"For centuries, scientists have been attempting to come up with an elixir of youth." "I did not know, would I look twenty years younger two weeks later?" "It's leading them to take extreme measures." "It was extremely risky to be taking this molecule." "I was probably the first to be taking large amounts of this molecule." "Remarkable individuals promise a way of unravelling the mystery of ageing." "I look at my grandchild and realise he's older than me." "Shocking results in laboratories are challenging what we thought we knew." "Anti-oxidants are a multi-million dollar industry and people didn't want to accept what we found." "Some people's bodies are breaking all known rules." "We have a woman who just celebrated 95 years of two packs of cigarette smoking." "And revealing the astonishing powers of the mind over how we age." "We have enormous control over our health and well being that we're only beginning to become aware of." "How close have we got to finding an elixir of youth?" "Ageing is happening to us all of the time." "Some of us fight it, most of us see it as an inevitable part of life." "Our own family is often our best guide to what it will mean." "Here in the Silvester household, ages range from Toby at two to Nan at ninety-three, but even though we all grow up expecting to grow older, there seems little agreement of what we even mean by old." "I think it's 127." "You would have to be 20 or 30." "Eighty plus." "You're the same person looking out, but you know that the world's looking at somebody different." "I suspect you don't notice you're getting old, but your children notice it...and tell you." "Actually, I don't feel old." "We think we know it when we see it." "Their hair's usually white-ish." "When you're young, you don't have that much freckles and, and bumpy bits of left-over skin." "This is the most important thing." "The older people can't run and the younger people can." "Our bodies just don't do what they did, but why not?" "Understanding why we age has been a major scientific mystery." "I think all of us kind of know what ageing is all about because we've either experienced it, I mean even if we're young, we've seen our parents, our grandparents age, but understanding the mechanism," "this would be the mystery of the mysteries." "It's a very young field and that's probably the reason why we don't know much about it and why there are so many competing models, and I think the real key is probably in understanding how these different pathways relate to each other." "If you were a Martian coming to this planet, and you saw someone in her '90s and her granddaughter of sixteen, then you would say "Gee, there's not much difference."" "On the other hand, if all of a sudden the house caught on fire and the people ran, you would immediately be able to say," ""Oh, this one really didn't make it very far."" "We don't really have a clue for exactly what's happening in ageing." "Each scientist is trying to solve a piece of this vast jigsaw, hopeful that what they've uncovered will help us live healthier and longer." "Could it even mean life after 120?" "Will the secret lie in special creams, special foods or eating virtually no food?" "Is it more down to positive thinking, or is it all in our genes?" "I'd like to think of ageing as we have multiple sticks of dynamite inside all of our cells and each stick of dynamite is a cause of ageing." "Really, the only thing we need to worry about right now is which stick of dynamite has the shortest fuse." "Milk, buttermilk, veal, fruit gelatine, sherbet." "Of all the influences on how we age, what we eat could be a major factor." "My mother used to say to be healthy, eat to your heart's content." "We have always been told that SOME diet can make you healthy." "But is there really a diet that can make you live longer?" "Well, there's one that works for mice." "Scientists have know for eighty years, that if you reduce the calories of a lab mouse by almost a half they live longer, by up to 30%." "They think it's because when the body believes it's in a famine situation certain genes are turned on that help fight disease." "What they didn't know, was whether this diet would work in humans." "No group had been monitored for long enough." "But this may be about to change." "In upstate New York, a couple are taking part in an experiment run by the University of Washington." "Paul and Meredith have decided to submit to a seriously strict regime." "Calorie reduction." "I'm 63, I have been up since 5.30, I feel great." "I'm 61 years old." "I feel like I'm about 40." "How old do I think I look?" "Gee, I hope I might look a little bit younger than that." "50 or 40." "The experiment requires that you cut your calories by as much as a third." "Maintaining a sufficiently nutritious diet whilst counting calories is a painstaking job." "Foods like broccoli, kale, collards, mustard greens, onions, those are some of the ones that..." "Celery." "Celery." "Radishes." "Radishes, yes, radishes do come to mind." "I have often some sort of bread with some sort of vegetable spread on it which is a lot of fun." "They are determined to make the best of what they can eat as there is quite a lot they can't." "Habits are known to be very difficult to break." "Somehow food habits seem to be particularly difficult to break." "One of the things that was a sort of favourite of mine was ice-cream." "It took me a long time to stop it all together." "Chocolate, I don't eat now." "Having decided to do it sixteen years ago," "Paul and Meredith have gone for it 100%." "You usually don't lapse." "I really can't think of doing it." "As for when they eat," "Paul and Meredith now organise their