Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel

You always have to start by asking yourself, did evolution spend a lot of time optimizing this? If yes, my job is going to be insanely hard. If no, potentially there are some lowhanging fruit. And so I think that puts human aging and longevity really in this category of problem in which it should be relatively speaking easy to try and intervene and provide health.

We have a gene called TRIM 5 alpha. Trim 5 alpha once protected against an HIV like pathogen. It's currently protecting against a virus which no longer exists and you can edit it back to actually restrict HIV dramatically. You can reprogram a cell's type and a cell's age simultaneously just by turning on four genes.

Out of the 20,000 genes in the genome, the tens of millions of biomolelecular interactions, just four genes is enough. That's a shocking fact. Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Jacob Kimmel, who is president and co-founder of New Limit, where they epigenetically reprogram cells to their younger states. Jacob, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

>> Thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to the conversation. >> All right, first question. What's the first principles argument for why evolution just like discards us so easily?

Look, I know evolution cares about our kids, but if we have longer, healthier lifespans, we can have more kids, right? Or we can care for them longer, we can care for our grandkids. So, is there some plyotropic effect that anti-aging medicine would have which actually selects against you staying young for longer? >> Yeah.

So, I think there there are a couple different ways one can tackle this. One is you have to think about what's the selective pressure that would make one live longer and encode for higher health over longer durations. Do you have that selective pressure present? There's another which is are there any anti- selective pressures that are actually pushing against that.

And there's a third piece of this which is something like the constraints of your optimizer. If we think about the genome as a set of parameters and the optimizer is natural selection, then you've got some constraints on how that actually works. You can only do so many mutations at a time. You have to kind of spend your steps that update your genome in certain ways.

So ...