain loses sensitivity. So you would let it rest and then it would come back and work like a fresh one just like resting your brain and muscle. And one of my next newsletters is going to be on this idea of fatigue and what it has to do with inflammation, excitation and eventually damage to the tissue and atrophy of the tissue. And
as far as I know the people at Polar Giaf, they didn't make any special reference or connection to J.C. Bowes but these ideas of material substance being sensitive and responsive the same way living substance is, these were in the culture and A.I. Oprin who is considered one of the founders of the study of the origin of life, 1924 I think Oprin's book was, which explained a jelly conception of the origin of life, that organic materials would coalesce spontaneously and Oprin got his ideas from this Belgian, Bungenberg de Jong who wrote
in 1922 a book on, he called it complex coacervation which is like a colloid that reestablishes new equilibria until you get several phases that are all stable with one another. Some of them love oily materials, some that are more water loving. But Oprin and Bungenberg de Jong were the pioneers of the gel conception of cytoplasm even though there were people who realized that the cytoplasm is a gel and that the membrane isn't a necessary component, these people did the thinking and the experimenting that showed how a gel can establish itself,
remain in equilibrium, have preference for certain types of material that will dissolve oily materials preferentially over watery materials and that certain salts will be concentrated just passively, just in the physical arrangement of materials without any pumps or energy being involved at that stage. Le Chatelier was another contemporary, Vernadsky the Russian went around the world, he hoped to get an appointment in the United States but no one wanted to have a geobiologist or a biogeologist on their faculty so he was mostly working in France
and Russia and he recognized in Le Chatelier's principle which chemists all know about but don't really apply it very far, Le Chatelier's principle is that when you disturb a system of substance, the substance responds so as to reduce the stress. Vernadsky showed that any energy impinging on any substance creates order of a certain kind depending on the nature of the energy impinging on the substance so sunlight running through air or sea water whatever organizes that in a certain way and the energy by Le Chatelier's principle minimizes
the disturbance. So a continuous flow of energy is going to continuously restructure and reorganize adding information to the system when you flow energy through any substance that has any capacity for memory it's going to remember that now this is the second passage of energy so it's never the same as the first passage the substance remembers by changing its structure. Water in the 1930s and 40s water was already being realized to have its intrinsic memory and have long range ordering processes that made water near a surface different from the
water at a great distance from a surface and the water that had been near a surface will remember some of that structuring effect that it had. For example, where a body of water or a drop meets the air it forms a film that's tough enough for a bug to walk on. That's the sort of structuring that happens anytime something different is introduced into the water. Bernadsky by applying this principle showed that all substance is especially wet gelatinous substances are able to store experience or store the record of energy that's passed
through them. A lot of people were thinking about the origin of life in terms of a warm soup is how a lot of American biologists described it. Sidney Fox who was a student of Oprins and understood De Jong's work, he suggested that maybe life didn't start in the soup. He thought possibly condensing amino acids formed in clouds or wherever might have condensed on the hot volcanic rocks. So he just threw some powdered amino acids on hot volcanic rocks and sprinkled a little bit of water just enough to make a very viscous gel. Then
he scraped the stuff up an hour or two hours later and put it in water and looked at it under the microscope and it had formed something much more specific than the complex coacervates that Bungenberg, De Jong had studied. Sidney Fox's mixture of amino acids had spontaneously and almost immediately formed little bacteria-like particles of very uniform size and shape. When he added amino acids to the watery solution that these were floating in, the things would grow incorporating amino acids into their structure and even produce offspring. They
would reach a certain size and a bud would form. In the absence of water, slightly moist hot amino acids polymerize spontaneously into proteins and those proteins spontaneously form little bacteria-like particles that break up. Following the coacervation principle, they are more stable at a certain small size and those then, the proteins that make up those particles can catalyze reactions incorporating new amino acids in the new proteins allowing them to grow. So in an hour or two, Sidney Fox demonstrated something very much like
the origin of life that Oprin and Bungenberg, De Jong had just postulated as possible. Sidney Fox demonstrated real growing organism-like things with real proteins spontaneously synthesized. The inflammatory process that causes atrophy and inflammation, tumor formation, aging, tissue loss and so on, this is structurally just like fatigue. If you start thinking of the living stuff as substance rather than information, then you imagine you're a chemist or an engineer with a gob of stuff to analyze. You look at it under different conditions of temperature and pressure and saltiness and wetness, the amount of water versus salt.
When you look at the living organism or at its cells in this way as substance, everything gets infinitely simpler. When you look at it from the Weissman influenced kind of biology, you have the God created infinitely complex genome which is being torn down to create the various structures. But it's essentially an infinitely complex process that it's so complicated that you can't calculate it. But when you look at it from Vernadsky's, LeChantelier's and Sidney Fox's perspective, you see that physical processes influence the behavior.
When you look at any condition such as dementia, cancer, arthritis, epilepsy, paralysis, migraines, emphysema, all of these are physical processes as well as biological processes. A common feature that they have is that the cells get too wet. The gel that's put into a watery solution without enough salt or sugar or things dissolved in water swells up and can eventually decompose just from getting too wet. All of the fatiguing, inflaming, tumor forming, atrophy producing biological processes involve this accumulation of water out of control. The
gel is no longer in control and excluding watery stuff. The gel is forced to take up too much water and along with the water it tends to take up random amounts of protein and fat and salts that shouldn't be there. For example, the healthy cell excludes calcium and takes up magnesium. If you immerse it in too much water without enough sodium, that alone will cause the cell to take up calcium and the calcium and the water excite the cell. So for example, to apply this to epilepsy, if you make a person drink too much plain
water it can bring on a seizure. Another way that neurologists can test for epilepsy, they used to do this, actually have a person drink a pint of water and if they had a seizure that proved they had epilepsy. Or they would have them hyperventilate and if they had a seizure from hyperventilating that proved they had epilepsy. When you hyperventilate you reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood. That allows water from the blood to move out into the cells such as the brain cells causing them to swell, get excited and
in the case of epilepsy it can cause a seizure or in other situations it can cause cramping pain. Are there any questions or comments up to this point? I wanted to back up way in the beginning when you were talking about William Blake. A lot of what William Blake wrote was poetry and what I got from his readings back in medical school, he was profoundly religious. Was that a cover or was that him? Yeah, he referred to God as Old Novadanny Aloft. But all his illustrations are profoundly religious. Yeah, he was...