day around their meals." "The first meal of the day is the largest and the second, lunch, is a bit smaller." "And then for dinner we take a walk." "A dazzling young scientist with a keen interest in anti-ageing has been watching this experiment with interest, impressed with the results, but not necessarily with the method." "I know about a dozen people voluntarily restricting their foods so that they're hungry during the day in the hopes that that will extend their life span, but you have to be hungry for this to work." "Well, calorie restriction means you need to cut your calories by about 30 % from what you would normally eat, and I tried it for about a week and it meant eating baby food and just a few vegetables and I felt hungry all the time, and I thought if" "this is going to be my life for the next hundred years, I don't want it." "Professor David Sinclair wanted to understand how calorie restriction worked, and see if he could create its effects without the effort." "So far, trying to make sense of the ageing process, he'd been working with yeast." "The organism that I'm particularly excited about are yeast cells." "These are yeasts that you put in your bread and your beer, but actually they have a life span of about a week and the goal about fifteen years ago was to find out why do they age, and what can we do about it?" "For scientists like David, yeast is the perfect research specimen." "It's a simple organism with only 6,000 genes, a tenth the amount we have, so it makes much easier to hunt for particular genes." "And surprisingly almost all the genes in yeast exist in humans." "After seven years, he was able to identify a gene for longevity." "The yeast cells are microscopic so we look at them under the microscope count how many times they divide, and what we're looking for were genes that if you delete them, or you add an extra copy of them, that they live longer, and we found a set of genes that do that." "They're called the sirtuin genes and really what was very exciting was that just adding one extra copy of a gene called sirtuin could greatly extend the lifespan of those yeast, about 30%." "David had a hunch that this longevity gene was key to how calorie restriction worked." "What he needed to do was to prove the link." "It had already been established that like mice, normal yeast lives longer on a calorie restricted diet." "So with this in mind, David removed the gene that triggered longevity and put this genetically modified yeast on a calorie restricted diet to see if it still worked." "What the team discovered was that when this gene wasn't there any more in the yeast cells, they didn't respond to the diet calorie restriction." "They didn't live longer so we knew that this gene, maybe others, were really important for this diet to work." "What was a really amazing discovery was to realise that this diet and these genes were part of the same system, and that was a real breakthrough." "David felt he'd cracked it." "He'd shown that without the particular gene he'd identified, calorie restriction would never work, no matter how little you ate." "But what if he could find a drug that would activate this longevity gene and mimic the effect of the diet." "Could it be done?" "Would it be worth the hunt?" "Results from the experimental group suggest that it was." "They've low blood pressure, low cholesterol and the heart functions seem to be that of people 15 years younger." "I never have an ache or a pain that stays with me, none of that." "That just doesn't exist for us." "The real deal is that we are feeling wonderful now." "But it's tough." "They must even calculate how much exercise they do." "Reduced calories mean less energy." "Imagine finding a drug that would give the gain without the pain." "For ten years," "David hunted and then he got lucky." "He found a molecule called Resveratrol." "For David, fairy-tale promises had met cutting edge science." "The amazing thing about this molecule is when you feed it to life forms or a yeast cell a fly, even a mouse, that's obese, they live longer and they're much healthier." "And this was the first discovery that we could actually find a way to slow down the ageing process with a single pill." "Could this be the ultimate anti-ageing pill in a bottle?" "David sold his company to GlaxoSmithKline for 720 million, but it's too early to know whether it works on humans." "I'm a scientist." "Occasionally, I experiment on myself as well and so I started taking Resveratrol as soon as we had tested it on yeast cells." "Now, looking back, that was a little mad." "We didn't know if it was toxic, might even have caused cancer." "We now know that it is, as far as we can tell, relatively safe." "My wife started taking Resveratrol, my family does." "Now, I don't endorse it, it's still an investigational molecule, but I felt that the science was strong enough for me to take that risk and I know what's going to happen if I don't take it." "So, now as an anti-ageing scientist, what would his goal be?" "I'd be happy living another few hundred years, but I don't think that's going to happen." "Eventually, I'll grow old and die, but if I can live a long healthy life, maybe to 90, 100, 110, that would be fine with me." "Though David Sinclair is confident about this drug, it'll be a while before he'll know for sure." "Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, another scientist was working on one of the most established anti-ageing beliefs." "Professor Arlan Richardson was tackling an idea known to most of us, that anti-oxidants can make you live longer." "The interesting thing about ageing is that it ultimately becomes personal." "I am 67, going on 