Fund manager Joon Yun argues that aging is a programmable trait, not inevitable decline. He traces the idea back to Weismann and Medawar, then uses salmon and other species that barely age to show aging could be decoded and reversed.
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So August Weismann is the 2nd most important evolutionary biologist ever, which is another way of saying we have no idea who he is, right? America only knows number one, so he's number 2. He's the guy who actually did a lot of work on the evolution of sexual reproduction. He was a successor to Darwin, and he was the first one to use Darwinian theory to wonder if aging is a trait. Right, is aging a trait? Now that idea was around for 50 years until it got killed by Peter Medawar, who's a Nobel laureate. It takes a Nobel laureate to kill a field. And Peter Medawar basically said any trait that emerges after reproduction cannot be selected for, and since aging occurs after reproduction, it can't be a trait. Now we all know it's a trait because Google said so 2 weeks ago. But along the last 50 years, people assumed if you said aging is a trait, they said you're crazy. And yet it's very easy to provide a counterargument to Medawar's argument and come up with examples of things that happen that we do after reproduction, so after age 45, that affect our evolutionary fitness. One is called grandmothering. This is called grandmothering, grandmother's hypothesis. I would call this Hefner's hypothesis. 'Cause Hefner is clearly affecting, even though he's past his prime, he's affecting the fitness of those around him by plucking 20-year-olds off the market. Right. In fact, if you look across nature, there's many examples of things that happen that make it seem like aging is a trait. Salmon go upstream, they lay their young, and then their hormones start going haywire, their system goes haywire, and then they die. They happen to die Downstream of their own young become part of the food chain that their kids eat, and you just made better versions of yourselves, right? Yeah. So you tell me that's not a trait? There's many examples of this in nature where it certainly seems like aging is a programmed process. There's also examples out there you've heard of where it looks like there's no evidence of aging in certain species. There's no evidence of biologic aging. They just seem to have this sort of indefinite persistence. In fact, it makes no sense from a thermodynamic standpoint that aging should be necessary, because as long as you can— we're not a closed system as a living system, so as long as there's energy around, we ought to be able to rebuild ourselves. So it's not a thermodynamic necessity that we have to age and die. But because of this mental block we've had in science for the last 50 years from Medawar's argument, We've not considered the possibility that aging is a trait. This is good news. That means that this is the road not taken, and it's priced at zero. That means that there's actually an open possibility. If we've been trying for the last 50 years and not come up with a solution, it'd be one thing, but the fact that we haven't even tried thinking this way gives me enormous hope that we're about to hit the massive jackpot. Okay, so let's start with this idea that maybe aging's a trait. Maybe it's a code. So anytime there's a code, you can decipher it, and if you decipher the code, then you can hack it, right? That's what we do very well in Silicon Valley. So what if we could crack and hack the aging code? What might it look like? I think it's a combination of lifestyle, There's an old idea in biology called apoptosis. Have you guys heard of it? Apoptosis? It's the idea that cells are programmed to die. This was a discovery made in the '50s and '60s. It took about 20 years for mainstream scientists to accept it, that there are genes built into every cell that allow it to age and die under the right circumstance. And now it's consensus. Everybody believes in apoptosis in cell biology. And yet no one's made the fractal leap to think about organisms as being programmed to die. The word would be called phenoptosis. So let's explore this. So every cell in our body is programmed to die, but there's a few cells that actually mutate, shut down their programmed death genes, apoptosis genes, and they become immortal. You know what we call them? Cancer cells. Cancer cells. Exactly. So cancers are examples Living examples of cells that have essentially shuffled a few genes and they're now immortal. So it shows you that, in fact, the default state is immortality, and that death was actually innovation that was built in. Right? So cancer, we need to solve it. It's the scourge of humanity, right? But I would suggest that at least a few of us should be focused on not what cancer is doing wrong, we should be focused on what cancer is doing right. As Bob Marley said, your worst enemy may actually be your greatest fan. Thank you.