Like I've been doing this for ages. Yeah, he came from a sect that used language in a particular way and when you look at the conflicts between two different poems, one where he's sounding like an atheist, ridiculing a beastly cruel God, he basically says that doesn't exist, that only God is man-like. So he was a humanist speaking a very old-fashioned religious language. Could you make some analogies as to what could be happening today? I mean, I go for instance the drug companies, the FDA, and they really suppress knowledge.
Yeah, I'm trying to avoid taking any genetics courses. I think I did take one, but I read the textbooks they were using in other genetics courses and one of them was called Classical Papers in Genetics. And I read that just to see what they considered their history to be. Were there some really good genetics ideas that were apart from this Weizmann mental organ religion? And all of the papers in that book of classical papers that supposedly are the foundation of modern genetics, all of them said these data are consistent with the
idea that there was no confirmation of an idea, it was simply it could happen. And that's surprisingly how science has been working in the 20th century, consistent with not disprove all of the alternatives and leave something that is very convincing. But basically just saying it could happen in line with this evidence. And often the conclusion in magazine science, the conclusions often have nothing to do with the data except the editor didn't read the paper. Could you talk a little bit about hydration effects that are involved with let's say blood
hydration versus extracellular hydration, intracellular hydration also and how hydration may relate to developmental cycles in terms of gestation and the evolution of organs? At an early stage when the cells are growing fast like the fertilized ovum and early cell divisions, they're about 92% water. And in an old organism the water content gets way down to 70% or something like that. In 1920 someone found that just putting cells in a hypotonic solution forced mitosis to start. So when the cell is rapidly dividing and forming
a new organism, the high content of water stimulates a certain kind of activity that in the context creates increased mass and complexity. And when the organism is mature and doesn't want tumors popping up everywhere, the body fluids, cells, intracellular and extracellular are relatively dehydrated. But you can stimulate regeneration just by increasing the moistness. In the 1950s some magazine described someone who had the end of their finger cut off at the base of the fingernail and they kept it sealed and moist and found
the finger regenerated. Remembering that 20 or 30 years later, I knew two people, a little kid who cut off the end of his finger the same way, right at the base of the nail and a carpenter who sawed off the end of his finger. And both the kid's mother put his finger in a ballpoint pen case so it was not touching anything but the atmosphere was sealed around it and the carpenter used a cigar, an aluminum cigar tube to put over his finger. And they
now both have perfect normal length fingers. The fingernail looks perfect even though there was no fingernail visible after they cut it off. So adults can regenerate nicely formed tissue in a very visible way, bone and skin, everything takes on a normal shape. When the conditions are right, I think besides the humidity, the carbon dioxide that's kept present in equilibrium with the metabolizing tissue, I think the carbon dioxide is a factor that prevents it going wild in the mirror scar formation or tumor formation. And I think
that's the main function of carbon dioxide is when sugar is fully metabolized it all turns into carbon dioxide and the carbon dioxide can, but doesn't necessarily, can be turned into carbonic acid by combining with water. And so sugar constantly streaming into the cell means that water and carbon dioxide are going to be constantly streaming out of the cell. And just in terms of binding with water and leaving the cell, that's one way that carbon dioxide as it's formed tends to remove water from a certain compartment. But carbon
dioxide in itself is acidic before it forms carbonic acid. And this is another thing where the mainstream culture talks about hydrogen ions as how you conceive acidity. The whole way of talking about it is typically in terms of the concentration of hydrogen ions, that's what pH means. But the real theory of acidity is just the opposite. It's the binding of electrons rather than the releasing of protons or hydrogen ions. And Lewis was the person who explained the correct general theory of acidity and so these are called Lewis acids.
And a Lewis acid doesn't necessarily contain any hydrogen or protons so there's no pH involved but it still has all the properties of acidity because it is binding electrons and when you bind electrons you tend to liberate protons anyway. And carbon dioxide then in itself when it binds to a protein is acidifying the protein just by pulling electrons away from the protein. And when you acidify a gel, the gel being acidic proteins, most all biological gels and most gels in general are made with acid polymers. If you acidify a gel it tends
to contract and if you add alkali to it, it expands and swells. And so the acidifying function of carbon dioxide tends to squeeze water out of the cells just like what the carbon dioxide is doing to the proteins. And so carbon dioxide is a stabilizing and shaping factor. Is there any difference in this effect between sugar as a fuel and fat as a fuel? Yeah, sugar makes more carbon dioxide per unit of energy and at high altitude or in the presence of an atmosphere enriched with carbon dioxide, the cells ability to resist
fatigue, fatigue being seen as the same as inflammation, swelling, uptake of too much water. In the presence of extra carbon dioxide or at high altitude where there is less oxygen pressure so you retain the carbon dioxide that your tissues produce because it isn't being competed against by the excess of atmospheric oxygen. At high altitude you retain your own carbon dioxide as if you had an enriched atmosphere of carbon dioxide. At high altitude or in the presence of carbon dioxide you can work harder and longer without getting fatigued.