68." "I've been told I look younger and I always jokingly say it's because of two things." "It's the hair and that I don't have many wrinkles because I've got them filled out with this fat stuff." "The belief in the rejuvenating power of antioxidants rests on a theory called oxidative stress." "Arlan wanted to find proof that oxidative stress deserved its status as one of the leading causes of ageing." "This theory was established in the 1950s based on the idea of animal life spans." "The theory was that animals with the fastest heart beat, consumed the most oxygen and died the soonest." "The theory has never been proved, but that didn't stop a burgeoning antioxidant industry." "Purple grape juice has twice the natural antioxidant level." "Food companies competed over whose product contained the most." "Creams containing antioxidants spawned a multi-billion pound beauty industry." "Dramatic results around the eyes." "Scientists no longer think it's about heart beats, but oxygen is still at the centre of this major theory." "One of the important components of all living organisms is the need for oxygen, and the reason we need oxygen is that we use oxygen to essentially generate energy so that we can live." "And so when we take that oxygen in and we burn it, we have one of the by products that comes from this, not only do we get the energy but we also have radicals or oxidative stress." "All of life actually is, you have these trade-offs to get this energy, you've essentially had to pay a price but... and the price from the oxidative stress theory of ageing, the price would be that you're eventually going to age." "So Arlan set out to do something that had never been done before." "He bred sixteen different types of mice, with different abilities to resist oxidative stress, and then stood back to watch." "He expected those who were susceptible to the stress to die well before the ones bred to be resistant." "The experiment had taken years to set up, but pretty soon Arlan noticed that things were not going as he expected." "The first experiment was very surprising to me cos I was confident that if we were able to alter oxidative damage, the animals would live shorter." "In fact, I remember watching that curve go out there and every so often it looked like it was, they were dying faster and I said "You know this is good," and then finally after we were about halfway through, I said, "We're not seeing any difference." "But he carried on with his team, finally completing the experiment after ten years." "When we finally got to the end of the experiment, there was no difference in the lifespan at all." "The genetic manipulation had no effect." "So, we sit there and looked at that and said," ""This goes totally against the oxidative stress theory of ageing."" "This was not what Arlan had hoped for." "He had expected to confirm the theory, not to disprove it." "But this kind of surprise was kind of the bad surprise, and at that point it was like," ""Oh, nuts, what, how can we explain this?"" "We sat back and asked ourselves well, how could we design this experiment differently?" "It was very disappointing for me because if I, if I had a chance to script this, I would have done it the other way." "Meanwhile, other scientists were also searching for evidence to support the established oxidative stress theory and turning to other species for proof." "The naked mole rat may look, well, weird, but it's pulled off a rather clever trick which makes it particularly interesting to scientists." "What, to me, has been so fascinating is they have put their little finger up at ageing." "If you look at a naked mole rat, it's a thirty gram animal, the same size as a mouse, yet it lives ten times longer than a mouse and is beating the odds." "So we predicted that given the fact that they live so long, that they would have very low levels of oxidative damage." "So, Professor Buffenstein set out to test the theory." "But, just like Arlan's mice, things didn't pan out as expected." "We found that even our youngest animals had three to ten times more oxidative damage than a similar physiologically-aged matched mouse." "Clearly, it was possible to have high levels of oxidative damage and live a long healthy life." "The fact that they're maintaining this high level and they're tolerating it with no ill effects means they're not wasting energy fixing something that's not needing to be fixed." "But this was not going to go down well." "What Arlan and Shelley had found would shock colleagues who'd worked in the field for years and threaten the entire anti-oxidant business." "People didn't want to accept what we found because there's too much investment in this area of research." "Anti-oxidants are a multi-million dollar industry, as you know." "When we tried to publish it in Science, the first review came back," ""You guys don't know how to measure this technique so that's why you're getting these crazy measurements." ""Send it to a real lab that knows this kind of thing." And we sent to Arlan Richardson's lab." "So Shelley repeated the experiment and found, just like Arlan, that oxidative stress did not make a difference." "Arlan is continuing his research and, despite a few anomalies, results are confirming that oxidative stress does not have a major impact on ageing." "But he's not quite given up on the theory." "I would..." "I would say it's not quite dead." "I think, what I think is that the oxidative stress theory needs to be re-thought." "I don't think that we could say that it is one of the major pathways but I still think that there's a possibility that it plays a role under very specific conditions where there's increased stress