Biogerontology with Dr. Caleb Finch Ologies Podcast February 4, 2019 Oh heeeyyy, it’s your ol’ Dad here, saving you some pancakes even though you sleep until 11 a.m. when you visit, Alie Ward, back with another episode of Ologies. I have been promising you for weeks an episode about aging and marching toward our demise, molecule by molecule. Here we are, folks! We made it! This is an interview that is like concentrated laundry detergent. It’s like eating spoonfuls of instant coffee like cereal. It’s to the point. It’s intensely powerful information; minimal buffoonery. Aging: Why? How? Let’s get into it. First, let’s get some business out of the way. I want to thank everyone supporting on Patreon.com/Ologies for submitting their questions, making the show possible. Anyone wearing Ologies merch out and about, I hope you find each other and fall in love. Have me officiate your wedding. Thank you to all the folks who have rated, and subscribed, and left reviews. I read them all. You know that. For example, GlassFullOfSass, who said they, “changed two passwords and signed into four different accounts to leave a review,” which was very hilarious and sweet. Also, thank you for the review CateVF, who says: Every week I wait with bated breath for the latest episode to drop. Alie and her guests are so captivating. And one episode even brought attention to a medical condition I didn’t realize I had! And may have saved my life. Thanks, ol’ Dad Ward! Thank you for continuing to live! Let’s talk about old age. Okay, biogerontology etymology. Bio means ‘life’ and geron means ‘old man’. So, the biology of an old guy. Not super inclusive in terms of its roots, but it’s a subset of gerontology. It examines the processes of aging. How does ‘olding’ happen? Now, I came across this ology after recording Cheloniology about turtle lifespans back in November and a Wikipedia page whispered, [whispering] “Biogerontology is a thiiiing,” which ushered me to an article about how one particular ologist has been studying this since the 1950s, and lo and behold, his office was a few miles away from me in LA. What?! So, I gingerly begged him via email to hang out and I freaked out when I got a reply. Then, I navigated to USC with my vintage purse full of microphones and hope, and I knocked on his door 12 seconds after our appointed time. [door creaking] There he stood, a person who is ranked in the top half-percent of the most-cited scientists in the world; 500 papers with his name on them! Decades of research, thousands of students, scores of studies. This dude in the cardigan and the khaki pants, standing before me with a long white beard and office piled with books, he is the dude! Now, for a visual, just Google Image search, “Father Time,” and then add a laser-focused expression and a furrowed brow. He’s like a human fountain of knowledge on how our youth slips away. In the Death and Dying episode, I talked to Cole Imperi, who makes ballpoint pens inscribed with the motto: I don’t have time for bullshit. I should have given this biogerontologist one of these pens as a parting gift because as you will hear: when you are an expert on mortality factors, you don’t suffer fools. You don’t waste any time. This man does not have time for bullshit, and I love him. Let’s get right into it. Let’s talk about metabolisms, modern lifespans, risk factors for losing your memory, thoughts on a possible cause and cure for Alzheimer’s, why we age, secrets of 1 centenarians, and what a 78-year-old professor and globally-lauded science hero does to stay so fit and so sharp. So sit up straight, take some notes for the concentrated crash course on the forward march of molecules with world-renowned biogerontologist, Dr. Caleb “Tuck” Finch. ---------- Dr. Caleb Finch: Remind me of where the radio program is? Alie Ward: It’s on Apple’s iTunes and anywhere on the internet. Thank you so much for doing this. Let’s go into your background a little bit. Can you tell me why you decided to study aging? Dr. Finch: Well, as an undergraduate, I was looking to work on fields that had not been fully developed in which there would be the chance to work out some of the basic questions. One of my professors at Yale, who was a physicist named Carl Woese, was coming into biology in 1958. He said, “Well, why don’t you think about aging? Nobody knows anything about the biology of aging, even much less than how embryos develop.” And this was 1958, which was just five years after Watson and Crick and we didn’t know what the genetic code was. So that stuck in my mind. Then when I got to graduate school in New York at Rockefeller University, I did my PhD on aging and sort of the first papers on the neurobiology of aging came out of my work there. Aside: So yes, Dr. Caleb Finch attended Yale on a scholarship, working in labs to help pay his tuition and he graduated in 1961 with a degree in biophysics. Then he went on to Rockefeller University to get his PhD in cell biology, studying cellular activities during aging in mammals. He gave a talk on this subject and afterward some jabroni came up to him to say, “Don’t bother, everyone already knows what they need to know about aging.” That tall drink of Haterade was pathologist Peyton Rous, who had recently won a Nobel prize. Finch was like, “Whatever dude,” and went on to become one of the foremost voices in the highly respected field of senescence research, which is a fancy word that means the condition or process of deterioration with age. Alie: So what part about the aging process fascinates you the most? Is it the effect neurologically or is it the entire body? Dr. Finch: It’s the unknowns that we are still working out, the basic mechanisms. We know that it is under some genetic influence. If you have the genes of a mouse you’re only going to live two years. If you have the genes of a human, you might get to 70, 80, or 90. So, it is genetic, but then among individuals, the role of genetics seems to be much less. Identical twins’ lifespans, you can attribute… 20% of their heritability in aging is due to genes that influence aging. It’s really a minority of the individual differences in humans and in other animals that can be attributed to inherited genes. Aside: Only 20% is attributed to genes, which is terrible news for those of us who like to deny personal responsibility. Dr. Finch: I’ve been working, in many parts of my career, on environmental aspects of how individual gene responses to the environment, to diet, influence outcomes of aging. I’m now, in the last six or seven years, been focusing on air pollution, which shortens lifespan in proportion to the number of particles per cubic meter and also accelerates almost all of the diseases of aging, including the risk of Alzheimer’s. 2 Alie: Was that inspired at all by living in Los Angeles? Dr. Finch: Indirectly because I have had colleagues in the epidemiology group on the Health Science Campus who were pointing out to me that the rate of arterial aging in Los Angeles scaled in proportion to the density of air particles in your residence. The arteries that they were studying were the carotids, which go to the brain. They kept saying to me, “Well, Finch, you’re interested in the neurobiology of aging, you really gotta see if there’s a relationship to the arterial aging that we’ve described as driven by air pollution.” So, that’s what I undertook to study, and last year we published a definitive paper in collaboration with an epidemiologist, J.C. Chen, at USC’s School of Medicine. In that same paper, a mouse model showed that air pollution increases the Alzheimer’s processes; and we know what molecules are involved in the mouse anyway. Alie: Let’s go to the super basics. As someone who is not as well versed in this as you, what exactly is aging? How do you define aging? Dr. Finch: Well, the basic way is at a population level, that after the age of 40 your risk of mortality essentially doubles every seven or eight years. Alie: Oy! Dr. Finch: There’s an exponential increase in mortality risk and preceding that is a parallel risk in chronic diseases: heart disease, cancer, and at later ages, Alzheimer’s. The individual pathways in this are not understood, but by age group, aging increases the risk of chronic diseases that are causes of death. Then you can ask at a more fundamental level, “What are the mechanisms behind that?” That’s where the mystery is. Aside: So, our risks of disease and dying go exponentially up. Rather than bum you out, let that fact encourage you to write the novel you’ve been intending to, or call in sick and go to Six Flags tomorrow. Wear the shoes you think you should save for fancy occasions. Wear ‘em today! We’re all getting old. Just go for it, champ! Speaking of, how do you ask a genius expert the most basic bitch question ever? You just do it, people.