And I think that's entirely the effect of carbon dioxide on the water but there are effects on the ATP too. The equation for making ATP is to dehydrate the precursors and when you destroy ATP by de-energizing it you add water, hydrolyze it. And if you look at the equation if you could just pull water molecules out of the environment ATP would spontaneously form and it wouldn't take any fancy machinery. Just dehydrating a compartment should cause spontaneous phosphorylation. And I think carbon dioxide by its effect on gel and by taking
water out in the form of carbonic acid, I think that's how the carbon dioxide contributes to raising the energy and endurance of cells. At high altitudes in Nepal there was a study of I think it was 67,000 households looking for different diseases. They didn't find any cases of Alzheimer's or other dementias and they were extremely deficient in brain diseases in general. But the absence of aging dementia was remarkable and that's something that's been known for over 100 years that high altitude populations are very resistant to the diseases
of aging, cancer and heart disease for example. In New Mexico alone which is a relatively small population but the figures are very clear that for every I think it's 1500 feet you get a 5 or 10% reduction in mortality from heart disease. Same with cancer around the world. Insurance companies have known that cancer is relatively scarce in Nepal and Bolivia and all of the high altitude places. Well carbon dioxide is retained, it has an antioxidant function. There's less oxygen but the carbon dioxide is, I think carbon
dioxide is really what oxygen is being used for. It undergoes chemical reactions but the production of carbon dioxide I think is what really creates the structure of the cell, maintains the gel in the living state and makes the energy hard to deplete. Just all kinds of muscle and nerve tests, grip strength is stronger at high altitude even though the oxygen is lower. It's an example of the toxicity of oxygen or the anti-toxicity of carbon dioxide. It's tending to damage their lungs and make their emphysema worse. I think it's a similar thing to altitude sickness.
Many places are still treating altitude sickness with oxygen but someone noticed that a device they were taking up on Mount Everest, a plastic bag that they would put the sick person in, zip it in and blow it up with oxygen. They would get better recover from the mountain sickness but someone analyzed the error and they were concentrating their own carbon dioxide in this plastic bag and so someone tested just having them breathe carbon dioxide at high altitude and it worked.
I think that's related to the fact that aging involves a plugging up of all kinds of sensitive points on macromolecules in the cell. Glycation is something that is identified with diabetes and Alzheimer's disease and so on. It means the attachment of sugar like fragments to proteins and especially to receptors or sensitive points in the cell, regulatory points. That happens, they call it glycation as if it's caused by glucose but actually the oxidized products of polyunsaturated fatty acids are many times more active in causing glycation.
And the glycation happens mainly on lysine amino groups of proteins but you can glycate any molecule that has an amino group and that pretty well inactivates it. But the normal function of a good concentration of carbon dioxide is to bind to lysine groups in hemoglobin, that's how oxygen is released in the tissues where you need it because carbon dioxide comes out of the cells, binds to the lysine forming a carb amino group on the hemoglobin, acidifying the hemoglobin and making the oxygen available for the cell to get. Then when you get in
the lungs with a high oxygen concentration, the oxygen displaces the carbon dioxide. But the carbon dioxide binds that way to insulin receptors, nerve receptors, anything that has a lysine group, carbon dioxide is normally there protecting it and acidifying it and stabilizing the structure in the sensitive position or condition. And so just hyperventilating I think is contributing to the aging process in which things tend to get glued together by glycation. So do you know if anybody's ever measured this competing effect between carbon dioxide interfering with glycation reactions and the fact that glycation reactions themselves are
dehydrations and therefore would be enhanced by a drier environment? Therefore you predict that they would go the other direction in terms of aging itself becoming dehydrated? Well I think some of the dehydration with aging is a normal defensive process. In extracts of tissue, slices and cell cultures and whole animals and organ treatments, if you inject a hypertonic solution, which remember the hypotonic causes tissue swelling, excitation, inflammation. The hypertonic solution like sea water instead of isotonic saline so-called, sea water is about seven times stronger than the salt solution of the blood or even ten
times stronger. But a lot of hospitals are using the concentration of sea water, seven times normal strength to revive people and it works better than isotonic saline. And in the individual cells and tissue cultures and so on, it has an antioxidant effect, it protects against oxidation, free radical damage. All kinds of damage are protected by not just concentrated salt, sodium chloride, but concentrated sugar and urea have similar effects in protecting cells. So I think the dehydration of the fluids with aging, part of that is a defensive reaction
reaction. During a seminar once in 1991, one of my professors said, you know I read, unlike the other people at the university, he said, do you think that is true that all of these tissues, different tissues of the organism are isotonic with the blood? And so I went down and in about an hour found an experiment which took out very fresh snips of tissue and dropped them in isotonic double concentration, triple concentration and so on solutions and found that most tissues from an adult organism are stable only at about a triple osmolarity,
two or three times more concentrated than the blood stream. And so there seems to be something special about the blood that makes us able to handle it at the isotonic but hypotonic to our functioning tissue cells. And I think that's a barrier of fibrin, largely fibrin on the inside of capillaries, interacting with the movement of carbon dioxide out of the cells. Did you have a comment? Is there any relation between your comment on the story that high altitude populations age slowly and the fact that writers from Kenya and Ethiopia sent world directors on