either because of genetic make-up" "or because of the environment." "So anti-oxidants do not hold the key to ageing, though some of us will carry on taking them just in case, hoping as ever for the elixir of youth." "But what exactly are we hoping for?" "Hold it like that, keep it steady." "If we think about it, we'd like more years but probably only if we had a decent body to take us through them." "So how long do we want to live?" "Until I fell apart, you know, 85, 90." "I would expect, I'd expect I'd have to stop dancing around 85." "'As long as I'm enjoying my life, then I want to keep going." "And if that takes me to 100, so be it." "'My grandfather, Alan, he's very fit and he's always been very active." "'For his 80th birthday we climbed Snowdon and we sang Happy Birthday at the top." "'And I think yeah, I'd like to do that when I'm 80." "That would be brilliant.'" "We're going to sit you on the chair." "It's just the realisation that things that go wrong are part of a process, because I mean I'm watching mum ageing." "I don't want to be older than Mum gets, really." "I would like to live to that age, though." "What if you could have a long life AND a healthy one?" "One scientist thinks you can." "Dr Bill Andrews, living and working in the Nevada desert, believes there is a fundamental cause of ageing, and that we can deal with it." "'Well, I'm 58 years old." "'I don't feel 58 and I hope I never feel that age.'" "I'm obsessed with trying to make certain that I'm around 500 years from now." "And every day, today," "I've got to be thinking about that, doing whatever I can to do it." "What drives Bill is something his father once said to him." "'When I was a little kid, he told me to grow up, become a doctor and cure ageing." "'That's been just something I've been focused on my entire life.'" "I remember he said, "How come nobody's figured out a cure for ageing yet?"" "He didn't like the fact that he was growing old, so he said, "Bill, you should go and do it."" "And that's what I've been doing." "Bill's father, now 82, keeps in close touch with his son's work." "He's still just as passionate about a long life." "'My personal goal?" "'Well, certainly to live to 150.'" "Um..." "I don't think 125 is a goal any more, too many people have done it." "'No-one's put a limitation on it and as long as there's no limitation, 'there's no limitation, I expect to keep running, and I know Bill will.'" "'He ran a marathon before I ever did." "If he ran one, I had to run one." "It's always been, like," "'I got to keep one step ahead of my father, which has been kind of tough to do at times.'" "Bill's always believed there's a prime cause of ageing and that if you look for it, you'll find it." "I knew since I was in high school that there's got to be some kind of clock that's ticking inside of us." "And it really frustrated me that nobody knew what this clock was." "But there had to be a clock and I just knew that some day we were going to find out what that was." "And he thinks he has." "Bill believes that the ticking clock is our telomeres." "This theory says that every time our cells divide, the tips of our chromosomes - called telomeres - become shorter." "Eventually they become so short, they stop our cells dividing." "We can't produce new cells and so we age." "Telomere-shortening is an absolute problem that we have and every time our cells divide, our telomeres get short." "There's nothing we can do about it." "No matter how well we eat, no matter how much we exercise, no matter how much we do everything our doctor tells us to do, our telomeres still shorten." "Ten years ago Bill was part of the team that identified a natural antidote to telomere shortening that's in our bodies." "It's an enzyme called telomerase." "It looked like he'd found the cause and a potential solution to ageing." "It had been believed for a long time that we aged because of telomere-shortening but there was no way to prove that unless we could stop the telomere-shortening, and we did this by discovering the enzyme telomores and putting it" "inside of cells and showing that in that case the telomeres quit shortening and they stopped ageing." "The cells that naturally produce telomerase are our reproductive cells, and they never age." "But the body needs more of this enzyme." "We want to find a drug that will get inside of our cells and turn that telomores gene on so all the rest of our cells in our body don't age, just like our reproductive cells don't age." "While Bill races to find a solution to telomere-shortening, there's one extraordinary condition that was believed to demonstrate the problem of short telomeres, a rare premature ageing disease." "So, we got your britches..." "Here's your pants." "Since we're going to the park, let's put something warm on you, OK?" "Oh, man!" "I know, man." "Josiah is five." "He was born with progeria." "You're all dressed." "Go ahead, you can go to the family room." "He's got a like a six-to-nine-month-old waist-wise, but length-wise he's that of about 18 months old." "I was told initially that progeria is premature ageing disease and the life expectancy of children with progeria is around 8 to 13 years of age." "I mean, he's sort of already a middle-aged man, per se." "Scientists believed that children with progeria were born with especially short telomeres." "This suggested telomeres were central to ageing." "Their bodies do in fast-forward what awaits us all." "Progeria is a truly remarkable disease, and I think what is remarkable is the large number of parallels between this very extreme disease and the normal ageing process." "You're welcome." "'We're starting to see the arthritis start." "'His