How do we, at a cellular level, again, I'm over my skis here, but how do we receive damage that would create these cells? Is it from the sun? Is it from the food that we eat? From the air that we breathe?

Yes, yes, yes and yes.

So there are a variety of things that can damage a cell.

And we think that the predominant type of damage that drives senescence, drives these zombie cells, is damage to your DNA, to actually the chromosomes and the genes that control the composition of our cells and body.

So that damage that occurs leads to this induction of a pathway that then tells the cells to stop growing.

The type of things that can induce that damage, obviously UV, cigarette smoke, exposure to x-rays, but also our cells are not perfect metabolic machines.

And we generate reactive oxygen species.

so unique relative to other cultures? Or does American society have people that are centenarians or Chinese? Go ahead, I'm

I would put something like Yamanaka factors in this category, which is saying, hey, how can we reset the cell and bring it back to a more youthful state? What do you think about something like Yamanaka factors and how much optimism would you have there? And if you could describe them quickly, I've probably done a good job of describing them.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because it's kind of a hot topic in the aging space right now.

So, Yamanaka factors is actually...

An approach developed over a decade ago by a Japanese scientist named Yamanaka reidentified four genes encoding proteins that are expressed in a cell like a skin cell or a liver cell or brain cell actually can be differentiated into a stem cell, into an embryonic stem cell.

And that stem cell then can be used, at least in mouse experiments, to make a new mouse.

So you can take a skin cell for one mouse, convert it back into an embryonic stem cell, inject it into a female mouse, and you'll get offspring derived from that.

But what's been shown, how it relates to aging, is that if you turn these Yamanaka factors on for a short period of time, so if you express these in the cell for three, four, or five days, it rejuvenates an age cell so it starts to look more youthful.

Do you think camp two ends up being right? Would you put yourself in, in camp two over the longterm or would you be more skeptical and say, Hey, we can get another 10 years, 15 years, but we're not going to get another 80.