a regular basis and also is there any relation between that and caloric restriction slowing the aging process? Yeah, caloric restriction reduces the amount of damage to the mitochondria and energy produced by the producing system so that the cells are actually metabolizing at a higher rate than animals that are eating lots of vegetables and such. The toxins from a freely chosen diet quickly slow down the metabolic rate and in calves which are born with very saturated brains because they're basically getting butterfat incorporated into their brains rather than
vegetable oil. Their mitochondria slow down in proportion to the linoleic acid getting incorporated into the mitochondria in the cardiolipin that regulates the mitochondrial energy production. And there's a paper you can find on the internet called "Uncoupled and Surviving" it's about a mouse that is naturally very hyper metabolic, burns energy at a tremendous rate and lives much, much longer than ordinary mice. And that's the general rule that the high metabolizers live longer than the low metabolizers and they tend to have bigger brains. The biggest fossil brain skull ever found was on Mount Kilimanjaro
and I've always thought that that was probably a combination of some kind of a good diet plus the high altitude because when you do the opposite, when you increase the oxygen tension or do any of these things such as disturbing the amount of water the tissue can handle, the brain gets smaller. Radiation causes the tissue to swell and take up water and the chronic effect is to cause the offspring to have smaller brains. So I think all of these things, polyunsaturated fatty acids, radiation, estrogen and too much oxygen are
all doing exactly the same thing which is over exciting the tissue and keeping it from going along the normal path of complexification and adaptive complexity. I've always thought Heraclitus had something when he said dry souls are best. Heraclitus, the Greek guy that said you can't step in the same river twice, he also said dry souls are best. What's that? When I went to graduate school I was intending to become a nerve biologist primarily and the professor would refer us to articles in journals that seemed pretty irrelevant to
the actual problem it was supposed to be solving. But I would look through the same journal and found that there were articles published the same year that were much better solutions than the professor had referred us to. And eventually over a period of three or four weeks, first term in graduate school, I saw that Gilbert Ling was turning up more and more often as a person who had solved the problems that were being not solved by the conventional mainline biologists. So I wrote to him and he answered nicely and said you
just don't understand what science is. Science is about money and prestige and power. And he's the one that developed the glass microelectrode which used to be called the Ling-Gerard microelectrode. And he not only developed it but he decided that it wasn't measuring the membrane potential which everyone since him has claimed that it does. He says there is no membrane potential. In my lab with that same nerve biologist, I was using a Ling electrode in a muscle cell on an oscilloscope and with a micro manipulator I would move it into the cell and back different
places in the cell. And a professor came by and was watching what I was doing and I said look each place in the cell has its own distinct electrical potential. And he turned so fast he couldn't look at the evidence because if there is a membrane which is creating the potential everything inside is a dilute solution. You can't have regional potentials. But Gilbert Ling explains why a cell is analogous to a water softener which retains ions passively doesn't expend energy to do that. You can take hair, clean all of the ions out of it
and dip it into blood serum and it will take up magnesium and potassium just like a living cell. But people are still talking about membrane pumps and at Gilbert Ling's site on the internet at gilbertling.org you can read a lot of his papers on how basically silly and corrupt mainline biology and medicine are. He is following up on A.S. Troshin who was more or less a contemporary of Gilbert Ling who wrote a very good book. You can find it in one of the big science libraries here on the behavior of ions in cells.
Did you go back to VH how should one measure VH then? A guy named VH at the National Institute of Alcoholism, one of the national institutes, has demonstrated that we can use NMR to measure intracellular pH distinct from the extracellular. He was the first one I know of who demonstrated that tumors have higher intracellular pH. It's the extracellular acidity that lactic acid causes but the tumor itself intracellularly is excited and alkaline relative to normal cells. And excitation of any sort will eventually
produce an alkaline field around the nerve of the muscle as well as swelling. It's just like any gel that gets alkaline will swell up. Is it necessary to make the body alkaline if it's acidic? How does one determine that? Well acid basically is protective as long as it's involving carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is oil soluble and if you added 1% or so to the air here we would add it to our blood and soft tissues it would concentrate inside cells more than in the water. But it would
go on increasing for months at just breathing the same concentration. It finally builds itself into the bones, strengthens the bones as calcium carbonate before the calcium phosphates form. So we're as if we've been deprived of carbon dioxide chronically and I think that's one of the things that causes the tendency to inflame and tumify and atrophy with aging. Does the carbon dioxide help osteoporosis? Yeah. And that's how vitamin K works. Vitamin K activates carbon dioxide and helps to integrate it into the bones. So we should all walk around with a bag over our heads?
Yeah. I have an osteoporosis bonding bag for watching television. Are you contradicting Anderlin's theory of morphism as to if the body becomes more acidic all these inoculant protids or whatever your name would be for it normal down around the verouse clock into these viruses, bacteria, fungus and then cancer? The carbon dioxide, while it acidifies inside cells and stabilizes them, it's regulating, it's hauling calcium outside cells and helping to deposit it in the bones or send things out the kidneys. Its ability to combine with water and become a counter ion to metals accounts
for I think all of the so-called active transport of metals, the active streaming of metals out of cells or in the cells that people used the idea of pumps to account for those kidney movements and so on. Gilbert Ling several times has calculated that the cell just to operate one or two of its pumps would need 15 times more energy than it could possibly derive from the energy available as food and oxygen. But the blood is alkaline because of the movement of carbon dioxide keeping the alkaline metals in motion.