hands are kind of starting to show the signs that you'd see 'with an older person, his hands, his feet especially." "'A lot of the things that Josiah is dealing with right now, my parents are dealing with them - 'they're in their mid-50s - and my grandmother, who is in her 70s, is dealing with.'" "Mentally, Josiah is completely normal." "Use that to move, remember." "He totally is a five-year-old." "He loves to play, he loves to roughhouse, just like any other five-year-old boy would." "He's into Handyman." "All those things, that you would find a five-year-old doing, that's what Josiah does." "That's crap!" "Hey!" "Meanwhile, Bill Andrews, still keen to get a drug to solve telomere-shortening, has set up his own company." "But just three years ago, he found he'd been pipped at the post." "Another company had got there first." "But this didn't stop Bill from taking their pills." "Well, this is TA 65." "It's the... only neutroceutical chemical, whatever, that exists today that produces telomores inside my cells." "The second it was available, I started taking it myself." "It's..." "My mission is to cure my own ageing, even if it's somebody else's company that comes up with something." "But would it work?" "'I did not know, would I look 20 years younger two weeks later?" "'It was all a big adventure." "'I was looking in the mirror every day to see if I could see changes." "'I learned I was the very first person ever to actually sign up paying to take TA 65.'" "The drug hit the open market at 25,000 for one year's supply." "Bill started his dad on TA 65 for his 80th birthday." "Bill's analysed it in his own lab and believes it is having some effect, but he's passionate about designing his own, more potent version." "Every time we get a run done, and every day I say, "Did we find it, did we find it?"" "And so far it hasn't but we keep searching." "But while he remains committed to preventing telomere-shortening, a scientific breakthrough has happened which could challenge Bill's work and change the future for children like Josiah." "Scientists have found the real cause of progeria, and it's not short telomeres." "For many years, there was the idea that telomeres control ageing, that maybe progeria patients just have very short telomeres." "Now that the gene has been identified and the length of telomeres has actually been measured in progeria patients, we know that that is not the cause of the disease." "It's now been discovered that progeria is caused by a mutation in a gene called lamin A." "This leads the body to produce an abnormal protein within these children's cells which blocks their normal functioning." "What's interesting about the disease is that the same abnormal protein is also made at very, very low levels in healthy individuals who do not have the mutation." "The level of this abnormal protein doesn't increase over time as we age, but what seems to happen is that cells from old individuals are not able to cope with this protein any more which is trying to do damage." "Other proteins also go wrong and as we get older we have more difficulty repairing the damage." "Dr Misteli believes this build-up of damaged protein within our cells could be at the heart of how we all age." "The cell cannot deal with damage as well as it could when, when it was young." "I think that's actually almost the definition of cellular ageing." "And why that exactly is, we really don't know." "And that is in a way the real ageing mechanism." "See how his hands are starting to turn white?" "This is what usually happens when we go out in the cold." "Come on, buddy." "'I don't know how to make sense of it." "'I just don't know where to go with it sometimes, you know." "'I look at my grandchild and realise he's older than me in his body." "'And that little walk we took to the park today tells me I'm getting older now." "'My knees hurt, I have a little arthritis and I have pain 'in my knees." "But he has it, too." "To have to see him go through that at five years old, it's like...'" "I don't know how to put it in perspective, it's just hard to put it in perspective, other than I love the little guy to death." "There you go." "You OK?" "Most scientists are now reassessing the role of telomeres in all ageing and not just in progeria." "But Bill has not changed his mind, nor is he slackening in his drive to solve ageing." "It still comes back to the telomeres." "No matter what we do to control ageing, we still have to solve this telomere-shortening problem." "'I'm going to really enjoy life after they cure ageing.'" "If I don't succeed, I want on my tombstone to say, "At least I died trying."" "And that's the way it's going to be." "When we imagine our older age, a lot of us look at our parents." "We know we've inherited their genes and suspect that what's happening to them now may well be what happens to us in the future." "That's something we're likely to have mixed feelings about." "Well, you can look at their mothers usually which gives you an idea of what's going to happen!" "But don't tell Claire that!" "Nancy can see her younger self in her daughter, Claire." "'I think she looks like me.'" "A lot of people say she looks exactly like I did." "I like it, I like it because I think," ""Oh, well, I haven't wasted it, there it is."" "It's the gene, isn't it, the selfish gene, passing itself around." "You want to be copied." "You could waste your life ironing things..." "Because we inherit our parents' genes, we might also be vulnerable to some of the same illnesses." "I remember when she showed me her hand, I suddenly noticed that her hand was an old hand, and I'd never really paid it any attention until something had gone wrong, and