About 30 years ago I was thinking about this carbon dioxide thing and I had mentioned how it regulates brain circulation to one of my nutrition classes and the next week I had said soda, meaning soda pop as a carbon dioxide source, but next week a girl said that she had given her paralyzed mother who was hemiplegic from a stroke, six months she had been half paralyzed, she gave her a spoonful of baking soda and a glass of water and in 15 minutes
the paralysis lifted. So then I started trying it every time I heard of someone who had a stroke. Recently in Mexico a guy had been basically just a blob on his bed for three weeks after a stroke and a guy gave him a spoonful of baking soda and a glass of water and within a few minutes he could move his hand and the next day he could walk across the room, but not very well. And dementia, I think I told you before about the woman
who had had epilepsy for 20 years, 15 or 20 years, and her neurologist had documented her IQ decline, that was all he did on his annual checkups, and said she must not go out of the house by herself, she was so demented she couldn't find her way home. And she took progesterone and three or four days later she came back all by herself and she was recovered and able to do everything on her own. She went to graduate school and got her master's
degree in three days and she met her doctor. I tried to get her to go back and talk to him, but in general these people who have these sudden total recoveries embarrass their doctors I think. A guy with Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS, he had a doctor that said he would work with him, but that involved just watching him rather than actually participating in prescribing. But anyway this guy was declining along with the other patients in the waiting room that he saw every week. And when he started using niacin, progesterone, light on his head
for a couple hours every day, just infrared, a clear light bulb. Anyway he, after a few months of declining, started improving. I think it was six or eight months after he started he sent his toilet equipment, wheelchair and all those things back to the store and showed off that he could do leg lifts and went back to work at his company and had no problem with Lou Gehrig's disease. And baking soda and salt and sugar is another thing. Sugar stops the excitotoxic process. It works with niacin to stop the lipolysis that produces
the fatty acids that activate the excitotoxic process. And so sugar and salt and baking soda and breathing in a paper bag and getting a lot of light and taking thyroid and progesterone. The only thing wrong with it is that some of the people recover so fast that no one believes they could have been terminal. >> Would you talk more about the red line? >> Okay, at a hardware store or a chicken store you can get these things called infrared light bulbs. They have a cone shaped aluminumized reflector and a clear front and they cost
about three dollars. And they just run, they're designed to run at 130 some volts and so at 120 volts they put out a lot of infrared and red light compared to ordinary incandescent bulbs. And that's good enough. It saves thirty, what, thirty-eight hundred dollars cheaper than a laser. >> What does the cone shape look like? >> That's just the reflector. >> Reflector flood. >> Yeah, floodlight. >> Could you talk about coconut oil? >> Yeah, coconut oil is anti-inflammatory. If you look up, if you put EFAD, essential
fatty acid deficiency, into PubMed and do a search, you'll find that animals that are deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids, who have none of those fats in their diet, are hard to kill with endotoxin or mechanical trauma or a variety of poisons. They don't get arthritis or inflammatory diseases from the normal causes. So coconut oil and butter and the waxes from sugar cane and beeswax are being used for the same protective anti-inflammatory effect. The fats that we make based on palmitic acid, which is found
in butter and coconut oil, these are anti-inflammatory things. The mead acid and this derivative are powerfully anti-inflammatory. And when we eat vegetables and vegetable oils, we stop making these anti-inflammatory substances and instead make the prostaglandins and inflammatory things. And one of the differences between palmitic acid and linoleic acid is, besides their effect pro- and anti-thyroid and pro- and anti-testosterone and progesterone and so on, the cell tends to take up more water when it has polyunsaturated fats, just because the double bond tends to associate with water more easily than the purely hydrocarbon saturated fatty acid.
[audience member asks question] Full spectrum does stimulate, for example the ultraviolet stimulates your production of vitamin D, but ultraviolet and blue light are both toxic, for example to the retina. Blue light is destructive to the retina and one of the main things that causes blue light and ultraviolet light to be toxic are the polyunsaturated fatty acids, because they react with high energy radiation. [audience member asks question] Gail and Tom Brewer, man and wife couple, wrote a book on what every pregnant woman should know about nutrition or something like that. And he had two associates, Shanklin
and Hoden, who wrote a book more technical than the Brewer's wrote, about the importance of salt in preventing high blood pressure in pregnant women. Salt restriction is pretty sure to cause hypertension in pregnancy. And so I made the analogy between premenstrual syndrome and pregnancy and suggested that women who swell up before their period try eating as much salt as they crave during that time, and usually they crave extra salt like pregnant women. And when they ate lots of salt, they didn't swell up. So then my old
friends who were taking high blood pressure stuff, I suggested that they try the same thing. And I found that other people had tried that and saw that a salt restricted diet raised adrenalin, made them have insomnia as well as high blood pressure. And when you gave them more salt, you lowered their adrenalin and generally tend to lower their blood pressure. A man named McCarron demonstrated that calcium deficiency is more important than sodium excess. But extra sodium and calcium really will protect you against most high blood pressure.
So the kind of salt, is that important at all? Like, salt is pretty strict and should it be a minimal balance? It's good to use natural foods like lots of milk for the calcium, lots of fruit for the potassium, and any source you can get, sodium, seawater if you like. To a great extent, one salt can substitute for the other because it's the ionic strength and the osmolarity that's important. Is there one salt that doesn't need potassium or sodium? Or do you need a different source of sodium?
Sea salt without additives is a good practical source. An English woman doctor who went back to her native Mongolia, where they averaged 30 grams of salt per day. She gave blood pressure tests to everyone she could find and couldn't find a hypertensive person all the way up into their 90s. She didn't say anything about the rest of their diet, but I think that's an example that even 30 grams is compatible with good health. Great. Two questions, one for her. I just have a comment. I had a friend who taught
chemistry and medicine at a university in Buffalo. He cured himself of cancer by drinking sea salt and saturated it, like we talked about at dinner. He had huge amounts of salt, litter of water a day, and completely nothing else. He didn't change his diet or anything. There have been studies recently of treating ulcers with different concentrations, and 10 times isotonic is curative for ulcers. Stomach ulcers included, like seawater, tends to be strong enough to help cure stomach ulcers. Give me your explanation of coffee. I tried it. Coffee is our richest nutritional source of magnesium.
And also progesterone. Caffeine, I think of it as a vitamin because it so closely fits into our system of uric acid and so on. And empirically, the people who drink the most coffee tend to have the best health, the lowest cancer and heart disease and so on. Is that true? You guys drink it within 30 minutes of you putting it in your mouth. [Audience chatter] Well, it's caffeine, but you don't have to caffeine right now. It can, it makes you hyperventilate, but you can use it with food.
It helps you burn sugar specifically, so it helps you to sit right. [Applause] I have heard that Ray Peat recommends eating ice cream. I want to know what the real truth of this matter is. For about, I guess, 15 years, I ate a quart a day and it didn't affect my weight, but when I added about an ounce of coconut oil, my weight went down in spite of eating the same quart of ice cream plus an ounce of coconut oil. But then Peninsula Creamery over here got squeezed out of the market by evil distributors.
And so then I went to Breyers, which was the next best thing, but then Breyers started adding horrible gums to make the product have a long shelf life. And so there's only one or two flavors of Breyers that are still really edible, vanilla and French vanilla. You might add that Ray has an excellent website and a very, very readable letter. I went onto his website for the first time and it's absolutely excellent. I didn't understand some of the things he was talking about. [Laughter] The website is outstanding, except there's naked women. [Laughter]
There's one other thing too. Is it true that you do counseling for a small fee? Yeah. Yeah, this is one of the best bargains in the world. It's like Steve Fox does counseling for a small fee. If you have some questions and want to get another perspective, call that phone number up there and talk to Ray. And here's a man who's not in science for the money, but on the other hand, he's got bills like everybody else.
So I really think that it would be good for both of you if you give this man a call. Anyway, thanks very much, Ray. Thank you. [Applause] [Background conversation] There's a product out there on the market right now called Oregasillium that actually has been shown effective against the bird flu. And it's produced by Physician Strength, and they do have a protocol, and they use it in combination with oil of Oregano. And I can bring you the card, email you the protocol. [Background conversation] So are you an MP? No, I'm an MD. MD, okay, good.
That's one of the things we should know about, then bring that in so we can investigate that. Now, hey, Dean, you're late. [Laughter] Okay, now I'm going to get, since we have two reports, I want to get right to our first report. Okay, one more thing. Cordell. I was looking through this, preparing for the pandemic, and on page 16 it says, it talks about Tamiflu, and it mentions relapses. The one study I saw, and it doesn't seem to say Relins is better, but the one study I
saw said that Relins had worked better than Tamiflu, and Relins is available. Yeah, that's the expensive one, too, unfortunately. Okay, well, anyway, so you all do your homework, and then we'll have something to talk about next time. Matt Catfiord is going to be on that panel, and so is Steve Fox and myself and Mike Coffey. And the rest of you will have plenty of chance to add into it, because we really want to know what would Bob Cathcart do if he got the flu?
What would you do if you got the flu if you had done some research and preparation and so forth, so we can all take advantage of each other's ideas. And here's Steve Fox, and we're going to ask him next month what he would do if he got the flu. [Laughter] Okay, now, I wanted to talk about this article on Herceptin today, but we don't have time, unfortunately. The Mercury News today, studying advancing cancer drug Herceptin, and as it turns out,
for $366,000, you can have a 50/50, if you have a certain kind of breast cancer, for $366,000 over five years, you can reduce your risk of relapse by 50%. And that's good news in a way. Of course, the bad news is that the price tag. So there's two issues there. [Laughter] 50% the other bad news. But the thing that struck me, I just want to mention briefly, is that in the October issue of Life Extension magazine, they had an article on CoQ10 and cancer, which we sold out of already, unfortunately.
But I'd like you to take a look at it. And in that article, they report, they have four articles, excuse me, they refer to four articles. You know how Life Extension is great with references, scientific studies. This article, about six-page article, 30 scientific studies cited and footnoted into the article. So, you know, they give you, they make a claim and then they put a footnote after it. You look in the footnote, what article that goes to, which I really like. So they're not just kind of puffing up their bibliographies.
But anyway, this article shows, I think, that CoQ10 is so much better than Herceptin, and yet, what do we hear about? In the newspaper. This costs $50 a month. Herceptin costs $3,220 a month. And we hear about Herceptin, which is, of course, another story about the great Satan, also known as Big Pharma. So, you know, keep track of that. And if you can get a hold of that article in Life Extension magazine, it's well worth well. Because here, just to read you a little bit about it.
Several women in the study, first they started with 90 milligrams and they got partial remission and so forth. Then they went to 390 and the tumors disappeared. Not in every case, but in several cases. And so I think 4 out of 32 of the tumors disappeared completely. So this is a way of a treatment, not just prevention cancer, but a way of treating cancer. And as you know, CoQ10, one of the more expensive supplements still, you can take 400 milligrams a month for about probably $25 or something like that. So I would look into that.
The other thing is the vitamin C treatment, which we've been talking about before. And the NIH study just came out, which I referred to last month. Again, the vitamin C treatment, vitamin C, IV, increasing hydrogen peroxide, and doing other things, such as we'll learn more about next month when we talk more about vitamin C with Bob Cuthart. Vitamin C is also a tremendously powerful treatment for cancer. And now the NIH itself has established that in a very carefully done NIH type of study.
So I want you to kind of investigate those things, because if you go by what you read in the newspaper, all you're going to do is feed Big Pharma, and you're not necessarily going to be doing what's best for yourself. Now the first report that we have is on our board meeting. We were very blessed, really, by the fact that Dave Asprey had a friend by the name of Ron Snyder, who he recommended to us. He said, "Ron, can you come and help us kind of launch ourselves?"
I mean, we're all aware that we've got a tiger by the tail here, that there's a tremendous need for the kind of information that we get at these meetings. We don't get it from our doctors. We get misinformed and misled by Big Pharma that tells us what's in their interest, not what's in our interest. And so we want to become the best and biggest organization we can become. So we brought Dave Asprey on as vice president to do that.
He said, "Okay, what I want to do is bring my friend Ron Snyder on, who's an expert and kind of just gifted in getting groups together and trying to figure out what they want to do and how they want to do it." So we had a meeting, and it was dynamite. The report was in the newsletter. I want to bring Ron up here. Unfortunately, Dave didn't make it with the projector. [Audience member] Should we wait for the projector? [Randle] Okay, let's do that. Maybe he'll still make it. Okay, so let's take our other report first.