then I looked at it and thought not only was it an old hand," "but it looked quite a lot like my hand." "So I, I am now aware that my joints are likely to go through the same problems that my mum has and so, look after the knees!" "Nancy in her turn looks at HER mother." "'I think it is something we're permanently aware of, that we're all going the same way.'" "And you feel for them, but more than that, you feel for yourself!" "Because you think, "Oh, that's me in a little while."" "If we're trying to understand ageing, studying family genes is key." "Just how much of our future lies in our genes and how much in our own choices is the question at the heart of a study by a scientist in New York who's also having his own personal struggle with the idea of what exactly ageing is." "'It's not very easy for me to define ageing.'" "This is not for television, but it's the couple and the husband turns to the wife and says, "Why don't we go upstairs" ""and make love?"" "And she says, "I cannot do both."" "That's the definition." "What struck him were healthy centenarians living in his own community." "Kidding aside, I think that ageing can be redefined after you see so many centenarians, like I do, and I'm really jealous of them." "They might look old to you but you see that their life is so meaningful." "What he wanted to find out was how people get to be 100-plus, and what exactly we could learn from them." "The biology we're trying to under-cover is that if we could imitate that, then long life including 100 can be really terrific." "The population surrounding Professor Nir Barzilai are Ashkenazi Jews." "They were an ideal group for a study because they shared a similar genetic background, therefore any exceptional genes would stand out." "If we go in the streets of London or New York and just take everyone, we're going to have lots of diversity." "By using the Ashkenazi Jewish population, this is a population that was established in the pale of Eastern Europe." "It helps the genetic discovery." "So we started gathering 100-years-old, basically." "Hi, Grandma, good to see you again." "Darling, I'm so glad you came." "The old man with the beard is my baby grandson!" "Rhea Tauber is 102 and part of Nir's study." "The chances of living to 100 are only one in 10,000." "The question for Nir was how much of their longevity was down to genes and how much could be about lifestyle." "Are you going to have some lox, Grandma?" "What could be bad?" "There you go." "Eat like this and you live to 102." "So his team conducted physical and cognitive assessments and asked the 500 centenarians a range of lifestyle questions." "Did you eat yoghurt all your life?" "You know, were you a vegetarian?" "What was your interaction with the environment?" "And I think the surprising thing for us is that we don't have yoghurt-eating, we don't have a single vegetarian." "We have just one person who was an athlete." "Nir gathered their blood samples and prepared to map their genes." "It didn't look as if they were following a particular lifestyle, but while he was analysing the laboratory results, he continued to monitor the families." "..And say hi!" "You look beautiful." "You know how old I am, don't you?" "Yeah." "Do you know how old I am?" "I'm 53." "You're a kid." "I'm a kid." "I am a kid." "I want to ask you women questions, really." "How many operations did you do for face-lifting?" "Never a one." "Never a one." "I even have my own teeth." "So why do you think you live to be 102, and going strong?" "What about exercising?" "A lot of ballet, that was my big thing." "OK, so what I'd like to do is I'd like to help you get up and we'll go to another room?" "OK." "Can you, can you..." "Just a minute, can you dance with me a little bit?" "What dance do you do?" "What dance do you do?" "The horah, I'll do the horah." "# Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba Ba-ba-ba-ba... #" "In fact, Rhea, it turns out, is typical of what he's found in his study." "These centenarians do have strong personalities but they've not given their health too much thought." "Rhea who said "You know, I was ballerina for a few years,"" "and that was really great and maybe it had part of that but of course that was 5%, 7% of her lifespan." "So many people can be ballet dancer or being an athlete for ten years and most of them are not going to be 100." "It's her hair?" "No, he said that your hair looks very beautiful." "Shall I show him?" "Mother!" "Nir was in for a surprise." "For most of us, how much we eat and exercise is key to how healthy we are and to how long we live but there was something rather shocking about these centenarians." "30% of them were obese or overweight and 30% smoked two packs of cigarettes for more than 40 years." "It seems there are two rules, one for these special centenarians and one for everyone else." "For most of us, our health depends less on the genes we are born with and more on how we choose to live." "It's commonly believed that it's 80% the environment and 20% genes." "In centenarians, it's probably the opposite." "It's probably 80% the genes and 20% the environment." "Because our centenarians have longevity genes, they are protected against many of the effects of the environment." "That's why they do whatever they want to do and they get there anyhow." "Nir has seen this by watching one of his wife's relatives." "This is my grandmother in law, Freda, and that's her 100th birthday party." "At that time she was dating an 85 year old guy that drove a car." "Look how she grabs the bottle and pouring herself and laughing all at the same time, right?" "You can sense the type there, right?" "After five years of analysing the blood samples, Nir finally had some results." "He found a gene key to longevity and has since found two more." "We have 2 million markers across the genome that we can follow and we found three genes that looked to be, that seemed to be over-represented in our 100 year olds." "Two of those genes seems to be relevant to cholesterol." "Basically, they increase the good cholesterol in a significant way." "There is no drug currently that does it so effectively." "And another gene seemed to be very important is preventing diabetes." "This makes the children of centenarians 20 times more likely to live to 100." "The third gene may explain why the centenarians seem to remain so engaged with life." "As long as you're healthy." "As long as you're healthy!" "It seems that those that have this specific genotype are protected from Alzheimer by about 80%." "So Grandma, what are your plans for your next birthday?" "I'll be 103, oh, my God." "You have a nice guy for me, I'll go on a date." "But what's more surprising is that he believes it's possible for us all to benefit from what he's discovered." "The advantages of finding a gene that is involving longevity is that many times we can just develop a drug that will imitate exactly what this gene is doing." "He predicts that the first drugs would be available for testing in three years, and has a personal interest in their development." "This research has become quite difficult for me." "My mother died several months ago, and my father has been sick for a while." "I don't have longevity in my family, I don't have longevity genes," "I know that and looking at those people," "I see how my end can be different than theirs unless I really rush and get something going, and really find a way to treat and protect us against those age-related diseases." "Even if you have spectacular genes, eventually we expect to see and feel the signs of age." "Our pigment and skin cells simply can't replace themselves as well as they did." "We'll start to look older." "I would say the wrinkles are creeping in." "That's to be expected." "Being in the fresh air and the wind, I am going to be a prune." "It's obvious in between dyeing stages that it's, it's fairly grey now and the grey hair is quite different." "It's a lot coarser." "Other parts of the body may not repair themselves as well as they did." "I can't dance six dances in a row any more... without stopping." "It's..." "Just too old." "I've realised that my knee is never going to be right again." "Eyes, yeah, that was a shock." "Being tireder, less energy." "The standing joke is always that you forget things, and that's true." "You do." "We might start to feel more dependent." "MICROWAVE PINGS" "Ageing to me is not being able to do what you used to do." "I don't even cook now." "I still like to do my own thing but there's limits and you know you can't do it." "So you just have to give in, as they say, gracefully." "Probably I don't give in gracefully but..." "It's made me realise that it's, it's a bit like being a child again because your control over life goes." "You become more dependent on other people and that's really hard because I've seen Mum having difficulty letting go." "I've tried to make sure that Mum feels that she's not being pressured into things cos I wouldn't want to be pressured into things if I were her." "We do have rows but we always make up, we always make up and it's always me that says sorry." "Changes and losses may happen to those we love." "I saw with my grandmother who died at the start of the summer, she developed Alzheimer's, I think for the last six years of her life, she didn't want to be alive." "She'd recognise you when you walked in, she'd go... and your heart jumped." "You thought "Oh, she knows," and then she'd just sort of glaze over and..." "Yeah, that's heartbreaking." "And for Alan, he'd lost his companion and that was the saddest thing." "I think that aged him an awful lot." "Just how much do our emotions affect the way we age?" "Should we really see frailty and dependence as inevitable?" "What if what we expect to happen as we age, will happen?" "What if our thoughts really impact on our bodies?" "This was the basis of a most extraordinary experiment that took place in 1979." "The male volunteers, all over 75, were going to be taken back in time." "They were going to live as if it was actually 1959." "But getting these men to live and behave as they had 20 years before meant living without carers." "This was something the scientist behind the experiment was only too aware of." "These people looked like they were on their last legs, so much so that I said to my students" ""Why are we doing this?" "This is too risky."" "I was going to take over their lives basically for a week." "So they're very much your worst stereotype of old." "But she went ahead anyway and pushed them back in time." "We created this environment that they were going to be totally immersed in." "It was a timeless retreat that we had transformed and so for a full week, they'd be living there as if it was that earlier time, talking about things from the past, watching movies from the past, seeing props from the past" "and all of their discussions were going to be in the present tense." "Professor Ellen Langer was testing mind over body." "If you made people think they were years younger, would their bodies follow?" "But given how dependent these men had become, a lot of convincing was going to be necessary." "At first, some of the group struggled with Ellen's rules." "As soon as we got off the bus, I told them that they were in charge of their suitcases, getting them up to their rooms." "They could move them an inch at