John? Let me introduce you before you get up. John Furhwer, as you know, is part of our community. And a wonderful biochemist lives in Florida, so we kind of grab him only when he's in town. Now he came in town this time, partly at least, to go to the Symposium on Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine, which was held last Tuesday in San Francisco by the AFAR, I think it's the American Federation for Aging Research. Is that right? Well, through John's intercession, we were able to go up there, several of us,
and it was a tremendous event. A tremendous event. Sandy Goebel, Mike, myself, Dick Mata. Dick, are you here? Yeah. And Phil Miller were there. We heard some of the best science in the Bay Area, people doing research on stem cells. And as you know, the promise of stem cells is renewable body parts, is what it amounts to. And they're right there. I mean, they can already do a little bit of it. And there's no question there's going to be six different ways to do this,
to get the kind of cells that we need to get the body to regenerate. And it's just a question of which is the best way. And so it's a very exciting thing. Well, the good news is, not only do we have a wonderful time here, all these great speakers, have a free steak dinner with wine, and all the best stuff for free, thanks to John's intercession, but we also might have four or five speakers. And we're going to have a couple of speakers from Stanford,
probably Irv Weissman and Helen Blau, who are leading the charge on stem cell research. They're going to be here next month, not next month, but in the next few months, in the spring, to talk about stem cell research. So stay tuned, because that's going to be a very important part of our futures. And I'm sure you don't want to be the last one to know if you're 70 or 80 years old. So at least I don't. I'm the one kind of on the edge. They're just finding the step out in time for me, hopefully.
I can just stay alive a few more days. Now, okay, John. John's going to give a report on some of the conferences he's been going to. He goes to conferences all over the world. So do you want me to-- No, I'm fine. Okay, thank you. So you won't miss much by not seeing my slides, because they're basically just keywords to remind me what to say. I've been to three conferences in Europe and about half a dozen conferences in the last six months related to research into aging.
The first one in Europe was in Italy, and it was a conference on a subject called autophagy. Now, autophagy--or autophagy, there's actually two ways of pronouncing it-- is a swallowing of damaged mitochondria inside the cell. It's a way for cells to renew themselves. There is a lot of new research turning up ways that mitochondria have a half-life of about six weeks in the cell, even in brain cells, which live all your life. So if you're 60 years old, you've got brain cells that are 60 years old,
but your mitochondria in your brain cells are only a month or two old. So somehow the cell is constantly recycling the mitochondria, and we've always been wondering, how is it that the cell knows how to do this? Well, there's information turning up, and I think that in the next five or ten years, we're going to see new therapies emerging out of this subject. You might want to keep a keyword in your Google News browser. You all know about Google News, right?
You can put keywords into it, and any time your keyword pops up anywhere in the world, in any of the world's newspapers, it'll get sent to you as an email, and I'll link to that. Pretty handy. So look up autophagy, A-U-T-O-P-H-A-G-Y. That'll be a good one. AU, what is it? A-U-T-O, auto, P-H-A-G-Y, phagy. In June, some of you may have gone to the American Aging Association meeting in Oakland, California. The American Aging Association meets once a year, talk quality research. The next one's going to be next June in Boston.
They started out the first day of the conference with a pre-meeting on nutritional interventions, and probably it comes as no surprise to anyone here that there's a lot of benefit from highly colored fresh fruits and vegetables, and even some cooked fruits and vegetables. Particularly, I found this interesting, to get the greatest benefit from things like tomatoes, you want to cook them with olive oil so that they get assimilated by your digestive system. Another thing that I found very interesting was that raw nuts like almonds are just loaded with antioxidants.
I mean, I had been thinking of blueberries and blackberries, but almonds and walnuts, especially if they're raw, are just loaded with antioxidants and good fiber. Let's see. Recently, in August, the International Association of Biomedical Gerontology met in Denmark, and they meet only once every two years, but they tend to get more international speakers, more Europeans and more people from Australia and Japan than most of the American conferences. I found it very interesting that Robin Holliday showed up. Now, some of you maybe studied biology and molecular biology,
and you've heard of a way that the chromosomes recombine during meiosis and sexual recombination called the Holliday Junction. This was the man who came up with the Holliday Junction, and he is very interested now. He's just recently retired, and he's still interested in studying aging. I asked him, "When you first thought of the Holliday Junction, was it immediately acclaimed? Did people pat you on the back and congratulate you?" He said, "You must be kidding. I was a graduate student, and nobody would take me seriously for years
until finally we got electron microscope images of the junction, and once people could see it, they believed in it." But up until that time-- Sometimes the technology for imaging is very important, which reminds me that the National Institute on Aging is starting a massive collaboration of 30 university MRI imaging facilities to try and discover what's the best way to see Alzheimer's disease as early as possible. This is important not only clinically for diagnosis, but more importantly, suppose you've got a drug or an herb or something, and you think it does good for Alzheimer's.
In the old paradigm, you give it to the person for 20 or 30 years, and then when they die, you cut open their brain and see whether it did any good. Or you give them a memory test every six months and see whether they can remember 27 words that you recite to them. So the ability to actually see the pathology of Alzheimer's developing, I think is going to be tremendously important in just the next couple of years. They're already developing, and I think the local center of greatest interest is UCSF.
UCSF has a great brain imaging facility, and I believe the leader of that facility is actually coordinating this whole consortium of 30 universities across the country. So that's, I think, a very important topic to keep in mind. Right after the Denmark meeting, there was a meeting at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, which is near Martha's Vineyard, just on Cape Cod. And the Woods Hole Marine Biology Lab has been around for something like 100 years, and very well-renowned. Larry Ellison has not been around that long. He's out here in Redwood Shores. He has a company called Oracle,
and he and Bill Gates are vying to become--to see who can upstage the other one. Larry Ellison has, for the last six or seven years, been funding aging research, which is very important. He has the Ellison Medical Foundation. You can find all of these things on the web, by the way. And so every year they give grants to university researchers, both senior researchers who are switching into aging, and researchers who are continuing work in aging, and new researchers who have just gotten their labs set up and are starting in aging research.
And every year he has them come to a symposium to report and tell each other about what they're doing. Did you have a question? No. Oh, okay. And so they met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in August. One of the most interesting speakers was, in fact, Helen Blau, that we just saw a couple of days ago in San Francisco. But she's in Stanford here, and she's doing marvelous things with stem cells. She has developed ways of marking the stem cells so that you can see them in mice,
because a lot of the early work is done in mice before you start doing it in people. And she's found that bone marrow stem cells from adults will, on occasion, go into the brain and fuse with brain cells and take over the function of a brain cell that was failing, in a sense of restoring it. So what she's doing now is learning how to take the stem cells out of the bone marrow or blood circulation, give it certain growth factors in laboratory dish culture,
so that she can grow up millions and billions of them out of just one, and then re-inject them into the animal or eventually into the human. And one of the possibilities is that instead of trying to get an embryo from some unrelated fertilized egg, you take it from the patient themselves. You only need one cell. Everybody's got a few hundred at least of these cells. You take one of these cells, you grow it into, multiply it in the laboratory dish into millions or billions,
inject it back in, and all of a sudden you've got a totally compatible stem cell infusion that goes in. If you've got diabetes, it goes in and takes over the islets function. If you've got liver deterioration, it goes in and takes over the liver. If you've got brain deterioration, Alzheimer's, neurodegeneration, it goes in and takes over the functions that are necessary. So I'm really glad that Phil got a chance to talk to her on Tuesday and invite her to speak here. It's going to be a very enthusiastic day. And she's got marvelous slides.
I mean, when I told you about Robin Holliday and the electron microscope, she's got pictures of these cells fusing inside the brains, and there's no doubt what's going on. It's just fantastic. The following month in September, Aubrey de Grey organized a conference called Strategies for Engineered Make-Legible Senescence. I don't know if it's such a great acronym, but it does make sense. S-E-N-S. Several people in the audience went over to see it. The interesting thing about this conference is that Aubrey's focus is not primarily to understand aging and what causes it ultimately.
Aubrey's main focus is to understand what aging does to the body before the pathology starts. He divides things into three boxes. There's metabolism, right? You've got your mitochondria turning sugar into ATP and throwing off free radicals, which then go and the free radicals interact with membranes and proteins and cross-link them and do all these things. And eventually these cross-linked proteins aggregate and they result in damage, like Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, or even dying muscle cells, which cause old people to become more frail. Okay, so that's the ultimate pathology. Metabolism is what starts it out.
If we try to stop the cause of the damage that occurs in the middle, the damaged proteins, if we try to slow down metabolism, well, that's not really so healthy. So he's not focusing on understanding how metabolism causes the damage. He's focusing on how can we engineer away the damage, which I think is a novel way of looking at it, and not all of the gerontologists in the world understand exactly the distinction yet. As a result, because he's getting a lot of press and because he looks a little unconventional in his attire and his beard,
and because he's approaching it from the standpoint of cleaning up the garbage rather than slowing down its accumulation, there's been some controversy and there will be continuing to be controversy. But the lineup of speakers that he brought to this conference were all focused on how can we clean up the garbage. And he brought over experts in stem cells. He even brought over the group from South Korea that had cloned human embryonic stem cells. And he had a researcher, Ellen Ebo Katz, from Wistar Institute in Philadelphia.
And she has been studying things like rheumatoid arthritis and obesity, and they made variations on mice that were genetically designed to get bad and have bad joints. And they discovered quite by accident that this mouse regenerates almost as well as a salamander. Now, those of you that have studied regeneration, what it means is if you cut them or take a bunch of skin out of their ear or cut off a digit, you don't just get scar tissue, but the tissue grows back the way it was supposed to.
And developmental biologists have known this for years, that salamanders will do this. But it was commonly believed that mammals would not do this. So here they've got a mouse that's pretty much like any other mouse with a couple of genes that have changed. And all of a sudden, they have a mouse that's able to regenerate. So we've got this scientist who's an expert in rheumatism and obesity now handed into her lap a marvelous mouse model of regeneration. And she's scrambling to learn everything she can about regeneration
and make the best that she can out of figuring out, well, if we've got a mammal that regenerates, mice are a lot closer to people than salamanders. So I think this is another one that you're going to want to be watching in the future, the MRL mouse from Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. What else did I want to say? Just a couple of weeks ago, up in Marin County, there's an institute called the Buck Institute for Age Research. It's the only institute in the world of its size that does nothing but aging research.
And it's in Novato. And they had an annual symposium, and this time they were looking at pharmacological interventions that might affect lifespan. A lot of the interventions that the various speakers were looking at had to do with making flies or worms live longer and looking at dietary restriction. But there were a couple of talks that stuck in my mind. One was Ashley Bush from Harvard Medical School, who has been working for about 10 years now on Alzheimer's disease.
And he has been looking at the interaction between metals and proteins in the brain that aggregate and form these plaques. And he found that if you could get the metals to go away, the plaques would dissolve and go away too. And not only that, I learned something from hearing him talk and then talking to him afterwards. My thought in the past had been, "What does Alzheimer's disease do?" Well, it kills brain cells. You have fewer brain cells, and you don't think so well, and you don't remember so well.
He said, "Well, ultimately that's true, but a lot of the symptoms of early-stage and mid-stage Alzheimer's disease are from sick brain cells that have not died yet." And his results now are indicating that if we can get in there, get rid of the plaques, we can restore the sick cells to health and essentially not just slow the rate of decline of an Alzheimer's patient, but actually create improvements. Now, most of what he's been doing, he's been doing in mouse models.
But a couple of years ago, they tried it out in a preliminary clinical trial in Australia with just 30 patients. And they used low-dose, this experimental drug called cleoquinol, because they weren't sure if it had side effects or not. But even with a low dose, they were able to slow the rate of decline. decline. And I think… [BLANK_AUDIO]