a time, they could unpack them right at the bus and take up a shirt at a time." "Just think about the difference in how these people were treated by me with the assumption that they could do everything, versus treated like a little kid." "And this attitude was going to be maintained right through the experiment." "There was nobody babying them." "They were in all ways taking care of themselves as they would have, did, I'd say, 20 years earlier." "By the second day, everyone was actively involved in serving meals and clearing away." "Ellen was changing the routines and habits they'd built up over the last 20 years, challenging what they'd come to believe was possible." "They were being treated as if they were capable, autonomous individuals." "When they were in discussion groups, they would decide whether or not they were going to speak without anybody signalling subtlely as the culture often does, that they're incompetent." "Ellen believes that what's often taken to be incompetence is really wilfulness." "Old people have learned to please themselves." "When old people start to act in ways that young people think is uninhibited and think they've regressed, actually they've progressed and they're disinhibited." "They say "Why am I paying attention to some of these rules?" ""They just don't make sense."" "Ellen wanted to see if getting the men to think of themselves as in control would actually put them in control." "But would their bodies follow their minds?" "Had her reconstruction been convincing?" "She'd only run the experiment for one week but at the end of that period, it was crunch time." "Had they changed?" "We got a difference in their dexterity, a difference in their joint flexibility, their gait." "They were able to move faster, they stood taller, their cognitive abilities improved, their blood pressure dropped." "The men put on weight and were objectively judged to look younger." "One man decided he could do without his walking stick." "63% had increased their IQ." "What was even more surprising was that their vision and their hearing improved." "These findings in some ways are quite astounding." "Remember, old people are only supposed to get worse." "Most people don't assume vision will improve, hearing will improve, certainly not cognitive abilities." "Some of the symptoms of their arthritis diminished and all of this from them just living as if they were younger for a week's time." "I'm not going to show you, I look fat in that one." "For Ellen, the experiment shows that changing how you think can improve how you age." "If one group of men can produce these changes, perhaps we all can." "I probably think I look older than I thought I looked before I looked at these pictures!" "There are some some people for whom age looms very large in understanding where they are in life, where they've been and so on." "I don't find it relevant to my life at all." "Ellen's counter-clockwise experiment was the impetus for a whole range of psychological studies exploring the influence of mind over body." "The results all suggest that our thoughts have a powerful influence over our health." "Your views of your own ageing are going to largely determine how you age." "If you view yourself as somebody who's going to fall apart, you will fall apart." "You will probably live just as long as you think that you're supposed to live, that again we have enormous control over our health and wellbeing that we're only beginning to become aware of." "So psychology is telling us that how we age is a lot more open than we thought." "As for the future of other scientific interventions, how soon should we realistically expect help from them?" "The fountain of youth, anti-ageing medicine... this has been around for as long as humanity with 100% failure rate." "So you might ask why this is new?" "This is real science." "This is cutting-edge." "Now it's a matter of turning that into medicine." "I don't know if we'll be the ones or someone else behind us will do that, but it's going to happen." "It's not if but when now." "We would like to develop drugs that maybe will take once a day, beginning when we're 40 or 50, and it will prevent those age-related diseases." "We have learnt a tremendous amount about some of these mechanisms." "So that obviously now provides targets to develop drugs." "So in that sense, we're a lot closer." "But still, I think it's going to be a long way." "I think ageing is going to be probably one of the most complex things we've studied, because it affects all tissues and it affects all tissues a little bit differently." "But, in my mind, the excitement in the next century is we're going to be understanding ageing for the first time in human history." "It looks like there isn't going to be one answer to ageing but while science grapples with this enormous task, we know our views will affect how we actually age." "So what do we think it will be like?" "If it happens in the right order, if Mum goes, then I go, then my children, you know, die, in that order, then you can't ask for more really, can you?" "My family are all quite long-lived." "Nancy's family are as well, so our children are going to be, going to be fit and healthy to look after me, I hope!" "I shall be a burden." "That's one of my..." "Yes, I shall live to be a burden." "I'm probably going to be hell to live with." "I hope I'm going to be a happy old person." "If I can have the life I want, yes." "Getting old is not scary because getting old just means I will have had more of this." "I think children keep you young." "If my legs allowed me, I would still be dancing." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "Email subtitling@bbc.co.uk"